Leading While Female
A Culturally Proficient Response for Gender Equity
Foreword by Thelma Melendez de Santa Ana
Your take-action guide to gender equity
First, just to be clear: Leading While Female is not a book about how to get a leadership job. Nor is it about fixing or transforming women into male managers or mindsets.
Instead, Arriaga, Stanley, and Lindsey’s bigger ambition is to help both women and men educational leaders confront and close the gender equity gap—a gap that currently denies highly qualified women and women of color opportunities to better serve our millions of public school students.
Designed as both a personal and group discussion guide for taking action, Leading While Female draws on the research of feminism, intersectionality, educational leadership, and Cultural Proficiency to help us all:
- Better understand the impact of faux narratives that foster lack of confidence among girls and women
- Utilize the Tools of Cultural Proficiency to examine barriers to overcome and support functions to locate for your own career planning
- Learn from the stories of women leaders who have confronted and overcome barriers to career development, including women of color who were targets of implicit bias
- Explore and expand the roles and opportunities for our male colleagues to serve as allies, advocates, and mentors.
If we look at the data, we can safely say women are doing the work of classroom teaching while disproportionately, men are making administrative and leadership decisions. Here at last is a resource for the breaking down the barriers and leading the way for future generations of women leaders.
"As someone who believes deeply that we need to find our voices around what matters, this book is a necessary and supportive addition to my bookshelf. The authors combine powerful statistics, personal narratives, and concrete strategies into an accessible and useful text both men and women can use to shift the conversation around gender equity at all levels in education."
"Leading While Female is a much needed and timely piece that thoughtfully explores the multidimensional experiences of women in educational leadership. The authors take an inside-out approach that encourages men and women to reflect and take action toward disrupting gender inequality."
"Leading While Female is the journey and verbal testament of three women who speak to reveal the racial, classed, and gendered injustices they have witnessed as educational leaders as a means of healing, empowerment, and advocacy for a more humane present and future grounded in equity. Arriaga, Stanley, and Lindsey provide powerful counternarratives to interrupt the status quo, master narratives of male-dominated leadership roles, inspire male leaders to grow as culturally competent leaders and feminists, and to pave the way for future generations of women leaders from diverse backgrounds."
"I am truly excited about the new book which Trudy Arriaga, Delores Lindsey, and Stacie Stanley have written about women raising their voices in the fight for gender equity. I am pleased that the authors are continuing the work which was begun in the book by Franco, Ott, and Robles, titled A Culturally Proficient Society Begins in School: Leadership for Equity (Corwin, 2011). It is hard work that must be continuously brought to light if change is to occur at levels equal to the population statistics for women today. The conversation must be ongoing, robust, confronting, and engaging and the three authors address this in Leading While Female. Through the efforts of Arriaga, Lindsey, and Stanley, and their acknowledgement of those who have gone before, the topic of gender equity will endure in the daily lives of women and those who inspire women to break through barriers to success."
"Gender equity is an educational issue for women and men school leaders as allies, advocates and mentors. Arriaga, Stanley and Lindsey provide school organizations and individual school leaders pathways for ensuring that schools and school districts have the expertise of highly qualified women educational leaders. The authors skillfully combine their personal experiences with current women’s narratives that illuminate lingering barriers to leadership roles. Then the authors provide narratives that highlight successful personal and systemic pathways to entry-level and district-level leadership roles."
"Leading While Female is an essential work for educational leaders at all levels. It calls for opening space for those who makeup the majority of school personnel to more effectively lead for justice and equity. This voice has too often been missing in shaping policies, practices, and procedures."
"Throughout Leading While Female, I was struck by the importance of gaining allies in the work of leadership. The alignment between racial and gender equity allies is truly significant. Just as white leaders absolutely cannot stand by quietly as our leaders of color step up time after time, men cannot be silent supporters of gender equity leadership."
"In Leading While Female, Delores Lindsey, Trudy Arriaga, and Stacie Stanley hold up a mirror for all of us as we consider the inequity that exists in educational leadership. Unlike many corporations, education is a field where the majority of women are teachers, yet only a small percentage go on to become superintendents. Helping us to ask why and to when consider how we can all make a difference is the central focus of the book. We hear from women directly about their experiences and their journey. The authors' stories and those of the women that they interviews help us to understand the many facets of this challenge, and it is in these stories that we can see just how much we are all losing by not looking for ways to lift each other up in order to address the current inequities. This is an important book for our time."
"Finally a book I can relate to as it speaks to the struggles, grit and perseverance women experience as we aim for equity and access in educational leadership. Leading While Female is the clarion call for access and equity in the arena of educational leadership. It reminds us that we cannot make changes in silence. It is a research-based book chock full of practices and real possibilities as we aspire towards an inclusive educational leadership landscape worthy of our children."
"A book about Culturally Proficient Leadership such as this, which examines the historic and current reality of gender inequity, is truly a must read for all leaders at all levels. In the name of striving for a pluralistic society, to move away from individualism towards collectivism—the questions in the book that ask 'Who Am I? Who Are We?' bring leaders to truly look into the mirror and identify whether their values and beliefs are reflecting back to them. Dr. Stacie Stanley’s leadership defies the statistics of women of color in leadership, more importantly her story of 'becoming' as a leader in a male-dominated field for executive leadership is truly inspiring and an example of breaking the glass ceiling. Leaders will appreciate the Gender Equity Action Plan and Rubric to guide the work in order to make informed, systemic decisions that will increase women in leadership roles for the year 2020 and beyond."