Sexism, Silence, and Solutions: Women Superintendents Speak Up and Speak Out

Abstract

Women as a group continue to be underrepresented in the ranks of American public school superintendents. Since the mid-1970s, researchers have attempted to account for the continued domination of the public school superintendency by men, but even in research that has moved beyond traditional paradigms, barriers to gaining insight into women superintendents' experiences from their own viewpoints have persisted. The qualitative case study on which this article is based was designed to break down some of those barriers by using a participatory research design that included the women participants' own analyses of their experiences and that explored their proposed solutions for the problems surrounding their inequitable treatment. The authors discuss three interrelated parts of the study results-the sexism that is part of the culture of the superintendency, the silence of the educational administration profession about women superintendents'discriminatory experiences, and the study participants'proposed solutions for the problems of sexism and silence.Until we have . . . a literature from the silenced, we will probably not have a full critique of the social order from their perspectives. Nor will we have their proposed solutions, or the means of sharing their daily worlds.- Lincoln (1993, p. 44) The development of an activist discourse among female public school superintendents depends on structural conditions and discursive possibilities that do not exist in these women's professional lives (Chase, 1995). For example, Susan Chase reported that the women she and Colleen Bell interviewed for their study of the work lives of women superintendents had 44 Downloaded from difficulty integrating talk about their individual struggles for equality with their narratives about professional work. Chase attributed this "discursive disjunction" for her participants to the ideological character of conventional practices in educational administration. That is, in a profession in which men and masculinity set the standards for what is valued, women superintendents, visible and isolated members of an underrepresented minority group, are pressured to "de-feminize," or disaffiliate from other women, in order to prove themselves as professionals (Bell, 1995). This disaffiliation inhibits the development of pro-equity discourse. In other words, because the feminist discourse of social change continues to receive a hostile hearing in the world of educational administration (Chase, 1995), women superintendents who want to succeed stay silent about systemic problems of inequality.Parallel to the silence that exists at the individual level for women superintendents is the larger silence of the educational administration profession about the discrimination these women face. criticized educational administration for its disinterest in examining and challenging inequalities within the profession, even though the numbers alone tell the story of the particular inequality represented by women in the superintendency. The percentage of American sc...

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