Why So Few Female School Superintendents? Bias, If You Believe the RTD.
by James A. Bacon
It appears that there is a “disparity” between the percentage of female teachers in Virginia public schools and the percentage of female school superintendents. About 82% of classroom teachers are women, but only 40% of school division superintendents are, reports Anna Bryson with the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
What causes that discrepancy? According to Bryson: “a quiet but persistent skepticism about whether [women] can lead and mother at the same time.”
Bryson serves up supporting anecdotes from female school superintendents such as Amy Cashwell, who runs Henrico County Public Schools. Someone once asked Cashwell if she would be able to devote herself fully to a particular project. She looked at him with a puzzled expression.
“Well, you have kids,” he said.
She responded: “So do you.”
Somehow, Cashwell still managed to become superintendent of one of Virginia’s largest school districts. It never occurred to Bryson to ask how she was able to rise in the face of societal misogyny. Or how Verletta White, who encountered similar questions, managed to become superintendent of Roanoke City Public Schools. Or how Michele Reid became superintendent of the Fairfax County school district.
But Bryson does serve up a quote from a certain Rachel White, with the University of Texas at Austin, who ascribes the national paucity of female superintendents to prejudice. “The people in power are skeptical of women’s abilities to hold these leadership positions in ways that are entirely unfair and untrue. We hear things like, ‘Women are too emotional….’ I think we have to change our perceptions and our mindsets towards women and women leaders.”
White conducts research into school superintendents, you see, so that makes her an “expert.”
The Times-Dispatch never considers other possible explanations for the disparity — despite evidence in the article indicating that there’s more to the story.
For example, Bryson notes, national research shows that women are more likely to become superintendents later in their careers. But she never asks an obvious question: If men are more prone to jump from the teaching track to the administrative track earlier in their careers than women do, doesn’t that mean they have more time to work their way up through the administrative ranks?
Nor does Bryson ask a related question: Isn’t it possible that the reason women are less likely to make the leap from teaching to management is that they… I know it sounds crazy …. they have a stronger preference overall for teaching over management?
One of the superintendents quoted in the article, Rebecca Walters with Lexington Public Schools, buttresses my point that men and women have different values and priorities:
“More men go into education, teach for a few years and then decide, well, my next step is to be a principal, and then, my next step is to be an assistant superintendent or director, and then my next step is to be a superintendent,” she said. “It seems like that’s a pretty clear trajectory for men, probably a little more than women.”
Bryson goes on to observe that in Virginia 85% of male superintendents hold doctorates compared to 74% of female superintendents who do. Insofar as the doctorate credential gives an advantage to applicants for the job, it would appear that higher educational standards are demanded of men than women. That would seem to conflict with the bias-against-women narrative.
There may be other factors involved not alluded to in the Times-Dispatch article. For example, school boards tend cast a wider net when picking superintendents than they do for lower-ranking administrators. Typically, they will recruit from outside the locality. Taking the top-dog job often entails moving from another jurisdiction and uprooting the family. Perhaps men (and their spouses) are more willing to endure that disruption than women.
(I suppose you could argue that’s a different form of societal bias, and I won’t dispute the point, but that’s a very different argument from societal prejudice against the leadership qualities of women.)
Also, we hear from Axios Richmond today, that Virginia has seen a spike in superintendent turnover. “More than 40% of Virginia’s K-12 public school districts had a least one new superintendent between 2019 and 2024, according to national data collected by Superintendent Lab and reviewed by Axios.”
Axios sees the turnover as “evidence of school districts’ instability” in the current political environment.
The publication makes no effort to link its data to the male-female disparity in superintendent positions, but its data could be relevant. Any open-minded person would have to consider the possibility that risky, contentious, high-turnover jobs that require moving one’s family to a new community might have less appeal to women and, therefore, inspire fewer women to vie for the positions.
I suspect that we’re dealing with another variant of the “pipeline” problem here. In essence, the reason there are more male school superintendents is that men on average switch from the teaching track to the administrative track sooner in women, are more likely to earn PhDs, are more willing to relocate to move up the career ladder, and are more willing to apply to conflict-ridden jobs. Those are hypotheses, of course, to be confirmed or falsified by real-world data.
It would be interesting to know, for instance, what percentage of the candidates applying for superintendent jobs are men. If 60% of Virginia school superintendents are men and 60% of the applicants for those positions were men, it’s hard to make the case that bias was involved in the selection process. Conversely, if only 40% of the job candidates were men, then you might have some explaining to do.
I don’t profess to know the answers to the questions I raise. The data doesn’t exist to answer them. But I’m pretty certain that the reality is more complex and nuanced than the RTD portrays it.
