This timely book explores how various feminist perspectives fruitfully explain women’s experience of educational leadership, drawing on a contemporary conceptualisation of fourth-wave feminism that is intersectional and inclusive. The book asks which and whose feminist theory is used to explain gender and feminism in educational leadership, management and administration (ELMA): the scholar’s, the research participant’s or a combination of the two in the co-construction of knowledge from an intersectional feminist perspective. It conceptualises intersectional and inclusive feminist perspectives on educational leadership, theorising research through a Black British feminist perspective, a gender and Islamic perspective and a queer theory perspective, depending on the self-identification of participants. It explores digital feminism and men’s pro-feminism. The book identifies feminist leadership praxis as a focus for future research and explores how leaders can draw on funds of knowledge, identity cultural wealth and lead and educate diverse populations of students. Highlighting the importance of intersectional feminist perspectives in ELMA, the book will appeal to scholars, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of inclusive educational leadership and management, gender studies and feminism.

Ten prominent feminist researchers from diverse backgrounds examine educational leadership by focusing on critical questions about the theories, methods, and epistemologies feminist researchers use. The contributors analyze the impact of research on participants and assess the ethical and political implications of researching across groups. They explore the types of strategies feminist researchers have developed to address the problems of the field and propose alternative epistemologies that provide for more sensitive research methods and more complex research results. The book provides a timely examination of how gender inequalities were created and structured within U.S. systems of school administration, how they are maintained and perpetuated, and how they might best be understood and dismantled.

“Who is an effective leader?” has been a question posed by scholars, educators and practitioners of leadership for centuries. Historically, leadership positions, as well as research on leadership and effective leadership, was primarily reserved for men or masculine characteristics With most societies traditionally following a patriarchal hierarchy, few people questioned inequalities in leadership attainment, largely because of supernatural and/or natural explanations of men’s natural ability and desire to lead. This book runs counter to that culture and examines the experiences and leadership enactments of ten historically famous women leaders in hopes of gaining insight into their uniquely female leadership styles. The ten leaders include Catherine the Great, Jane Addams, Queen Victoria, Marie Montessori, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Mother Teresa, Margaret Thatcher, Pat Summit, and Hillary Clinton. The idea, of course, is to reflect upon these great women’s leadership styles in order to inform one’s own leadership behavior.

Co-published with How do we interrupt the current paradigms of sexism in the academy? How do we construct a new and inclusive gender paradigm that resists the dominant values of the patriarchy? And why are these agendas important not just for women, but for higher education as a whole? These are the questions that these extensive and rich analyses of the historical and contemporary roles of women in higher education— as administrators, faculty, students, and student affairs professionals—seek constructively to answer. In doing so they address the intersection of gender and women’s other social identities, such as of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, and ability. This book addresses the experiences and position of women students, from application to college through graduate school, and the barriers they encounter; the continuing inequalities in the rates of promotion and progression of women and other marginalized groups to positions of authority, and the gap in earnings between men and women; and pays particular attention to how race and other social markers impact such disparities, contextualizing them across all institutional types. Written collaboratively by an intergenerational group of women, men, and transgender people with different social identities, feminist perspectives, and professional identities— and who, in the process, built upon each other’s work—this volume constitutes a call to educators and scholars to work toward centering feminist and other marginalized perspectives in their practice and research in order to equitably address the evolving complexities of college and university life. Employing a wide range of theoretical lenses, examining a variety of models of practice, and giving voice to a diversity of personal experiences through narrative, this is a major contribution to the scholarship on women in higher education. This is a book for all women in the academy who want to better understand their experience, and to dismantle the remaining barriers of sexism and oppression—for themselves, and future generations of students. An ACPA Publication

This volume examines the educational leadership of Black women in the U.S. as informed by their raced and gendered positionalities, experiences, perspectives, and most importantly, the intersection of these doubly marginalized identities in school and community contexts. While there are bodies of research literature on women in educational leadership, as well as the leadership development, philosophies, and approaches of Black or African American educational leaders, this issue interrogates the ways in which the Black woman’s socially constructed intersectional identity informs her leadership values, approach, and impact. As an act of self-invention, the volume simultaneously showcases the research and voices of Black women scholars – perspectives traditionally silenced in the leadership discourse generally, and educational leadership discourse specifically. Whether the empirical or conceptual focus is a Black female school principal, African American female superintendent, Black feminist of the early twentieth century, or Black woman education researcher, the framing and analysis of each article interrogates how the unique location of the Black woman, at the intersection of race and gender, shapes and influences their lived personal and/or professional experiences as educational leaders. This collection will be of interest to education leadership researchers, faculty, and students, practicing school and district administrators, and readers interested in education leadership studies, leadership theory, Black feminist thought, intersectionality, and African American leadership. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.

The book analyzes the crossing issues of gender, school leadership and multicultural experiences as expressed in accounts of female school principals from diverse ethnic and religious groups in the multicultural society of Israel. It addresses the usually unheard voices of women principals in ethnic and religious minority groups that act and live in a modern country but their place is marginalized. Jewish and Moslem Authors, all citizens of Israel, display the particular life and career accounts of female principals from the Arab, Bedouin, Kibbutzim, liberal and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish groups. They are accompanied by authors from Canada, Hong-Kong and England who suggest a multicultural and post-structuralist feminist views to look at female leadership in the multicultural society. In this sense, they book contributes to our understanding of the influence of cultural scripts and values on women principals’ leadership styles and career development, as well as suggest an alternative way to interpret dominant feminist conceptualizations of female leadership. The book may be of interest for researchers in the fields of education, feminism, women management, multiculturalism, Israel studies and minorities. Educators of a higher level such as principals, supervisors and policy makers as well as graduate students will find the book chapters very contributing to their work and studies.