In matters both big and small, women in education leadership are treated, spoken to and viewed differently than their male colleagues. And it impacts everything from their assignments and salaries to promotions.

The career moves that are open to aspiring women leaders often propel them toward a very real glass cliff — leadership roles in which the risk of failure is high. By failing to address this bias, states and districts are constraining the rise of some of their most capable current and would-be leaders.

New survey data and research illuminates the experiences and perspectives of women who confront this bias and demonstrates the need for systemic change to dismantle the bias driving the gender gap.

The glass cliff for women is real, but it is not insurmountable. If more leaders — both women and, critically, men — take even a few steps forward, we can build a bridge to a future in which every leader can reach their full potential.

Here are some ways district and state leaders can transform the pipeline for who advances and leads their systems.

First, women in education leadership need more active support, with a shift from mentoring to sponsorship. That calls for women and men to take an engaged role in advancing up-and-coming women leaders — and all leaders, at all stages, who can benefit from on-the-job coaching.

These relationships can be game-changers, results from the first annual Women Leading Ed insight survey found. What’s more, they provide excellent opportunities for men to be allies in advancing gender equality.

Related: Widen your perspective. Our free biweekly newsletter consults critical voices on innovation in education.

For example, Kyla Johnson-Trammell, the superintendent of schools in Oakland, recently recalled having a male coach when she started out. He served as her sponsor, providing coaching and introducing her to other experienced leaders.

“When I started as superintendent of Oakland Unified School District, one of the former superintendents called me. This man coached me for two years every Friday,” Johnson-Trammell recounted. “He helped me and pushed me to be the leader I wanted to be as a Black woman. . . . His sponsorship helped open doors to accessing people, it helped me to connect to other superintendents.”

Second, rebalanced evaluation, promotion and hiring processes can be key levers in undoing bias. That means creating diverse applicant pools and hiring committees and providing bias training for those making key personnel decisions.

Seemingly small changes can have big effects. For example, having a finalist pool with two women candidates — instead of just one — made the likelihood of a woman getting hired 79 times greater, recent research in the Harvard Business Review found.

More broadly, the existing education leadership pipeline continues to disadvantage women. Data from the U.S. Department of Education shows — and the Women Leading Ed survey results verify — that women are predominantly funneled toward elementary school leadership and instructional leadership pathways that keep their trajectories below the top jobs in the district or state.

Men, however, are elevated to high school principalships and district positions that include fiscal or operational roles — precisely the kind of experiences that are prioritized during superintendent search processes.

The Women Leading Ed survey results underscore this divergence. Of respondents who had been principals, fewer than 20 percent served in a high school. Overall, just over one in 20 respondents had held finance or operations roles.

In one response to the survey, a woman who was a senior leader in a large urban school district described the bias of the skewed leadership pipeline succinctly: “I was told I’m too petite to be anything but an elementary principal.”

Third, bolstered family and well-being supports are essential to advancing more women leaders. These include parental leave, childcare, eldercare time and scheduling flexibility.

Rising to top district leadership positions comes with costs for women that are typically not shouldered by men.

Respondents to the Women Leading Ed survey reported feeling pressure to overperform professionally to prove their competency. Fully 95 percent of women superintendents believe that they must make professional sacrifices that their male colleagues do not, the survey data show.

Some women reported working long hours while neglecting family, under pressure to maintain unrealistic expectations at the office. One pointed out the additional responsibilities that women often carry in their personal lives, including the care of children or parents, attending and organizing school events, providing homework help and taking family members to doctor appointments.

Related: OPINION: We need more women in top leadership positions in our nation’s public schools

Added pressure at work and greater responsibilities at home lead to burnout: Roughly six out of 10 survey respondents said they think about leaving their current position due to the stress and strain; three-quarters said they think about leaving daily, weekly or monthly.

Providing high-quality benefits can be a key lever for addressing these underlying gender inequalities. So can offering flexible work schedules, hybrid work arrangements and remote work options that provide elasticity in where and when work gets done.

Finally, systems — not just individuals — must be accountable. Setting public goals for female leadership on boards and in senior management is a start. Reporting on progress toward those public goals is vital. So too is ensuring equal pay for equal work.

More than half the superintendents surveyed said that they have had conversations or negotiations about their salaries in which they felt their gender influenced the outcome.

One solution: establish audits for pay equity and increased transparency around compensation. Another: include salary ranges in job postings. These can be powerful steps toward the goal of pay equality.

Over 700 leaders have signed Women Leading Ed’s open letter calling for the adoption of these strategies. The strategies are already taking root through the advocacy and actions of women in education leadership and their allies of all genders.

It is a movement that is both growing and vital, as research makes clear that women continue to face a different set of rules than men in leadership, and districts too often give women window-dressing roles instead of actually reforming their practices to achieve gender equality.

The time for change is now.

Julia Rafal-Baer is the founder and CEO of Women Leading Ed, a national nonprofit network for women in education leadership, and co-founder and CEO of ILO Group, a women-owned education and policy strategy firm.

This story about women education leaders was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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America seems more ready than ever for long-overdue conversations about race, gender and opportunity. One setting where those conversations matter a lot is in our schools — the places that explicitly define opportunity in our children’s formative years.

When we select people to lead our education systems, we send a loud signal to our children about what is possible for them. That’s why we need to talk about who holds the role of the nation’s top education post, secretary of education. As President-elect Joe Biden mulls Cabinet appointments, I suggest it is high time a woman of color led the U.S. Department of Education.

So far, no woman of color has sat in that seat. Since the role was established in 1979, there have been 11 secretaries. White men have held the post for more than 24 of those 41 years.

No one should underestimate the public impact of the secretary. While it’s true that the federal role in education is limited, deferring in most areas to states and communities, and federal funding makes up less than one-tenth of overall school funding, the power of the bully pulpit is huge.

The symbolism of a woman of color at the helm of the Department of Education would be enormous, creating pressure on school boards and states to diversify their leadership. And just as important, having a woman of color as secretary of education would write an indelible story for all our children — girls of color most of all.

The secretary’s ability to define the national agenda in education outstrips the policy levers under his — or her — control.

Our school systems were designed more than a century ago on a model in which unmarried young women reported up to male administrators.

“The system required subordination,” David B. Tyack writes in “The One Best System,” his history of American urban education. “Women were generally subordinate to men; the employment of women as teachers thus augmented the authority of the largely male administrative leadership.”

Related: White men have the edge in the school principal pipeline,  researchers say

It’s been six years since students of color became a majority in our public schools. Teaching is one of the most female-dominated professions. Yet the typical school superintendent is a married white man. In a 2019 study we did at Chiefs for Change, women of color made up 25 percent  of leadership teams in districts we examined — but only 11 percent of superintendents.

When we go back, over and over, to choosing leaders who look the same as one another, but so little like the talent pool of skilled educators, we miss so much.

Look at the incredible women of color changing outcomes for students and families — Sharon Contreras  in Guilford County, North Carolina, Susana Cordova in Denver, Janice Jackson in Chicago, LaTonya Goffney in Aldine, Texas, Angélica Infante-Green in Rhode Island, Barbara Jenkins in Orange County, Florida, Aleesia Johnson in Indianapolis, Kyla Johnson-Trammell in Oakland,  California, Christina Kishimoto in Hawaii, Sonja Santelises in Baltimore and Penny Schwinn in Tennessee.

The poet Adrienne Rich once said, “When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.” That same effect occurs when children see an endless procession of education leaders who look nothing like them.

At Chiefs for Change, we created an initiative called Future Chiefs to ensure that diverse, committed up-and-coming leaders had the skills and the networks to excel as district superintendents and state chiefs. We’ve been thrilled to see 41 percent of our leaders land that top role and to see our women stepping into searches for chief roles in greater numbers.

Still, there are far too many instances of the not-so-subtle sexism that keeps too many women from high-level education jobs. Racial and gender bias play a pernicious part in keeping many of the most talented education leaders in the nation out of these roles.

Thankfully, that is beginning to change. When it comes time to appoint the next secretary of education, a woman of color should get the job.

To President-elect Biden, we’re ready to suggest some excellent candidates.

Julia Rafal-Baer is the chief operating officer of Chiefs for Change, a bipartisan network of state and district education chiefs and a  former assistant commissioner at the New York State Education Department.

This story about the secretary of education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Yet strikingly few women make it to the top role in America’s state and district education systems. And along the path to leadership, they face a familiar and frustrating pay gap compared to their male colleagues.

If we want to promote more women into education leadership, it’s incumbent upon us as a nation to stop this pattern of discrimination.

Now.

Related: College graduation rates rise, but racial gaps persist and men still out-earn women

Pay gaps in education start in the classroom and follow women into the principal’s office. For example, a 2018 study in Illinois found that female teachers make, on average, $2,000 less per year than their male colleagues, and the gap grows to $4,000 at the administrative level. This is even though the profession is majority-female up through school districts’ top tier of administrators, called the superintendent’s cabinet.

Two-thirds of school superintendents — and most state education chiefs — are men, and they out-earn their female counterparts by an average of $20,000 to $30,000 per year, according to the Council of the Great City Schools.

We at Chiefs for Change found a similar gender gap of $25,000 when we examined the most recent publicly available salary data for education leaders at the state level. The barriers that keep women from ascending to the top post are many, and we explore them — along with potential solutions — in a recent report.

A particularly unnecessary and easily solved barrier is the pay gap. The causes of the gender wage gap in education are complex and rooted in a long history of women making less than men in every profession, even ones where women have traditionally worked. Regardless of the reasons for why such gaps exist, fixing gender-based pay inequities should be a priority for governors and mayors as well as state and local education boards.

[pullquote author=”” description=”” style=”new-pullquote”]We are squandering the potential of many of the nation’s most talented education leaders, and it’s time to change that. A good place to start? Paychecks.[/pullquote]

They must send a strong signal that female education leaders unequivocally will receive fair and equal pay.

The low rate of women ascending to education leadership isn’t just a fairness issue; it means that families, students and communities are missing out on their talent. And as our report shows, the issues are even more pronounced for women of color.

At Chiefs for Change, we are working to train diverse leaders and help them build networks so that our schools can benefit from the talent they’ve been missing out on. We have called on states and cities to step up and address the gender gap in the hiring of school and state-level leadership. One part of that is doing away with wage discrimination at the top.

Related: COLUMN: Why more black male teachers should be feminists

Our report calls for several changes that can help in this effort, particularly the creation of more family-friendly policies like limiting evening and weekend meetings, offering child care and related transportation, helping with spouse/partner job searches, and crafting compensation packages to include benefits that explicitly attend to the health and well-being of the chief. There is no reason why the role of a chief — who oversees schools for the benefit of children and the well-being of a community — should be at odds with the care of children or a healthy individual lifestyle for the person sitting in that position.

In schools, we tell all children that they can be anything they want. It’s a striking irony, then, that the leaders of our school systems — district superintendents and state chiefs — are so commonly white and male and earn more than their female counterparts.

We are squandering the potential of many of the nation’s most talented education leaders, and it’s time to change that. A good place to start? Paychecks.

This story about women education leaders was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletter.

Julia Rafal-Baer is Chief Operating Officer of Chiefs for Change, a bipartisan network of state and district education chiefs. A former assistant commissioner in the New York State Education Department, Rafal-Baer earned a Ph.D. in education policy from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Marshall Scholar. She began her career as a special-education teacher in the Bronx.

The post OPINION: The first step toward promoting women into education leadership? Stop paying men more appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

In schools, we tell all children that they can be anything they want.

It’s a striking irony that the leaders of our school systems — district superintendents and state chiefs — overwhelmingly are white men.

A report that we at Chiefs for Change are releasing today takes a hard look at this issue and offers solutions that every school system and leader in America can put into action.

When we committed to developing a prepared, diverse cadre of leader-candidates dedicated to student-centered visions of change, we saw an encouraging number of candidates of color earn top jobs.

Then we looked at how many women had ascended to chief positions and the result was a punch in the gut. In response, we’ve spent the last year developing a leadership program specifically for women in education.

The new report is part of that response.

Women make up the vast majority of the education workforce, and based on our count of systems that our members lead, they remain a majority through the ranks of administration and top leadership teams. Yet they represent only about a third of district superintendents and less than half of state chiefs. For women of color, the numbers are even more troubling.

The inequities hit us hard, not just because of the current landscape but because we found that even among our members, 83 percent of our men were stepping into superintendent searches, compared with just 23 percent of the women.

Far too many highly effective, talented women are not even vying for the most senior positions.

On the first front, we created an entire thread of women-only programming for our Future Chiefs. They have told us it’s the only such network they have. And while I’m hesitant to ascribe cause and effect, I’m delighted that the numbers have improved significantly as we’ve doubled the percentage of women candidates from our programming who have applied for the top jobs.

We’ve seen three of our women recently land top jobs: Penny Schwinn, the new education commissioner in Tennessee; Denver Superintendent Susana Cordova; and Rhode Island Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education Angélica Infante-Green.

The second front resulted in the report, which shines a light on the problem and on solutions that can be implemented more broadly. And while it’s inarguable that some of the factors that hold women back are deeply embedded in our society, others are in the power of leaders to change immediately. Mayors, school board members, governors and others in every state and community must take concrete steps to effect change. Here are some key findings:

Transparency: Our school systems need to set public goals for helping women advance, and to be honest about progress toward those goals. Part of that is demanding specifically that search firms and school boards commit to work toward those goals and be transparent about progress.

Intentional preparation and networks: Men have always had strong networks to help them move up. Women need to be seen and supported, through not only mentors but active sponsors. Likewise, school systems must widen leadership searches so they capture and cultivate the talented women working hard at the school and cabinet levels, providing all new chiefs with coaching from seasoned leaders once they are in the roles, and demanding that search firms identify multiple female candidates and candidates of color for every chief search.

Family-friendly policies: Too often, structural roadblocks prevent leaders from pursuing or staying in the superintendent or state chief seat. Addressing this could mean limiting evening and weekend meetings, offering child care and related transportation, helping with spouse/partner job searches, and creating compensation packages that include benefits that explicitly attend to the health and well-being of the chief. There is no reason why the role of a chief — who oversees schools for the benefit of children and the well-being of a community — should be at odds with the care of children or a healthy individual lifestyle for the person sitting in that position.

The glass ceiling for women in education is not merely a problem of fairness, of representation or of opportunity, though it is all of these. By squandering the potential of many of the nation’s most talented education leaders, we are depriving children and families of vision and energy that could serve, and change lives for, millions. That’s an unacceptable price — especially when so many solutions are in front of us.

This story about women leaders in education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletter.

Julia Rafal-Baer is the chief operating officer of Chiefs for Change, a bipartisan network of state and district education chiefs. A former assistant commissioner at the New York State Education Department, Rafal-Baer earned a Ph.D. in education policy from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Marshall Scholar. She began her career as a special-education teacher in the Bronx.

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