Gender and headship in the twenty-first century

mainly confined to the secondary sector, perhaps because the primary sector is
numerically so dominated by women.

Table 21: How do you encourage all teachers to develop their careers?

In earlier reviews of women in educational leadership and management one of the
barriers to progress that was identified was that men might be favoured for more
informal career development and women passed over or stereotyped into pastoral
roles. Ruijs (1993) comments on the informal male networks and resulting
development opportunities that are more likely to benefit young male teachers in
school:

Where women have limited access to this type of informal system, they are
then less likely to have informal training opportunities such as committee
work, quasi-administrative duties and temporary management
assignments.... This puts female applicants at a disadvantage when

competing for management positions against men who have had such
opportunities. (p. 574)

It is therefore good to see that there is more overt recognition of informal
development opportunities than there was in the 1990s and that in some cases
heads are specifically directing such opportunities to women.

Table 22: How do you encourage female teachers in your school to develop
their careers? 2004

Table 22 indicates some differences between secondary and primary schools,
particularly in relation to women only courses. The issue of the encouragement of
women teachers is treated slightly differently in primary and secondary schools. The
majority of the comments from primary heads related to the fact that they were either
an all women staff, or mainly women - as a result, the question of specific
encouragement for women was not always relevant. However, there were still
examples of primary heads encouraging women who might lack confidence. One
woman primary head said: 'I nag them and tell them how talented they are! But I

40

<<   <   37   38   39   40   41   42   43   >   >>