Leadership changed hands in 114 of those districts — 23% — within the past year, a jump from 20% the year before, according to data, shared exclusively with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, by the  from ILO Group, a consulting firm. The project — the only current publicly available resource on leadership turnover in the 500 largest districts — listed about 15% of districts replacing their superintendents prior to the pandemic.

One surprise outcome of that turnover is an increase in female superintendents: Women now represent a third of district chiefs, up from 30% last year. Of the 114 new chiefs, 44 were women.

But even with those gains, it would take another 30 years for women to reach parity with men in district leadership, the authors said.

To Julia Rafal-Baer,  CEO of ILO Group, this year’s results offer a mixed picture, coming just days after the latest scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The results showed declines in reading for 12th grade girls and in science for all 8th graders.

“There is a continued destabilizing of leaders at a time when we really need to have a coherent agenda that is driving instruction,” said Rafal-Baer, also a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the NAEP program.

Even so, she was pleased with the gains for women.  “I’m encouraged by the fact that we’re starting to see some meaningful progress.” 

Superintendent turnover happens for myriad reasons — from stagnant student performance to disagreements over salary. But it’s clear that COVID and the cultural debates that followed — embroiling districts in disputes over mask mandates, “anti-racist” curriculum and sexually explicit books —  transformed the nature of the position. 

“It’s always been political, but it’s never been so partisan,” said Gustavo Balderas, superintendent of the Beaverton School District in Oregon. Since 2011, he has led five districts in the Pacific Northwest and will leave next year to become of the Puget Sound Educational Service District, a regional agency in Washington.

On top of local concerns, today’s superintendents have the added weight of responding to threats of funding cuts and policy shifts from Washington, Balderas said. “I was just visiting a school 
 that had a family deported.”

‘Worn out’

Researchers who focus on the superintendency and school board politics echoed Balderas’ view. Rebecca Jacobsen, an education policy professor at Michigan State University, said district leaders are “worn out.”

“I think that the toll of the past few years continues to ripple and really push people out,” she said. Several faced personal attacks, including , from angry members of their communities. “For many who entered education 15-20 years ago, this is not the landscape that one envisioned.”

The skills superintendents bring to the position sometimes don’t match the demands of the job, added Rachel White, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and founder of the Superintendent Lab, a source of research and data on district leaders. Most were teachers and principals before moving to the central office and spent years overseeing instruction, finance or teacher development. 

Now they’re responding to social media, and the “proliferation of misinformation and disinformation campaigns often rooted in ideology,” White said. “This has shifted what superintendents are increasingly spending their time on — debunking stories being told about what is happening in their schools and classrooms that simply are not true.”

As was the case in 2022, some of the turnover is due to school boards firing superintendents before their contracts expire. Since January, the in Georgia, the district in Tennessee and the district in Florida have fired their chiefs.

Most leaders, however, leave on their , sometimes because they’re seeking a new challenge.

Mary Elizabeth Davis spent nearly seven years as superintendent of Georgia’s Henry County Schools, overseeing the suburban-Atlanta district during a period of growth in both and . She eliminated a $12 million deficit and built teams to support instruction, facility planning and operations.

Last year, she started over in Cherokee County, another metro Atlanta district, where she aims to keep board meetings more focused on core academic issues rather than  just building projects and the budget. They still need to keep the public informed about finances, but “it is no longer the only thing,” she said. 

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In Davis’ part of the country, women are still the least likely to be superintendents, the data shows. Twenty-two percent of chiefs in the Southeast are women, while the Northeast has the highest percentage of female district leaders — 46%, or 17 of the 37 districts on the list. 

This year’s report also delves into the routes leaders take to the top job. 

In 2018, when ILO began collecting the data, fewer than half of superintendents were internal hires. Last year, the majority, 58%, were hired from within, and about 40% had served as an interim superintendent in their district before the board officially gave them the job. Moving up within the same school district is slightly more common for women than men, 55% compared to 50%. 

Over a 20-year period, Cliff Jones worked his way up from teacher to of the Fulton County Schools in Atlanta. Once he entered the central office, he said he “took notes” during a time of leadership turnover and learned the importance of communication in making relationships work with the board.

“The more successful superintendents that I saw were trying to be out in front, trying to create proactive communication,” he said.  

Newly hired as the superintendent in Horry County, South Carolina — with an unusually large 12-member board — he has work to do. He said he doesn’t want to just be a “911 guy,” contacting members when there’s an emergency. 

‘Priorities and values’

Not all candidates spend that much time in a deputy or other cabinet position, which Balderas said is likely one reason why turnover remains high. He calls it “leadership compression.”

Among the 500 districts in ILO’s analysis, 10 male leaders skipped straight from principal to superintendent. They include , named interim superintendent of Texas’ Conroe Independent School District in May, and , who took over in February as acting chief of the South Bend Community School Corporation in Indiana.

“People are just bypassing roles” instead of serving four to six years in a mid-level role where they might tackle some of the same challenges as the superintendent, Balderas said. Maybe, they’re “less prepared to understand the political navigation that’s needed” to stay in the position long enough to make lasting improvements. 

After leading multiple districts, Balderas said it’s possible to work with a politically divided board. He tried to build connections with members by taking on other responsibilities in the community outside of the education sector, from the local chamber of commerce to the Rotary club.

People active in those groups “see that you care about your community,” he said. That word “gets back to your board in one way or another.”

Despite division among board members, districts can stay focused on academic improvement, said Davis, who was hired in Cherokee on 4-3 vote. 

“I think that when you start from that position, you have a lot of work to do to understand the priorities and values of individuals,” she said. She met with each board member, hearing concerns over teachers spending their own money on supplies and a desire for more presentations on student data. 

Having a divided board was familiar for Davis. The Henry County board hired her on a 3-2 vote. During her tenure, public meetings turned into over a mask mandate and a in 2023 that kept students locked out of the internet for nearly a month. 

But she had plenty to celebrate. The majority-Black district saw enough to come off the state’s list of failing school systems and a 9% increase in students scoring at the proficient level or above in .

“I’ve never seen harmony as a requirement for effectiveness,” Davis said. 

For nearly a decade, women have in overall prime-age labor force participation – strengthening local economies and contributing billions to GDP. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that continuing to advance women’s equality could add trillions to global GDP, boosting incomes and living standards worldwide – for men and women alike.

Yet right now this progress is threatened by a multigenerational caregiving crisis—spanning both child care and elder care.

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Since January, over 200,000 women have . Experts attribute this largely to reduced workplace flexibility and persistently limited child care access. Misty Heggeness of the University of Kansas reports labor force participation for women ages 25–44 with children under five dropped from 69.7% to 66.9%.

At United WE, our research confirms the toll: women are than men to leave the workforce due to child care challenges. Sixty percent of women entrepreneurs say this barrier makes running their businesses harder, and millions live in child care deserts.

But the caregiving squeeze doesn’t stop there. The recent AARP and National Alliance for Caregiving “” report finds that 63 million Americans—nearly one in four adults—now provide ongoing care for an adult or a child with a complex medical condition or disability, a staggering 45% increase since 2015.

Many juggle both roles: one in three caregivers, and almost half of those under 50 are part of the “sandwich generation,” caring for both kids and aging relatives.

This crisis disproportionately affects women, but its consequences are felt in every corner of our economy. A by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation found states lose an average of $1 billion in economic activity each and every year due to breakdowns in child care access.

One expert put it : “The economy’s basically telling half its talent to stay home.”

The good news is that solutions are within reach, and even in deeply divided times, Republicans and Democrats are making common cause to make child care more affordable and accessible.

In Kansas, bipartisan action under Gov. Laura Kelly’s leadership is poised to create more child care slots in the next two years than the state did in the last 15 – giving thousands of parents the ability to return to work or expand their businesses.

In Missouri, where more than 41% of counties do not have an accredited child care facility, legislation to help businesses offset the cost of child care won support from both parties. And a bipartisan commission appointed by Gov. Mike Kehoe is working on recommendations to streamline regulations so providers can open and operate more easily while protecting the health and safety of kids.

And at the federal level, despite a polarized Congress, progress has quietly continued. The recent tax bill tripled the employer-provided child care credit, offering new incentives for businesses to support working parents.

Now, parallel action is emerging for elder care—still slow, but gaining traction. Promising policy proposals include caregiver tax credits and support services, though much more is needed to meet the escalating demand.

At United WE, we believe the path forward lies in research, solutions and results. That’s our model for change—and it works.

Today, as we approach the 105th anniversary of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to participate in our democracy, the time is now to break down this barrier to women’s full participation in our economy.

Suffragist J. Ellen Foster told delegates at the 1892 Republican National Convention: “We are here to help you – and we are here to stay.”

Women have more than delivered on that promise. Today, for the sake of our economy and our communities, it’s time policymakers and employers to do their part as well.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.

There’s a reason why women in this country feel that so much pressure rests on their shoulders, that parenting is hard, that too many expectations are heaped onto them and that if they don’t hold everything together Macgyver-like with pluck, grit, duct tape and dental floss, their worlds could fall apart.

The reason is because it’s true. Maybe not the part about the duct tape, but the reason so many women feel they must take on so much work and caregiving is that the United States doesn’t have a robust social safety net the way many other industrialized countries do. We have no federal child care infrastructure and no federal paid family leave plan. We’ve skipped over the safety net chapter on how to run a country and instead, we rely on women to pick up the slack.

Calarco, who works as an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, made headlines in November 2020 when her quote: “Other countries have social safety nets; the U.S. has women” went viral. It resonated while still getting to the heart of what makes being a caregiver in this country so incredibly frustrating: it’s hard, it’s time-consuming and women are expected to do it while being given no support, financial or otherwise. It also served as the basis for Calarco’s new book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.

Calarco spoke with Early Learning Nation about everything from the outdated Supermom myth to the role humor plays in perpetuating misogynistic stereotypes.

A lightly edited and condensed Q+A is below.

Rebecca Gale: Your book talks about the United States’ insistence on maintaining the illusion of a DIY society — that each of us should make our own decisions and take care of our problems without help from anyone else. But given that people actually need caregiving support at some point in their lives, why do you think this illusion has endured for such a long time? 

Jessica Calarco: This DIY society is beneficial for the billionaires and big corporations and their supporters who profit from maintaining this idea and the illusion that we don’t need a social safety net. Think of the big universal systems – child care, health care – they cost money. Who is paying the costs? We would be raising taxes on very wealthy people and corporations, which is threatening to people as it reduces social inequality in ways that manipulate the rest of us: exploitation. They have an interest in maintaining the illusion that we can get by without maintaining a social safety net. There is this belief that goes along with supporting the DIY model that not having a social safety net makes us safer because we are likely to make better choices without that safety net.

RG: Really?

JC: Yes, this is the idea of neoliberalism economically. It originated in Austria in the 1930s, then was imported to the U.S. for manufacturers to use to push back against New Deal policies. They were imported to the U.S. and used to train economists like Milton Friedman, who then went on to shape policy for decades.

RG: So does this DIY model contribute to the way we value care and why women are expected to make up the difference? 

JC: Part of this gets back to the DIY model. If we don’t have a social safety net like universal child care and universal health care, we still need those kinds of care. Within this kind of system, care work is too intensive to be profitable. This quickly becomes unsustainable, which means that it’s not ever going to work within our profit-based economic system, without high levels of government investment, charging high costs to consumers, or exploiting people and paying too little for their work.

We have pushed the labor-intensive work disproportionately onto women. You can see that in industries like child care, home health care, services, retail and house cleaning. And we push this onto people who are highly vulnerable: women, prisoners and immigrants. We have an interest in this DIY model: the more we create conditions where people are forced to take the job reinforces the perception that this job must be less valuable.

Women hold 70 percent of the lowest wage jobs. The jobs held by women get further devalued over time. We treat care work as the moral or emotional benefit that must make up for what is not paid. So, you have this system where women are earning far less than men do.

RG: One framework you discuss in the book is that low-income women are unable to say no as they need the work, especially those in caregiving roles, so they say yes, even to situations that may be untenable to them. 

JC: Yes, we see this especially for low-income women, disproportionately women of color, who have nowhere to turn for support. It is a two-way trap. I give the example of a woman named Patricia in the book. She’s a low-income Black mother who has a number of young children, also working a full-time job. She is carrying the burden on that front. She decides to cut back to working four days instead of five. Once her extended family finds out she has the day off, she winds up driving folks to the grocery store and doctors’ appointments. She wants to find a way to say no, but says “I’m their only hope.”

We have decimated communities so they have so few resources to go around. They know the people they love have nowhere else to turn. Patricia worries, ‘what if I need help one day?’ She ended up divorcing her partner, had five young kids at home, including newborn twins, and when she was home recovering from a c-section, she ended up needing that support from her network. She was glad she had not pushed them away at that moment and opted instead to help the other people around her as well.

RG: You have an entire chapter devoted to this concept of “Good Choices Won’t Save Us.” I know that ties into the neoliberalism you mentioned earlier, but let’s unpack that further. Is the idea that if people made the right choices, they’d never have a need for a social safety net?

JC: Yes, exactly. This gets back to the idea of the Neoliberal myth of the DIY society. Neoliberal economic theory states that societies are better off without a social safety net because if people don’t have a net to protect them from risk, they will be less likely to engage in risky behavior. The less protection you have, the better choice you make. This has been fully debunked – a social safety net does protect people.

People are told, if you just make good choices, you will be fine: marriage, college, a STEM education, waiting to have kids. The appeal of that kind of mythology makes sense. In such a precarious world, it feels good to have a sense of agency. The problem is that correlation is not causation. The model that we have is based on the people who are able to make good choices. If someone is able to get married, buy a house, go to college and get a degree in a STEM field, they may have better outcomes but it most likely has to do with the fact that they had the privilege to make the decisions in the first place. It’s not that choices don’t matter, but we have to be cognizant of the level of privilege to make those choices that we equate with the path to success.

RG: What about childbirth? That’s a pretty binary viewpoint. Plenty of people undergo all the risks involving gestating and birthing children, and have little control over those outcomes. 

JC: This is why this kind of model deeply ignores that there are risks that good choices can’t manage. Whether it’s childbirth or environmental risks with climate change, there are plenty of risks we can’t manage as individuals. This kind of messaging runs the risk of gaslighting people. They should be able to figure out what the choices are and how to protect themselves from risk.

We see this with mothers and adverse outcomes in childbirth and child rearing. As if there is a right choice to make, and it’s your fault if you didn’t figure it out and make it.

RG: Let’s talk about the sexism jokes. Your book explains that some men rely on humor to cover their own misogynistic tendencies, and you’ve posited that such humor actually makes things worse. Why is that?

JC: These were two pieces that were surprising to me. When I talked to men about the inequalities in their lives, they were quick to write it off as a joke. Even when they were making choices that looked deeply egalitarian, it was treated with a level of humor and a lack of seriousness.

I did a lot of reading and research on gender and sexism in the context of humor. Couching sexism in humor makes it more poisonous, because it becomes more palatable to men who can buy into the ideas without thinking of themselves as bad people. It also makes it harder for the women to push back. They’re told: ‘Stop being a nag. Can’t you lighten up?’

Sexist humor seems benign, though I would argue it can be deeply damaging. It is harder for women to push back in their context of the relationship and broader society they’re part of.

RG: Can you give an example?

JC: Andrew Tate is a former Mixed Martial Arts fighter turned YouTuber who is banned from a number of different public platforms for his misognystic messaging, like ‘Women should be men’s property in marriage.’ One of the problems with that is that if he is able to write it off as a joke, it makes it harder for those who have been harmed by that rhetoric. It gives men an easier way to buy into the softer ideas by saying ‘at least I don’t believe the extreme version of it.’

RG: My favorite chapter in your book is the one that concentrates on the Supermom Myth. Why do you think this myth persists, even as so much research and general wisdom seems to contradict that idea that women should be doing it all?

JC: We tell women in our society that they are the best protectors for children. If all else fails, it is their responsibility to make sure children are safe. In a society with a lot of risk, there’s a lot to protect them from.

This kind of messaging—where women are supposed to view motherhood as the top protector from the threats of the world—is that it primes them for fearmongering. It can persuade women that they need to go above and beyond. Some are cloaked in religious messaging like Critical Race Theory, or transgender kids and public schooling, or similar fear mongering along those lines.

It can take more secular forms too, like the fear of downward mobility; the idea that if you don’t get into the right college your life will be a disaster, or if you don’t have that investment banking job, your life will be ruined.

These fears can lead mothers to sacrifice themselves. Even if they have the resources for full-time child care, these fears can lead them to decide to stay home full time, believing that is the way to protect the child.

RG: But why are mothers the ones to shoulder this burden?

JC: We have these twisted ideas about biology because women have historically done that work, as opposed to recognizing the socialization influences. For example, girls are trained to be mothers from the time they can hold a baby doll. All the evidence suggests that young girls are pushed into these responsibilities at a young level.

With early socialization, these roles get more ingrained and it becomes easier for women to do that work. In the Supermom Myth, if moms have the most experience managing the responsibility, it can feel threatening if dad isn’t doing it as well. One of the saddest things we found about the pandemic research was the way angry dads were exacerbating the situations at home.

We did a big national survey in September 2020, and asked how often are you yelling at your kids? For college-educated white fathers, the numbers were off the chart. Those are the dads that were able to work remotely during the pandemic. In couples where both parents could work remotely part of the time, dads didn’t have the experience of working for pay while caring for children, which led to high levels of frustration. In one example from the book, on the days a dad was home he was angry, yelling at the kids. He didn’t have that kind of experience to navigate the challenges, so the mom was deeply worried and took on all the child care herself.

RG: When people read this book, and as you lay out all the concerns for the way we structure society so that an undue burden falls on women to act as the social safety net, what’s your takeaway?

JC: We have managed to maintain this illusion of a DIY society by pushing the risk and responsibilities onto women. Some women, often more privileged women, are able to push that risk onto underprivileged women. But the engineers and profiteers of this system have managed to persuade enough of us that the system works, which makes it incredibly hard to create the safety net that we need and deserve.

People are inclined to secure the resources to protect their own families even if it comes at the expense of others. We need to be up front about how a better social safety net could help to improve all of our lives – even as it reduces some of the inequalities between us.

My hope is that by understanding this system, it can help people see where this DIY model comes from and how it’s hurting all of us, especially women. We need to demand a system that can work better for everyone, and reject some of the myths that tend to delude and divide us.

“I accepted it, because I didn’t know any better,” said Tieu, who didn’t find encouragement from her own Vietnamese family either. “My father was like, ‘Oh, I’m so surprised that they selected you to be the principal.’ ”

A decade later, Tieu has not only been an assistant principal and principal, she’s now in charge of student support services for the Houston Independent School District — the eighth-largest school system in the U.S. But as an Asian woman and a single mother, she still feels pressure to prove herself in a male-dominated field.

“I spend double the time to make sure that everything I produce is 100% — nothing less,” she said.

The comment about Tieu’s height — and job prospects — is among the anecdotes district and state leaders shared as part of a first-of-its-kind of women serving in high-level school positions. Conducted by , a 300-member national network, the results show that despite ascending to senior roles in school systems and state departments, the vast majority of female leaders experience bias and think often about quitting. Over 80% of the 110 women who responded, from 27 states, said they feel they have to watch how they dress, speak and act because they are in the spotlight as senior leaders.

“I have found myself in high-powered meetings where men in leadership roles do not even look at me, but instead address my male colleagues,” said AngĂ©lica Infante-Green, Rhode Island education commissioner and a Women Leading Ed board member. “In a world where traditional notions of leadership have been predominantly shaped by men, there exists a profound need for diversity in representation.”

The survey, one expert said, comes at a time when districts could benefit from strengths many women bring to the table.

“Women who come up through this pipeline have often been elementary school principals and that sometimes precludes them from being selected as superintendents,” said Rachel White, a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, assistant professor. She launched , a research center, last summer to improve data collection on school system leaders. It’s common, she said, for school boards to view high school principals, who are , as more authoritarian or to prefer someone with a background in finance. “The type of leadership we need right now around family and student engagement and curriculum and instruction — elementary school principals really get that right.” 

But many women leaders say they face a double standard. 

“When a man in leadership takes time to coach his child’s sports team, he is applauded,” Infante-Green said. “If I choose to attend my daughter’s dance recital over a meeting, I am judged much differently.”

One leader quoted in the report said she was told to wear a skirt instead of pants to a presentation so she didn’t “come off as intimidating.” , Hispanic and Asian-American women were even more likely to feel pressure related to their behavior — 55%, compared with 36% for white women. One Black leader’s colleagues said the way she greeted students with “What’s up” made them uncomfortable because she was “speaking Ebonics.”

Tieu, in Houston, said students are often surprised to see a minority woman, especially an Asian woman, in leadership. 

“I want to show these young ladies that there’s nothing wrong with having aspirations,” she said. “There are going to be moments in time when you have to overcome barriers, but be smart and learn from it.”

The survey results build on the conducted by ILO Group, a women-owned firm focused on education policy and leadership. Nationally, over 20% of the nation’s 500 largest school districts saw turnover at the top, according to the 2023 results. Among women, the rate was slightly higher — 26%.

The most recent analysis also showed that even with a modest increase in the number appointed to superintendent positions, women still represent less than a third of those leading school districts. Women, however, make up 80% of the teacher workforce and more than half of school principals. 

Julia Rafal-Baer, CEO of Women Leading Ed and ILO, called it a “glass cliff,” and said when women reach higher ranks, they“nearly universally experience bias that impacts their ability to do their job, how they feel about their work and their overall well-being.”

Sixty percent of women leaders said they think about quitting due to stress, and of those, three-quarters said they contemplate leaving on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

Loren Widmer, director of student services for the Affton School District, outside St. Louis, left a neighboring system after unsuccessful efforts to advance into administration.

“I really felt like the only potential way to move ahead in that district was to be part of the good old boys club,” she said. “If you didn’t go to school there, play on the football team and come up through the ranks, there was no chance that you would progress.”

That became clear to her in 2017 when she was in line for an assistant principal job. The district offered her a 9 a.m. interview on a Friday, the same morning she was scheduled to have a C-section. She asked for an alternative time — even a virtual interview at noon the same day of her son’s birth — but the official turned her down. The position later went to a man.

‘Among all these men’

The new survey follows a that Rafal-Baer initiated on LinkedIn, asking women leaders to share some of the worst comments they’ve heard along their “professional journey.” Some of the nation’s top education leaders weighed in.

“A 
 colleague said (in front of the others), ‘You must be really proud to be the only woman among all these men,’ and then squeezed my shoulder a little longer than anyone needed,“ recalled Carolyne Quintana, a deputy chancellor for the New York City schools.

Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress, shared a comment she heard as a new mom. 

“An older male colleague bitterly complained he wished he’d gotten a three-month vacation after I got back from a horrible, miserable, painful maternity leave,” she wrote. 

And Daylene Long, CEO of a STEM education company, posted that someone told her, “Being competitive is not an attractive trait in a woman.”

‘You don’t have to choose’

But some leaders also see signs of progress. 

In Affton, Widmer’s district, half of the top-level staff and four of the five principals are women. She thinks the support women feel contributes to the district’s stability. 

“You don’t have to choose between staying home with your sick kids or leading a department,” Widmer said. “You can do both.”

And in the early months of the pandemic, Infante-Green participated in daily with then-Gov. Gina Raimondo and Dr. Nicole Alexander-Scott, the former state health director. A mother even sent the commissioner a card with Superwoman on it as a thank you for inspiring her daughter. 

“In that moment, it dawned on me that our presence together at those news conferences was more than just symbolic; it was a powerful statement of solidarity and resilience,” she said. “It sent a positive message that in Rhode Island, leadership knows no gender boundaries.”

Today, women occupy executive positions in business, government and academia. A woman has run for president and another serves as vice president. Yet, of the nation’s 500 largest school districts are led by women, despite the fact that the teaching workforce is overwhelmingly female. Women continue to be passed over for leadership roles in education based on “questions about family responsibilities, stability and emotionality,” just as the Sarasota County School Board did to Marie Izquierdo nearly three years ago. This doesn’t just hurt women aspiring to leadership positions — it’s depleting the educator pipeline, increasing turnover and, in turn, negatively impacting students and their families.

In addition to the opportunity gap, there is a significant wage gap. According to the, the average female superintendent earns roughly $20,000 to $30,000 less than her male counterparts. When, both elected and appointed, women make 12% less than men. Though 73% of elected superintendents are women, they make than their male counterparts.

Statistics like these no longer surprise me, and they won’t come as a surprise to the thousands of women aspiring to leadership roles in education. That is why I founded, a network designed to support and promote female education leadership. It’s also why Women Leading Ed , which synthesizes years of public- and private-sector workplace research and makes the case for five strategies to address barriers that have long kept women from rising to executive positions. 

Districts and states serious about hiring more women for leadership roles must: 

1. Create and promote support systems to prepare women for leadership: This means promoting sponsorship over mentorship. Sponsors take a hands-on role in managing career moves and promoting executives as potential CEOs; men tend to have twice as many sponsors as women. They also provide on-the-job coaching to female superintendents, using “coaching trees” to define clear paths to the executive suite and creating opportunities for building networks.
   
2. Rebalance the hiring process by requiring and promoting best practices: Districts and states must commit to creating finalist pools that include multiple women and work with those conducting searches to ensure a diverse applicant group by, among other things, standardizing the hiring process as much as possible and committing to bias training to ensure questions and processes are the same for everyone. Those doing the hiring and promoting must be aware of their biases and prioritize diversity.
   
3. Provide family and well-being supports: This means providing high-quality benefits, such as flexibility in offering both hybrid and remote work options, parental leave and time off for child care and elder care.
   
4. Set public goals for female leadership and increase transparency: States and districts should set voluntary targets for gender diversity on school boards and in senior management. States should publicly recognize districts that show exemplary progress toward gender diversity, support development of local plans for improvement and publish externally models that other districts can follow.
   
5. Ensure financial fairness: This means conducting pay equity audits, including salary ranges in job postings and developing a self-assessment pay calculator — an easy-to-use statistical tool that helps employees check whether a district provides equal pay for equal work between women and men. Canada, Israel, Portugal, France and Switzerland have all developed models for publicly available calculators that help women assess their gender wage gaps.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a  wave of superintendents joined the Great Resignation, opening hundreds of top district jobs. It was a chance to reset the balance and make the superintendency look more like the nation’s classrooms. But that’s not what happened. In fact, nearly half of the 500 largest school districts in the country conducted between March 2020 and March 2022, and men were selected for the job more often than women. In fact, men were chosen to replace both male and female outgoing superintendents 70% of the time.A post-pandemic opportunity was missed, and it is a reason to push harder. The country has made significant advances in gender equality since the days of The Superintendent’s Wife, but there is still a long way to go. Everything on the Women Leading Ed list is eminently do-able. The report offers a detailed roadmap to a better, fairer and more equitable future for women educators and American education, and school boards everywhere should take heed. If they do, some aspiring Ph.D. student, years from now, might write a paper on The Role of the Superintendent’s Husband. Then we’ll know we’ve made real progress.