Reclaiming Power in a Feminized Profession: Women's Leadership in K-12 Education

While women and white women specifically are vastly overrepresented in our nation’s teaching force, they are dramatically underrepresented in top leadership roles. Based upon the recent book, Education Lead(her)ship: Advancing Women in K-12 Administration, this talk will provide insights into how the feminized nature of the profession coupled with longstanding biased views of women’s more “natural” orientation toward caregiving have been operationalized in the field of education to shape women’s access to and ability to thrive in leadership. The session will consider how race and specifically gendered racism impact the trajectories of women of color and will close with implications for both research and practice that aims to disrupt and dismantle biases that have persisted in the education leadership pipeline.

This virtual seminar is part of the Women and Public Policy Program's weekly fall seminar series: Women’s Leadership in Context: Gender, Power, and Identity Dynamics.

Monica Higgins is the Kathleen McCartney Professor of Education Leadership at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a faculty affiliate with the Center for Public Leadership and Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard Kennedy School. Professor Higgins’ work focuses on leadership and organizational change; she has been fascinated by why people – and systems – are resistant to change. Drawing on her background in organizational behavior, social psychology, and public policy, she takes a relational approach to her work, examining the ways that social networks, mentoring, and partnerships can unleash the potential for change and innovation, especially in entrenched contexts. Her academic work appears on psychology, management, and education journals. With Dr. Jennie Weiner, she is co-author, of the new book, Education Lead(her)ship: Advancing Women in K-12 Administration. Professor Higgins is currently working on a book based upon the Scaling for Impact initiative she has run at Harvard University that showcases how entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial change can happen in education. She holds degrees from Harvard University and Dartmouth College.

Jennie Miles Weiner is a Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Connecticut. Her scholarship focuses on issues of leadership and organizational change, including the impact of gender and racial discrimination in educational leadership. She is affiliated with UConn’s Center for Education Policy Analysis, Research and Evaluation and serves as the co-director of the school’s EdD program. She appears as an expert on issues of women, leadership, and care work for a variety of events and on media outlets, such as Good Morning America and NPR, as well as on a variety of podcasts. She is the co-author of the new book Education Lead(her)ship: Advancing Women in K-12 Administration with Dr. Monica Higgins from Harvard Education Press. She is also the co-author of The Strategy Playbook for Education Leaders with Dr. Isobel Stevenson from Routledge. She holds degrees from Amherst College and Harvard University.