Introduction D e b r a E. L a n e
—M aya A n g e l o u
The World Economic Forum reported in 2019 that at the current pace, it will take another 208 years to achieve gender equality in the United States (Gates, 2019; Zahidi, 2019). The first time my coauthor, Kim, read this, she quipped, “Well, I guess 208 isn’t really that long, given how long it’s taken to get this far.” But Kim has two girls who had both just turned eighteen. That means neither her daughters, her granddaughters, her great-granddaughters, nor her great-great-granddaughters will live in a world where gender equality is the norm. Wait, what?! In the spring of 2019, I attended a leading conference for school heads and administrators. Of the hundreds of attendees, I noted that only about one in five were women. Men organized and ran the conference, they gave the vast majority of the talks, and it seemed men made most of the decisions around education. It was clearly disproportionate. Shouldn’t this predominance of men in leading roles in education be a thing of the past? Having interviewed for head of school positions myself, I knew differently. Breaking through the invisible barrier into leadership was going to be a challenge, and not because I lacked qualifications. Even though I had passed various rounds of interviews and been selected as a finalist in a number of searches, men told me time and again that I lacked head of school experience. This was the classic double-edged sword, only with a seemingly gendered twist. I knew I was not alone. Among the women in attendance, there were heads of schools, aspiring heads of schools, and senior leaders from various educational organizations. The more veteran women attendees insisted that despite decades-old gender disparity, they found some hope in the fact that more women were at this one particular event than ever before. I listened as they exchanged stories about just how hard 1
©️2022 by Solution Tree Press
Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.
