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Gender bias continues to blight society, not least when it comes to school leadership. Gerald Haigh examines the problems

If you’re teacher with leadership aspirations than you probably already know that one useful attribute is to be a man. The figures bear repetition – women make up 68 per cent of secondary teachers but only 36 per cent of secondary heads.

Gender bias in workplace recruitment has its roots in the fact that, like just about everything else, much of working life, historically, has been run by men. As a consequence, even balanced appointment panels can, consciously or not, look for management qualities that are perceived as masculine.

Apply this to the selection of school leaders, and what women are up against is a pernicious belief often hidden, sometimes openly expressed, that men are better than women at maintaining good discipline. Kate Chhatwal, chief programme officer at charity Future Leaders, makes the point in a blog on their website entitled ‘We need a big strong man to sort out student behaviour’ – and other myths.

She writes: “Schools across the country face the challenge of student behaviour on a daily basis. Yet we still hold on to old-fashioned preconceptions of who can manage the problems in our schools.”

In this regard, she points out that the composition of the government’s new behaviour expert group, announced in September, hardly sends a reassuring message.

“The panel includes no serving female heads. It also focuses on London schools, with the honourable exception of John Tomsett, headteacher of Huntington School in York.”

Reading the blog, and particularly the “strong man” references, took me back to the late 1980s, when Margaret Maden (now professor and honorary Norham fellow at Oxford University’s Department of Education) was chief education officer of Warwickshire, where I was then a head.

A decidedly metropolitan figure – a successful and high-profile London head, then a senior officer in the Inner London Education Authority – Ms Maden seemed to bring just the kind of wake-up that a largely rural county needed.

Always approachable, she had some good stories, many of which centred around what it was like to climb the career ladder as a woman (even as CEO she was often taken for a secretary).

She told me, for example, of being interviewed for a deputy headship, in the early 1970s, only to be informed by the male head that although she was eminently qualified, he couldn’t appoint her because: “For this post, I need the strength of a man.”

But that was then. If, like me, you have worked in a number of schools and visited dozens more right up to the present day, the idea that a woman is less capable of exercising discipline seems almost laughable, a throwback to a bygone age.

And yet, that “strength of a man” thing still lurks beneath the surface, causing many ripples and the some actual waves. It is actually astonishing how recently overtly macho behaviour control was taken for granted in our schools.

In their 2000 study Feminism and the Classroom Teacher: Research, praxis, pedagogy, Amanda Coffey and Sara Delamont quote numerous research studies which show clearly that, at least through the 1980s and 1990s, masculinity held sway in some schools to the point where pupils associated “discipline” with physical intimidation.

In an example from 1996: “Male teachers tend to ‘look after women teachers’, and even where this is not meant to be intimidating or undermining, the result is often much the same.”

To today’s teachers, 1996, even 2000, may seem an age away, but to many decision-makers, it’s like yesterday, and the attitudes survive. In another article, in the New Statesman, Ms Chhatwal tells of the female candidate who made it to the final two, but was rejected, “because the governing body wanted a man who could “deal better with the local ex-mining community”.

And in Where are all the female headteachers?, a Guardian article from February 2015, another would be head reported: “In my own experience of applying for a headteacher role, governors overtly believed that a man would be a better because he would be tougher and more respected by students.”

So what’s to be done? Properly focused governor training for sure. Appointing a head is arguably the most important task for a governing body. It doesn’t come round very often, though, and it is easily possible that a candidate will be shortlisted and interviewed by governors few or none of whom have appointed a head before. It is vital that panel members are carefully and professionally prepared, and also advised during the actual process.

Existing school leaders, for their part, have a clear duty to ensure that all staff are coached and brought on a gender-neutral environment. Senior women have an obvious role to play here. Then, women teachers themselves need to look for opportunities to network with and learn from others.

Back in the day, Margaret Maden ran numerous “Women into leadership” sessions. She was a pioneer, but now there are many such opportunities locally and nationally. Seek them out and make the most of them.

  • Gerald Haigh was a teacher in primary, secondary and special schools for 30 years, 11 of them in headship. You can find him on Twitter @geraldhaigh1

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