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…

In January 2017, at various Women's Marches spanning the world, women with decades of activism under their belts held signs that called attention to their incredulity at having to resist government policies that threatened control over their bodies. This paper explores a similar persistence of stereotyping and discrimination that women in…

Gender equity among South African principals remains a compelling issue for research. While post-apartheid governmental policies address gender equality, women continue to experience discrimination in the field. A theory of intersectionality was used to examine three Indian South African women's leadership experiences. The focus was to investigate…

Using collective biography, this paper examines the ways that rural identity mediates the leadership of two women working as administrators in higher education in the United States. We, the authors, examine our own leadership, as college administrators raised in rural environments, and seek to describe how the notion of rurality manifests in our…

The aim of this qualitative-phenomenological study was to investigate Turkish female school administrators' views on the concept of self-development and the techniques they adopt in their self-development process. Using snowball sampling, ten female school administrators participated in a semistructured interview. The obtained data were analyzed…

Existing research suggests that Latinx educational leaders in the U.S. positively impact Latinx student outcomes and home-school relationships. Yet, much of this research has been conducted in traditional U.S. Latinx immigrant destinations. We know little about the Latinx leadership experiences in regions where Latinx communities are smaller, yet…

Why is it that so many women seem to climb the administrative ladder leading to the superintendency frequently and with relative ease, but do not reach that top rung? Data to help address this question is presented here. These data are part of a larger research project completed in the fall of 2006. In addressing this question, an overview of the…

This is a narrative about my first year's principalship experience at a pre-service teachers' training college in Pakistan, a Muslim country with a patriarchal background. Here, I discuss challenges I faced upon assuming the principalship. Specifically, I focused on how I responded to these challenges. In my response to those challenges, I…

This article is drawn from a larger qualitative case study that examined the leadership context and leadership approaches of five Mi'kmaw women school principals in Mi'kmaw Kina'matnewey (MK), an Aboriginal educational authority, located in Nova Scotia, Canada. This article aims to identify the contextual supports within MK that have enabled…

Since the 1980s, there has been a burgeoning literature on women and educational leadership. The focus has primarily been on the underrepresentation of women in leadership informed by a feminist critique of the mainstream literature. Over time, key feminist theories and research have been appropriated in education policy and are now embedded in…

My intention in this article is not to solely "talk up" or "talk back" to troubling dominant discourses about, and practices in, educational leadership, but to authenticate and legitimate Indigenous women's voices through theorising their leadership realities and by situating such knowledge in the cultural spaces that they…

This article draws on post-colonial and feminist theories to interrogate the notion of "leadership" in the academy. Specifically, it examines challenges that women faculty, especially women of colour, immigrant women, and, in particular, Asian and Asian American women, encounter as they balance leadership work with scholarship and teaching.…

The term "leadership" metaphorically embodies a gendered hierarchy of labour. In this study women deans' values were found to be incongruent with the masculine discourse creating inner conflicts and alternative discourses. Data collected from 10 women deans from both male-dominated and female-dominated colleges were used to deconstruct leadership…

In Spain, the presence of women in decision-making positions and in positions of power is not proportional to the total number of women within the field of education. Women have encountered personal and professional barriers in their advancement to the principalship; however, significant and substantive changes to school policy are revealed when…

This article argues that people from diverse ideological and ethnic backgrounds conceive, perceive and practise educational leadership differently, drawing upon their beliefs, values and knowledge sources. It draws on data collected by 11 in-depth interviews with female heads of "girls-only" colleges in a region in Pakistan. The paper…