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.