By Dr Nicola Sum, Faculty of Education at Monash University, an invited expert to the UNESCO Teacher Task Force School Leadership Network, and an interdisciplinary researcher of leadership and context

Women represent the unchallenged majority of the workforce driving education, and yet representation of women across leadership roles remains inadequate. Faced with persistent fragile metaphors such as glass ceilings, glass cliffs and glass walls, data suggests that women have had enough. Increasingly women are driving the great breakup amongst the noise of potentially grand scale resignations across sectors.

Women making transnational choices

Education is no exception. The Global Education Monitoring Report has identified the “continued imbalance in men’s favour in education management and related leadership positions” as a ‘hard ceiling’. Though education is generally viewed through a largely nationalistic lens, educators have been moving away and across education systems for many years. In my study of women, as transnational educators and leaders, they leverage such mobility, inspired by communities and opportunities which are not accessible in their original context. I interviewed six women leaders – principals, coordinators and middle managers, who worked across borders, regularly returning home for visits before moving on. Transnational educators choose to move to other countries either to work in international schools, or other privately-owned educational providers. Often one contract can lead to further roles in other locations, and educators may choose to continue to relocate for work assignments.

Systems losing transformative capacity

We may minimise such mobility amongst women leaders as inconsequential. Choosing instead to sit firm in our views of schooling and systems as sufficiently resilient to their departure. That would be in spite of the data indicating that teacher attrition is a problem. Even prior to the pandemic, and possibly exacerbated by the disruption, research has shown that 30-50% of teachers leave within their first five years threatening the stability of education systems. Losing women leaders from across systems compounds the nature of the challenge. Recent work has shown that women in leadership roles are catalysts for organisational improvement and transformative for performance. Moreover, it is difficult to overlook the irony of women leaders leaving behind the void of representation, mentoring and support networks for future teachers in a profession that is more than two-thirds women.

Women’s participation strengthens systems

Women lead with a higher propensity for participative, inspiring, affirming and people centred approaches, which should be particularly valued at this time of great disruption. This is not a matter of better or worse, but rather different, pointing to the diversity that is necessary at all levels of education, and spanning learning communities. Across a global perspective, UN Women recognised that the equal participation of women is critical to securing ambitious targets such as the Sustainable Development Goals, because women are able to “work across party lines”. As school communities continue to address both the economic and social costs of teacher attrition, one way forward may be to consider how we retain current leaders, especially women, who are otherwise choosing to move onto opportunities which are more closely aligned to their values and vision. Therefore, there is something to be said about the nature of values and vision being broadcast across schools and education systems.

Recovering and rebuilding systems need to retain women in leadership

Covid-19 demonstrated a shift in the nature of relationships between and across hierarchies of school, department, policy makers and school leaders in complex and volatile times. Wellbeing, welfare and community care became key drivers of school leadership. More significantly, these values, and the vision to enact the practices, were set at a local level by school leaders. Such recent events point to a need to recognise the expertise and capacity of school leaders generally, and women specifically, as skilled professionals to be valued. Attention to new teacher recruitment is important, but must also be matched by attention to retaining, supporting and securing talent and capacity across career stages, with diversity and representation in sharp focus.

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