Advancing Women in Leadership Journal
Not a member yet
363 research outputs found
Sort by
The Benefits and Challenges of Inhabiting the Dual Role of Mother/Leader
Get PDFWhat does it mean to be a good mother? What does it mean to be an effective school leader? These questions elicit a myriad of answers, illustrating the complex roles of mother and leader. The complexities are magnified for those who inhabit both roles. The purpose of this study was to understand the intersectionality of motherhood and educational leadership through the experiences of women who are mothers and leaders in a public school district in North Carolina. In this qualitative study using a phenomenological approach, a focus group was formed to explore participants’ experiences and perceptions of the benefits and conflicts inherent in maintaining the roles of mother and school leader as well as their perceptions of the non-dichotomous relationship of the two roles. Feminist standpoint theory and work/family border theory were utilized as frameworks to inform study design, data collection, and data analysis. Ideas around gendered roles as well as work/family balance were central in our efforts to understand the lived experiences of each participant. Through analysis of each focus group session, followed by an analysis across group sessions, three themes emerged: 1) emotional challenges 2) mother’s ways of leading, and 3) work-life balance.
Keywords: Mother/Leader, Women in School Leadership, Feminist Standpoint Theory, Intersection of Motherhood and Leadershi
The Effects of Burnout in Female Higher Education Administrators
Get PDFThis research explored the phenomenon of femaleness and how it impacts the experiences of women in higher education administration, specifically in colleges of agriculture, and how these experiences contributed to burnout, compassion fatigue, and job satisfaction. Despite representing more than half of the college-educated workforce, women are not represented equally within leadership positions in higher education. In academia, women faculty numbers have improved over the past several decades, representing 52.9% of assistant professor positions (Women in Academia: Quick Take, 2020). Higher education was initially intended only for men (Bystydzienski & Bird, 2006) and therefore valued men in higher-level positions (Bird, 2011; Trower, 2012). This has led to the creation of a culture where women and minorities are underrepresented and face multiple barriers (Bird, 2011). Having an inequitable distribution of power not only in organizations but within society suggests that women will need to traverse a different, more challenging path than their male counterparts to arrive at the same tier of status.
Keywords: burnout, compassion fatigue, higher education, women administrators, women leaders in agriculture, stress, gender roles, coping with stres
Understanding Through Stories: Leadership Experiences of Trinidadian Women of Color
Get PDFThis narrative inquiry explored the lived experiences of four Trinidadian women of color who served as principals in schools across the Caribbean Island. The focus of this research was to gain insight into what motivated these women to assume leadership positions in education, and how their experiences shaped their leadership practices. Research findings revealed three key themes that influenced the participants’ leadership practice in Trinidad’s educational context. These themes include: (a) ethics of care, an approach to leadership rooted in care and empathy, (b) collaborative leadership, an approach that helped the participants to address unique challenges faced by women-leaders, and (c) gender, class, and racial biases confronted by the participants during their careers. Exploring the narratives of the Trinidadian female leaders provides a nuanced understanding of how women-leaders navigate a complex landscape, offering lessons on resilience and leadership in a unique cultural and historical context.
Keywords: women of color; female principals; Trinidad and Tobago; Caribbean; educational leadership; West Indies; ethics of care
Let the Silenced Speak: Digital Platform Usage by Feminist and Gender Equity Nongovernmental Organizations in Ghana
Get PDFThe freedom and acceptance of feminists’ activities in Ghana hit several rocks after the first African Feminist Congress in Ghana in 2004. In Ghana, research on gender advocacy and feminist organizations has increased, but little emphasis has been paid to the contribution of self-identified feminists to women’s empowerment. I explored how self-identified feminists and gender equity-focused NGOs in Ghana leverage social media to educate and advocate for women’s and children’s welfare. I also examined how these feminists and NGOs engage women in rural areas in seminars, discussion sessions, and training workshops to create spaces for women to voice their concerns and gain empowerment. Given this, 17 in-depth interviews were conducted with self-identified Ghanaian feminists and NGO leaders. I employed muted group theory and African feminist theory to guide the data analysis. I argued that Ghanaian self-identified feminists and NGOs have put in a lot of work to empower Ghanaian women to enable them to express themselves and share their experiences. The findings contribute to the discussion on Ghanaian feminism and how they enact empowerment and advance how the growing acceptance of feminism in Ghana allows Ghanaian women to speak for themselves and have their voices heard in national and global digital spaces.
Keywords: Freedom, Feminism, Digital platforms, Muted Groups, NGOs
Leading in a Room Full of Boys: A Retrospective Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of the Leadership Experiences of Adolescent Women as a Minority in a Coed Senior High School in the Philippines
Get PDFThis study explored the lived experiences of seven student leaders who belonged to the first three cohorts (2018, 2019, and 2020) of female transfer students in a private Catholic senior high school in Metro Manila after years of exclusive basic education. Using retrospective IPA, participants were individually interviewed to analyze the meanings they ascribed to their leadership experiences three to six years ago. Participants recalled their challenges, coping strategies, as well positive experiences as student leaders. Following Willig’s steps in IPA, data analysis yielded the following key themes: Leadership as (a) unsafe space (for women), (b) a response to systematized injustice, (c) adaptive resilience-building, (d) building social support systems, (e) character-forming, and (f) purpose-driven. These themes were framed by the participants’ experience of gender conflict and discrimination as a minority in their new school environment. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
Keywords: gender, women minority, adolescent women leaders, leadership, leader emergence, leadership development, coeducation, retrospective IPA, Philippine
“It takes a village to raise a leader”: Overcoming gender-specific barriers through individual, workplace, and organizational level facilitators
Get PDFWomen constitute most health workers, yet they hold proportionately fewer leadership positions. The literature is replete with normative advice to address gender specific barriers to women’s leadership; less attention is paid to the processes women undertake on their paths to leadership. We describe the leadership journeys of 23 women leaders in the health sector in Canada, guided by a multi-layered framework of barriers and enablers. A thematic analysis of 11 semi-structured interviews and 13 public presentations on leadership journeys was conducted, which applied a priori and emerging themes to segments of the transcripts using NVivo 12. Three key themes emerged: impetus for leadership journey, enablers to leadership development, and barriers to advancement. Women leaders reported a variety of reasons to embark on their leadership journey from their own desire to make a difference to being tapped on the shoulder by mentors and sponsors. Many of the barriers faced were specific to their intersectional identities where they often juggled the complex demands of gender role expectations, while maintaining personal and familial mental health and well-being. The multi-layered framework of important factors was validated and improved. Better understanding women’s leadership journeys needs to capture processual and structural dimensions.
Keywords: Women Leaders, Leadership Journeys, Health Care, Health Science
Empowering Second+ Career Female Academics: Strengthening Relationships through Mentoring for Personal and Professional Growth
Get PDFMentoring of early career researchers (ECRs) in universities usually involves older, more experienced researchers providing guidance to younger researchers starting out in their careers. However, for women who enter academia as a second or more career (second +), this type of mentoring may not recognise the experiences these women bring with them or the unique barriers that they encounter. This study is an autoethnographic case study through a relational cultural theory lens of five women who entered academia later in their careers but were classified as ECRs. In order to address the unique challenges confronting them they formed a peer mentoring group. Analysis of group discussions and individual reflections resulted in the identification of common themes of disempowerment, lack of belonging and lack of collegiate relations as they confronted the often-invisible barriers presented by university processes and culture. Sharing of mutual experiences within the peer mentoring group resulted in greater self-awareness of negative self-talk and beliefs, developed understanding of university systems, empowered participants through relational problem solving and supported agency in planning career progression. The increased sense of belonging and self-efficacy that participants felt suggests that peer mentoring, rather than traditional mentoring schemes, may be of greater benefit for other second+ career female academics.
Keywords: mature female academics, mentoring, university relationships, empowerment, early career researcher(s
What’s My Type? Characteristics of Quality Mentoring Relationships for Nonprofit Latina CEOs as Mentees in California
Get PDF Mentoring research that explores the experiences of executive leaders as mentees is limited, and almost non-existent, for women of color nonprofit chief executive officers (CEOs). Not only is existing literature limited, it does not intentionally explore how intersectionality influences the development of quality mentoring relationships for women of color executive leaders. The term Latina Leadership Development (LDD) has been established as a dedicated concept related to the leadership development of Latinas in this study. The purpose of the study was to explore how Latina nonprofit executive leaders in California leveraged existing social capital and mentoring relationships as mentees that influenced their self-efficacy and leadership development. Research was conducted between 2017 and 2020 with 10 Latina nonprofit CEOs in California utilizing qualitative research methodology. A hermeneutic phenomenological research design was applied utilizing hermeneutic looping techniques during a nine-step data analysis process to ensure participants’ perceptions of their lived experiences remained at the core of this study. This paper presents two themes produced by the study: (a) An evolution of mentorship relationship type and function exists with a preference for informal mentoring relationships that provide psychosocial supportive functioning, and (b) A constellation of mentors from diverse racial, ethnic, and gender backgrounds are preferred and integral to LLD. This study empirically extends existing scholarship by showing how intersectionality and specific characteristics of mentoring relationships may be most beneficial for Latina and women of color nonprofit CEOs.
Keywords: mentoring relationship, nonprofit organization, Latina chief executive leader, social capital, community cultural wealth typology, intersectionality, hermeneutic phenomenolog
Where the Glass Ceiling Cracks: Features of Organizations Where Women Rise to the Top
Get PDFTracking a subset of firms with 20 percent or greater representation of women in top executive roles in the year 2000, we report that these firms continue to have a higher than average percentage of women in top executive roles in 2015. Gaps in the pipeline, even at these best practice firms, suggest more needs to be done to ensure a steady flow of future women leaders. Executives at these best practice firms report that sponsorship from top leadership has been key to their high levels of women in senior roles. We discuss the implications of these findings for the progress of women in the pipeline and argue that firm-level commitments to diversity by top corporate leaders are essential for further progress.
 
Fundi - The Enduring Leadership Legacy of Civil Rights Activist Ella Baker
Get PDFMany Black activists have pronounced Ella Baker the Fundi of the American Civil Rights Movement. Moses and Cobb (2001), veterans of the Mississippi voter registration project from the early 1960s, named her “our Fundi in the tradition of community organizing” (p. 4). Joanne Grant (1981), who later wrote an important biography of Ella Baker’s life, called her film about Baker’s legacy – Fundi: The story of Ella Baker. Fundi is a Swahili word for the person who possesses practical wisdom and is skilled at passing on to new generations the knowledge that the community’s elders regard as most important. The Fundi is a teacher and a learner. The Fundi supports other people in learning the lessons of the elders. The Fundi does not seek credit or fame. She is quietly satisfied to provide a bridge from one generation to the next and to help young people root their ideas and actions in their culture’s most enduring traditions. Throughout her life Ella Baker stepped in again and again to model learning, relationship-building, teaching, and leadership.
Although she devoted her life to upholding the cause of racial justice and gained a reputation among civil rights activists for being a great leader, the name of Ella Jo Baker remains largely unknown to the general public. Born in 1903 in Norfolk, Virginia, Baker was the granddaughter of proud and defiant ex-slaves. With the support of her parents who made many sacrifices to further their daughter’s education, Baker graduated from North Carolina’s Shaw University as the valedictorian of her 1927 class. Almost immediately after graduation, she left the South for New York City and immersed herself in the excitement of the Harlem Renaissance. It wasn’t long before she was participating actively in a variety of organizations to help people secure their rights and enhance their economic opportunities. All of this led eventually to her assuming a leadership position in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) – the preeminent Black advocacy group in the United States since its founding in 1909. As Director of Branches for the NAACP, Baker was especially effective in maintaining contact with the Association’s grassroots membership and pushed hard for education and training programs to prepare rank and file people from throughout the South for leadership roles. In the 1950s, Baker was the first Executive Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) – the organization that grew out of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and supported Dr. Martin Luther King’s efforts to combat racism. In 1960, she left the SCLC to launch the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) – the group set up to sustain the student protest movement that began so dramatically on February 1, 1960, when four Black students from the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Greensboro to protest racial discrimination.
Throughout all of this work, Baker stressed the value of learning, growth, and the development of grassroots leadership. She saw herself primarily as an adult educator and a cultivator of untapped leadership. Every cause, in her view, simmered with opportunities for education. Taking the time to think through the issues, to cast off worn out assumptions, and to plan reflectively for the long term mattered most to her. She maintained that social action yielded valuable learning when sufficient time was set aside for reflection and dialogue.