This qualitative study explored the perceptions, challenges, and lived experiences of women, in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, holding executive level leadership positions to inform tailored support strategies. As female educators aspire to higher levels of leadership in schools and districts, limited avenues of structured informal and formal…

Women have made considerable gains in the acquisition of principal, vice-principal, and administrative positions within elementary and secondary educational institutions. Unfortunately, these gains have not translated into growth within the office of superintendency. Through incorporating a qualitative case study, the researcher ascertained the…

Despite women's increased participation in academic employment patterns, a global gender gap on senior leadership in universities remains. This mixed methods study explores toxic leadership as a potential contributing factor to the gender gap on senior management levels in universities in South Africa. The Schmidt Toxic Leadership Scale (2008) is…

Current trends among K-12 public schools in the Pacific Northwest reflect a disproportionate ratio of Latino(a) students to Latino(a) school administrators. Grounded on Latino critical theory and resilience theory, the purpose of this qualitative narrative study was to explore the professional and personal experiences of Latina administrative…

A recent study published in "Educational Researcher" by White (2023) examined superintendent gender gaps. This work required 4 years of internet searches to identify and match superintendent names with each of the roughly 13,000 school districts in the United States. Although this study provided important insights into the superintendent…

The present article proposes to broaden the understanding of the life courses of women executives to include an experiential perspective of meaning built around their different life projects. Our study is based on a qualitative approach employing narrative research methodology to analyze interviews with a sample of 51 women executives. Our…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore how women of color college leaders born in the U.S. describe the influence of resiliency in overcoming challenges in their career. It was not known how women of color college leaders born in the U.S. describe the influence of resiliency in overcoming challenges in their career. The…

The purpose of this descriptive case study was to understand how authenticity, balance, and challenge were focused upon differently throughout the various stages of women?s careers in intercollegiate athletic administration. Specifically, the research emphasized the career needs of individuals who identified as women in intercollegiate athletic…

There is significant disagreement about the Senior Woman Administrator (SWA) designation and how it should function within the overall structure of the athletic department (Smith et al., 2020). The purpose of this policy analysis case study is to fill the gap in research and better understand what people in Missouri who hold the SWA designation do…

Objective: This research study examined gender wage equality among administrators across Arizona's ten community college districts comprising 19 colleges. Method: Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze salary data. Results: All 19 college campuses evidenced differences in median income between 12-month, full-time women…

This nationwide study of 532 female school district superintendents, the largest such sample to date, offers compelling evidence that unconscious gender bias exists on the job and further inhibits equitable female representation in the superintendency. A modified version of Tran et al.'s (2019) Perceived Subtle Gender Bias Index (PSGBI), was…

Historically, Black women have faced many challenges in the pursuit of education. Despite being marginalized in educational spaces, black women have been instrumental in educating Black communities. Continuously, Black women have been considered the minority in school leadership positions. African Americans represent only 11% of all school…

A Netflix original six-episode series, "The Chair," examines the experiences of a woman faculty of color department chair at the fictional Pembroke College. One of the many stressors she must navigate is a response to an incompetent white male faculty (who is also her love interest) after he makes a Nazi salute during a lecture in class.…

Race and gender continue to be contributing factors to the disparity and lack of representation that exists among higher-education leaders. This study examines the lived experience of women of color to identify the strategies they utilized to attain administrative leadership roles at a Higher Education Institution (HEI). Participants included…

This qualitative study examined how female principals from two nations that recently opened up new avenues for women in educational leadership defined instructional leadership and what they did to prepare to become school principals. Using an open-ended survey and snowball sampling, female school leaders from Saudi Arabia and Qatar who led a…