Balancing the load: Gendered family roles and women's pathways to secondary school leadership
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: • Introduced the SEEP model to map gendered barriers to leadership. • Among participants, domestic duties remained primarily women’s responsibility despite senior professional roles. • Economic access to support services shaped leadership opportunities. • Leadership demands conflicted with societal ideals of motherhood. • Findings suggest systemic change is needed to support leaders with caregiving roles. • Strategic career timing around family needs extended women’s leadership pathways compared to make counterparts. School education in Australia has become increasingly dominated by women. Despite women comprising over 75 % of secondary teachers in Australia, they hold fewer than 40 % of secondary school principal positions. This interpretative phenomenological study investigates how gendered family role expectations influence women's progression to educational leadership in Western Australian secondary schools. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, this study examined lived experiences of 22 female secondary school principals across Western Australia's government ( n = 10) and independent ( n = 12) sectors. Data were analysed using thematic analysis within a feminist theoretical framework. Gendered family expectations emerged as a significant and enduring barrier to women's educational leadership advancement. All participants with children maintained primary responsibility for family care despite holding senior professional roles, reflecting the 'maternal wall' and 'motherhood penalty' even in feminized sectors. Significant sector differences existed: independent principals' higher salaries enabled paid domestic services while government principals relied on extended family networks. Strategic career timing around family needs extended women's leadership pathways compared to male counterparts. The study introduces the SEEP model (Social, Environmental, Economic, Political) as an analytical framework for understanding how family-related barriers operate across micro, meso, and macro levels. The SEEP model extends current understanding of gendered leadership barriers by providing a lens that highlights how societal expectations are reproduced and sustained through interconnected systems and structures. Individual solutions cannot address structural inequalities rooted in gendered family expectations. Achieving gender equity in educational leadership requires coordinated transformation across policy, organizational, and cultural domains, including challenging the 'ideal worker' paradigm and normalizing shared family responsibilities. Findings have implications for other feminized professions facing similar leadership gender gaps.
Author: Leanne Russell
Institution: Curtin University
Language: English
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,470
OpenAlex ID: W4414677138