Panelists Discuss Pressures Faced by Female Leaders in Education

When Kim Smith—the CEO of Bellwether Educational Partners, an education non-profit—took charge after her fellow Girl Scouts’ canoe tipped over during a trip in her childhood, she says she didn’t receive the gratitude she expected. Instead, her friends told her, “You’re so bossy!”

Smith, along with Deborah M. Jewell-Sherman, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Nannerl O. Keohane, a professor at Princeton University, invoked stories from childhood during an Ed School panel on Wednesday titled “Does Gender Matter in Education Leadership?”

All three panelists said they had been mistaken for a secretary in their lives, demonstrating, they said, how being a female shaped the way the world viewed their abilities as leaders.

Kathleen McCartney, dean of the Ed School and the panel’s moderator, followed up on Smith’s story and asked, “Is bossy a word you would use for a boy?” The panel replied no, and Keohane said, “There’s a connotation that girls are not supposed to be bossy.”

Smith said that only 20 percent of women fill superintendent roles, as opposed to the 80 percent of women in the teaching workforce.  Keohane, who formerly served as the president of Wellesley College and as the first female president of Duke University, said that even without the gender imbalance there aren’t enough strong applicants applying for top education positions.

“We need the talent, and having people excluded because of their gender, to me, is a crying shame,” she said.

Keohane discussed her personal story as a teaching assistant at Yale University, where she received her Ph.D.: when her students (who were all male) lined up for office hours, one immediately cried out, “Oh no, it’s a girl.” Keohane said her undergraduate experience at Wellesley helped her to deal with the situation.

She said that people also questioned her abilities as a female president at Duke.

Jewell-Sherman said that changing the field of education leadership would require giving women an experience like Keohane’s—one in which young women are empowered.

“The stereotypes of women as ‘bossy,’ as well as some other words that start with ‘b’ but aren’t as kind, are infused in young people and have irreparable damage for the psyche of young women and young men as they perceive the leadership of women,” she said.

“We’re socialized to do the work,” Jewell-Sherman continued, “but not to want to be front and center.”

—Staff writer Michelle M. Hu can be reached at michellehu@college.harvard.edu.