FEMALE EMPOWERMENT LEADERSHIP WITH HEART AND KINDNESS

Fostering leadership skills - amongst students and staff - lies at the heart of every all-girls school’s mission. In this article, GSA Heads Will le Fleming and Sandrine Paillasse explain why they think such initiatives are so important for the future of society. Together, they highlight inspiring new models of leadership which underpin the refocusing of female leadership and encourage SLTs to support nurturing working cultures.

Empowering and encouraging female leadership is at the heart of our purpose as a school.

Joining The Abbey as its first male head, I felt my personal responsibility in this regard with stark clarity. When asked – not infrequently – whether a man should be the head of The Abbey, I had an impassioned answer to give: I whole-heartedly believe that the responsibility for gender equality and empowerment is one we all share, as with all forms of equality. It is a question of mutual human dignity and freedom. And I knew from my previous experience in all-boys, all-girls and co-education that I wanted to commit to girls’ education and to the cause that drives it. But while I knew my answer, I certainly thought it was a fair question to ask. And it is particularly pertinent for a male leader, in a community all about opportunity and freedom for girls and women, to consider the community.

What’s painfully apparent is how powerful the barriers to such empowerment remain. Education itself is a good example.

Obstacles

One simple obstacle is the inflexibility of the demands. Everyone in education works long and intense hours and at the senior level the demands intensify further. There is the routine workload; there’s the need to be at so many of the evening events and functions and celebrations that punctuate every term-time week; and then there are the crises, almost as routine as the routine workload, that take an ongoing toll.

It remains the case that more women than men need flexibility in their working lives and, as we tackle the underlying causes, employers need to find solutions to enable this: from job sharing to strict limits on the sheer number of hours that all colleagues are expected to be available. That is particularly true for pastoral leaders. The nature of their work is to always be on call: we have to find ways to make this sustainable as the demands, and the complexity of those demands, continue to increase.

We also see the uneven impact of family life on leadership aspirations. Care and the responsibility for care is not fairly distributed. So often it is clear that even in families where men and women have joint childcare responsibilities, women are the managers and the brains and the authority and the arbiter: they may share the hours, but they bear the weight of the decisions. A study by the University of Kent this year showed that the ‘motherhood penalty’ – the pay gap between mothers and fathers with post-school education – has got worse since the 1970s, not better. The same pattern repeats across the whole range of personal and care responsibilities beyond school: unequal obligation and unequal impact.