Leading While Female
A Culturally Proficient Response for Gender Equity
- Trudy T. Arriaga
- Stacie L. Stanley
- Delores B. Lindsey - California State University, San Marcos, USA
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.
"This comes to leaders at an urgent and pivotal time in education. Gender inclusivity is necessary for all educators, but also for the students they serve. Nowhere else have the necessary advocacy, tools, and tangible actions been harnessed into a single book for leaders. Changing perspectives and creating actions that lead to an inclusive and diverse workforce is a challenging endeavor. However, it will create lasting experiences for students and empower the leaders and educators who serve them. Knowing about gender inclusivity is not enough: the authors force us to act on it."
"This book challenges us to look at educational leadership inequities with our eyes wide open, data in front of us, and a determination that we can do better. This book is about raising our voices to match our passion, dedication, and competency as female Educational Leaders. The barriers we encounter are both external in the form of sexist notions and internal in the form of those cultural mantras playing in our own minds. As women, we need to share our stories, which outline the barriers we have faced because those experiences are so pervasive. Understanding the enormity of the problem allows us to take more control of the future. This book gives us the tools and resources to find our own unique courage and the blueprints to build strong partnerships for this work."
