Women’s leadership development is everybody’s business: if not now, when?

ABSTRACT

The focus of this paper lies in our special interest in women leaders and those aspiring to leadership positions in schools and other educational contexts within Australia. Leadership is a gendered concept, and due to a myriad of factors including conscious and unconscious bias, and the challenges of balancing career with other life commitment, the reality is that women’s career journeys are different from men’s. Women’s unique career trajectories have implications for achieving their leadership potential. In addition to reviewing some of the extant literature in the area of women in educational leadership, we share our experiences and reflections based on our research and the leadership development programmes we have run for women mainly in Australia. These programmes have reinforced to us their value, place, and contribution to enhancing women’s capacities for leadership. In this paper, we address the following four key questions as they pertain to women leaders within the Australian context: (1) Why a focus on gender and leadership? (2) What are some of the barriers impeding women leaders? (3) Why is it important to have multiple faces of leadership? (4) Why is women’s leadership development everyone’s responsibility?

KEYWORDS:

• Women
• leadership development
• schools
• barriers
• Australia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Barbara Watterston

Barbara Watterston has had extensive experience in education and has held a number of school and executive leadership positions across Australia within the education and not-for-profit community sectors. Currently she is Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Council for Educational Leaders (ACEL), a premier cross-sector professional association whose mission is to connect, support, and inspire current and future leaders in education.

Lisa C. Ehrich

Lisa C. Ehrich is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership within the College of Arts, Law and Education, University of Tasmania (UTAS), where she teaches in the graduate certificate program. Prior to her position at UTAS, she served for twenty-four years as an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Queensland University of Technology.