“Living on Barbed Wire”: Resilient Women Administrators in Educational Leadership Programs

Abstract

Background: Despite access for women administrators in educational leadership departments, the longevity of their service within them is tenuous. Women administrators are caught in the social constructions of gender and leadership.Purpose: To explore how some women administrators in educational leadership programs have sustained their administrative roles; to evaluate whether their resiliency rests on a feminine type of leadership. Participants: A group of seven diverse women administrators in educational leadership programs who were peer nominated, are accomplished scholars, and have an average of 11.25 years of experience. Research Design: A computer-based qualitative Delphi technique using an online asynchronous mode and ensuring anonymity. Data Collection and Analysis: Several iterations focused on the identification of resiliency markers and components, descriptions of episodes denoting the participants' overcoming difficult situations, proposals for adapting educational leadership programs to foster better women leaders, and the reflection and interpretation of data. Findings: The participants' rankings and narratives indicate that gender identity and leadership are more complex than to simply fit them into one gender construction model or another. When interacting in particular episodes, resilient women leaders embrace or disclaim one gender norm for another to varying degrees. A multidimensional-gendered leadership model is provided. Conclusions: Faculty and students should not expect the socially constructed norms in women leaders. These resilient participants suggest that gendered leadership norms are too simplistic and that women leaders must be willing to shift into multidimensional gender and traverse conventional borders.When we started this project, we thought that we were playing slow-pitch softball, as one of us put it. 1 We thought that we would petition seven exemplary resilient women administrators 2 in educational leadership programs 3 and that they would identify components of their leadership that made them resilient. They would give us episodes that demonstrated their sustainability in the field; we would get a prescription for educational leadership programs, about how educational administration faculty could foster resiliency in women so that the growing number of women in educational leadership departments (American Council in Education Corporation Database, 2002) could find and maintain leadership positions. In fact, we set out thinking that with 54% of faculty being women and 52% of students being women (Chlinwiak, 1997), our participants could provide other women with clear indications of how to make it into and survive within the narrow margins of the administrative ranks in higher education (Ropers-Huilman & Shackelford, 2003;Schwartz, 1997), the ranks that hold women to a slim minority: 25% in chief academic offices, 13% in chief business offices, and 16% in executive ones (Chlinwiak, 1997). Unfortunately, determining how long women have been serving in administrative positions t...

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