Fewer than one-third of all New York school superintendents are women, despite women making up a significant portion of the education workforce. This disconnect was outlined in a report by the New York State Association for Women in Administration and Women Leading Ed.
WAMC's Sajina Shrestha discussed the issue with Women Leading Ed's Executive Director Emily Hartnett.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hartnett: We track this because there's just a huge sort of inverse and problem of when we look at who is serving in schools as teachers and as sports staff, and over three-fourths are women. But the inverse happens when you look at superintendents, and there's really along that pathway a narrowing that happens from teacher to that top leader. We really wanted to understand more about it.
Shrestha: You talk to an interviewee, and she touches on how, based on how the selection process is in searching for a superintendent, that can determine if women are even brought into a pool of applicants in the first place.
Hartnett: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we have really looked at is the pathway up.
So, women are more likely to have served as teachers and then going into principalship. Women are more likely to serve as elementary principals than high school principals, even if they taught high school, because it's sort of this perception that like women are good with little kids and like the nurturing aspects, all of which can be true.
However, they're not given the opportunity to lead at the high school level as much. Why that matters is because high schools have more community sort of engagement, larger budgets. They're more public. There's more interactions. You're out of the football game and like all of those things and like those reps matter. There's more reps at the financial and operational aspect of high schools, and boards and others as they're looking for candidates then for leadership.
Think about those aspects. It's sort of ingrained in society, and this is not true just for education. That like the CEO, which is the superintendent sort of equivalent, needs to have the business acumen in order to run the district, which is true.
And often, when board members think about that, they consider who has served as the CFO and the COO and the athletic director, who's been out at the football games and engaged in the community and all of those things, and they're not thinking about women who have this deep, deep expertise in academics and school leadership, and along with that, the finance and ops that goes with it.
But women are funneled into more often the elementary pathway, the academic pathway, and the school leadership pathway, and the bias that then exists is that like, 'oh, they're really good at that side of the house, but I'm not sure they can manage the whole district, or like they're really good at this, but I'm not sure they're ready for that.' Like, could they actually lead?
And it's those sort of things that, not at all saying that women should not be the CEO and they're doing incredible work, but really the recognition that in academic school pathway or school leadership and elementary pathways, like there are still the components of leading a really complex system with academics, with operations and finance across the board that just isn't recognized and sort of given the same level of weight as men who more rise through the operational, financial, and high school pathway, or sort of thought as, particularly when board members are considering who should serve in that superintendent CEO role.
Shrestha: I feel like as New York State, we are kind of in a unique position where we have some areas that are extremely populous, extremely dense, but we also have some really rural areas, areas where there's not a lot of resources, or there're not a lot of service jobs, or even just having teachers around. Could you talk more about what is it that you know women superintendents can bring to kind of fix or even just address this unique issue in New York State public schools?
Hartnett: Yeah, one of the interesting things that we saw was that even if you look at region type, there's not a difference statistically significant of who is leading based on gender, those different system types.
So, it's actually relatively similar of the percentage of women who are leading in rural versus suburban versus urban locations and and school district types, which is really interesting, I think, and we don't get into the causality of that.
But thinking about the impact that women can have, sort of across the board, and what that looks like, both in extremely populated, but also thinking about the more rural and sort of more spread out communities. I think that's actually one of the strengths of women moving up through systems is that they often have a really deep connection with systems that they're leading.
We see in our national research that women are more likely to move through internal pathways, so they are more likely to have served in the district or the system that they then lead later, and they're more likely to have served as interim. So because of that, they're more likely to have relationships with the community that exist already. They've proven themselves as leaders, which is something that like women are forced to do more than men. But in this case, it's a positive. They have relationships with school leaders. They have relationships with parents and community members and board members and all of those entities who are really integral in like the community and the system of a school and a district. Teachers can see them and and like have that relationship already and see themselves like in that future leader, which is really helpful, particularly in rural communities, of understanding like there are nuances, there are challenges that some communities have that others don't, and having someone particularly internal who knows those and is coming in sort of like eyes wide open and really able to speak to their own experience in that can be extremely helpful.
