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In our case study, we explored the perceptions of female-led and male-led educational leadership cohorts mentoring teacher candidates (mostly female) under faculty supervision. The study compares the educational leadership candidates’ cohort experiences and the teacher candidates’ perception of leadership development of individual students and as part of a group. Student teacher candidates engaged in generative mentoring relationships with educational leadership candidates by applying feedback from previous seminars and then revising their experiences in subsequent sessions. Our preliminary findings suggested that the structure of the seminars and collaborative partnerships contributed to student teachers’ understanding and application of pedagogical content knowledge, while critique occurred in facilitated sessions and discussions.

This paper reports on results of a systematic research synthesis of 25 studies on women in educational leadership and management in Zimbabwe. The aim of this systematic review of research was to report conclusions drawn from a synthesis of findings from studies of gender and educational leadership in Zimbabwe.

The review used systematic methods to identify 25 research studies that examined women leading schools in Zimbabwe. Research synthesis methods used for qualitative research studies were employed in order to identify three broad themes and related subthemes across the studies.

The review identified three themes: (1) barriers to women gaining access to management positions, (2) female ways of leading, (3) context challenges for women leaders. Both barriers to gaining positions and context challenges faced in enactment of the leadership role are described. These consist of an intertwined web of personal, institutional and cultural challenges. Women's ways of leading were characterized as collegial, collaborative and caring.

Three implications are identified. First is a need for better statistical information on gender representation in Zimbabwe and other African countries. Second is a need to design and implement training, mentoring and networking support programs for female leaders in Zimbabwe. Finally, the authors recommend that future research move toward the use of mixed methods research designs capable of achieving complementary research goals of gaining a broad perspective on the effects of female leadership and in-depth understanding of how those are achieved.

Empirical studies of female leadership is especially urgent in Africa where particular features embedded in the cultural context shape female access to leadership role and attitude towards efforts of women to lead.

This paper seeks to set the stage for the exploration of female leadership in educational systems within developing countries by reviewing the current research on women in educational administration within developing countries and suggesting future directions for further research on this subject in non‐western countries.

The paper is based partially on a systematic review of 13 English‐language papers that have been published in peer‐reviewed journals in educational administration, gender studies in education, and comparative education.

The review points to particular barriers to women's career advancement in educational systems within developing countries (e.g. strong family obligations, low levels of girl education, majority of men in teaching positions), unique career experiences (e.g. the important role of the father), and to the adoption of “androgynous” leadership style by the few women administrators in these countries.

Future directions for further exploration of this area of study are suggested (e.g. adopting a different theoretical view, the policy influences).

The paper is an initial attempt to accumulate knowledge about the life and work of women administrators and educators in developing countries, an issue that has received marginalized attention in the extended research on gender and educational administration. Likewise, the paper provides researchers with suggestions for new empirical directions of high importance to the understanding of women administrators' lives and work in different cultural settings.

There is a meager body of research addressing the role educational leadership preparation programs in colleges and universities play in preparing women leaders. Also educational leadership preparation research has yet to explore ways in which mentorship provides additional capital for female graduate students. This study seeks to understand the challenges facing, and the opportunities available to, female graduate students in educational leadership departments.

The study used qualitative methods to explore the constructs of educational leadership preparation and mentorship of female graduate students. Qualitative methods, specifically a questionnaire and a collaborative focus group, were informed by the work of feminist theory and were used to explore participants' experiences and perceptions with the larger purpose of understanding the implications of their experiences for the development of strategies and programs intended to support female graduate students.

The following themes emerged from the participants' stories: constraints within the organizational culture, personal and familial sacrifice, struggles with identity, questioning self, and experiences with mentoring.

The findings have important implications for the roles university leadership preparation program structures might play in supporting female graduate students and their career success. The findings also offer recommendations for the development of mentoring programs for female graduate students.

Currently, there is an exceptional lack of research documenting the lived experiences of female doctoral students, particularly research that can be used to inform policy and program development. To that end, the qualitative study described in this paper helps in understanding the challenges facing, and the opportunities available to, female graduate students in educational leadership departments as well as in understanding the implications of such experiences for the development of strategies and programs intended to support female graduate students.

The purpose of this paper is to concentrate on investigating the role of gender on educational leadership in the context of two differing cultures. The focus will be on exploring whether gender appears to impact on the leadership roles in education by examining the extent of female participation in leadership across educational levels in Greece and the UK, highlighting differences and similarities between them.

This paper examines secondary data on a number of issues, like the proportion of women in lower and higher ranking teaching posts across education sectors. Such data are retrieved from official national and international statistics, such as UNESCO, Eurostat, the Office of National Statistics UK and the Higher Education Statistics Agency, UK, as well as previous academic studies.

The results of the analysis reveal that in both countries, fewer women than men reach top rank positions in education, particularly in secondary and higher education.

The investigation will rely on the use of secondary data collected from a number of diverse national and international sources as well as from existing literature. The choice of secondary data is judged to bae appropriate on the basis of this paper and its research aim. Examination of women's presence across educational sectors in the two selected countries required obtaining information about actual and not representative, overall numbers or percentages of women in educational posts. Such information can only be positively retrieved by national or international, official statistics, while even these, the investigation revealed, can show variations between them.

The paper should raise awareness to women's under‐representation in leadership positions in education, especially at the secondary and the tertiary education levels.

Leadership has been acknowledged as a decisive component in education namely due to the improvements it brings in many areas. The complexity and diversity surrounding leadership has turned attention to the effect of a number of factors on the practice of leadership educational context, such as gender and culture. Therefore, the present paper concentrates on an exploration of the effect of gender in leadership in education. Also, the cross‐cultural investigation between Greece and the UK, allows for constructive comparisons to take place where appropriate.

This chapter provides discursive space for story-telling to provide narrative reflection on the experiences associated with struggles and advantages attributed to advancing non-traditional perspectives into practice. I utilize an auto-ethnography (L. Anderson (2006). Analytical autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(4), 373–395; C. Ellis & A. P. Bochner (2000). Auto-ethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: Researcher as subject. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 733–768). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage; L. Richardson (2000). Writing. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 923–948). London: Sage) to detail my lived experiences as a scholar who has encountered the outsider-within status in academe (Collins, P. H. (2002). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Routledge.). I detail my dual role as a social agent and as an African-American female scholar and the complexities of teaching social justice while promoting the need for activism of social justice and equity in our U.S. schools. Therefore, this study amplifies silenced voices regarding challenges for African-American female scholars engaged in transformative pedagogy in academe. I will utilize a Critical Race Theory lens to examine the racialized experiences that persist for African-American faculty seeking to advance transformational perspectives in academe, and thus through teaching, helping students to realize inequities in K-12 classroom settings (Grant, C. (2012). Advancing our legacy: A Black feminist perspective on the significance of mentoring for African-American women in educational leadership. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 25(1), 101–117.).

This paper aims to present some of the persistent gender issues that cause inequities in teachers' professional development and keep women away from reaching higher levels of educational administration, although they are the majority of teaching personnel. The interest seeks to focus on the under‐representation of female teachers in leadership positions and to argue on the barriers which stall female advancement and exclude women from the main “leadership pipeline”. The basic rationale is that women's role is crucial in order to face the new demands of school in a dramatically changing society carrying out a different style of leadership.

The original study, conducted in 2009, examined in depth the professional experiences of 20 male and 20 female primary principals from schools located in different districts of the Greek continent. Open‐ended and semi‐structured interviews were used to guide the original research. Similar to Skrla's study, all participants were provided with opportunities to reflect on their experiences as primary school leaders and questions where they talk openly about them. Two research instruments were designed to examine the leadership attitudes of both women and men primary school principals. The first was a demographic questionnaire. The second method of investigation was an in‐depth interview with a smaller group selected on the basis of their responses to the questionnaire. In the interviews participants were asked 14 questions concerning the above central themes and a further set of questions that appertained specifically to their role both at home and at school. The interviews were subsequently transcribed and analyzed according to Giorgi's method.

The literature points to a great number of factors which may influence women to remain in the classroom situation rather than seek promotion but few of these were reported in the data as being of powerful influence. However, several factors were identified as being very important to women: women usually became teachers because they liked working with children and to lose contact with this group was seen as a strong disincentive to seeking promotion; many women are very attracted to the social aspects of their work and would not choose to place themselves in a work situation where they would be unhappy; women's promotional chances are usually diminished by three main extrinsic factors: many have a break in service and may experience difficulty in gaining re‐entry, many women work either part‐time or have difficulty in gaining scale post status and as a result do not have the necessary experience to gain promotion, and family commitments sometimes make it difficult, and supply teachers are not generally eligible for this training. Furthermore, subordinates tend to view females in senior positions as emotional, sensitive and indecisive when they are facing difficult situations, and finally, women still face stereotypes concerning their management abilities, with the most important being the imposition of themselves.

The present paper reviews literature on gender and leadership and recent quantitative data presenting the proportion of women and men holding leadership positions in primary education in Greece.

This appreciative inquiry study frames and reflects upon other ways of knowing: beliefs, values, and experiences of identity, diversity, and gender as lived in the Arab world and specifically in the United Arab Emirates. It emphasizes the paradigms informing ways of leading for western expatriate females and Middle East gulf region national females in leadership positions. Western ideology related to diversity, gender, and leadership are all reflected in ways of leading in the global society that is the United Arab Emirates but in some ways are contrary to Islamic notions of women as leaders in the Gulf region causing educational leadership female expatriates and nationals to shift paradigms and revisit their identity, gender, feminist beliefs, and ways of knowing leadership working in a global society.

The purpose of the paper is to discuss and examine the development of frameworks and models to guide future research into studies of women's paths to educational leadership worldwide.

A grounded theory approach to the development of a model of the factors and their interaction that determine the path to educational leadership for women is adopted, drawing on existing research for world‐wide studies.

Past studies in this field have focused on identifying barriers and opportunities that are gender sensitive. With an increasing interest in developing educational preparation programs that are context and gender specific, there is a need to provide research frameworks to allow for meaningful comparisons between contexts to identify commonalities and differences, and for models to predict the likely outcomes of interventions in current procedures for drawing women into educational leadership. The model presented in the paper allows for the identification of those factors in any given context that influence the success of women aspiring to leadership.

Understanding the culturally determined interaction of social and institutional factors that create unique contexts for career building is a prerequisite of developing leadership preparation for women designed to increase their successful entry into, and practice of, school leadership and to rectify their under‐representation in this field worldwide.

Conceptualizing educational leadership for women at an international level is a newly emerging theme that this paper hopes to advance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore two dimensions of leadership practices (i.e. teaching and learning and sources of power) used by two exemplary principals in mainland China against a background of education reform and to identify how broader contextual factors have shaped these two dimensions of their leadership.

An exploratory case study was used that drew upon semi‐structured interviews, observations and document analysis. Interviews were conducted with two principals, six teachers from each of the two schools and a superintendent who was the supervisor of the two principals.

The findings reveal that there are some common elements in both of the leaders' practices but also some subtle differences. Both leaders emphasise teaching and learning. One sees herself as curriculum expert; the other delegate teaching responsibilities. While both uses a top down approach, one principal uses an adversarial approach and the other a more facilitative approach.

The study used a small sample size. It explored the leaders' practices in the light of broader contextual factors rather than personal factors or gender‐based factors

Given the limited empirical research conducted on female principals in mainland China, this qualitative study provides insights into two dimensions of leadership used by two exemplary principals and explains their practices in the light of critical contextual factors such as contemporary and traditional Chinese culture and the school's organisational context.