Leading While Female

A Culturally Proficient Response for Gender Equity

Your take-action guide to gender equity

First, just to be clear: Leading While Female is not a book about how to get a leadership job. Nor is it about fixing or transforming women into male managers or mindsets.

Instead, Arriaga, Stanley, and Lindsey’s bigger ambition is to help both women and men educational leaders confront and close the gender equity gap—a gap that currently denies highly qualified women and women of color opportunities to better serve our millions of public school students.

Designed as both a personal and group discussion guide for taking action, Leading While Female draws on the research of feminism, intersectionality, educational leadership, and Cultural Proficiency to help us all:

• Better understand the impact of faux narratives that foster lack of confidence among girls and women
• Utilize the Tools of Cultural Proficiency to examine barriers to overcome and support functions to locate for your own career planning
• Learn from the stories of women leaders who have confronted and overcome barriers to career development, including women of color who were targets of implicit bias
• Explore and expand the roles and opportunities for our male colleagues to serve as allies, advocates, and mentors.

If we look at the data, we can safely say women are doing the work of classroom teaching while disproportionately, men are making administrative and leadership decisions. Here at last is a resource for the breaking down the barriers and leading the way for future generations of women leaders.