Research Statement: Dr. Noëlle Jacquelin

My life, my work, and my research have always been dedicated to the realization of a democratic society in which all people are valued. The tenets of inclusivity, diversity, and equity have guided me throughout the past twenty-six years of my career. They have also tremendously shaped who I am as a parent, as an educator, and as a person.

When I was twenty-seven, I decided to become a foster parent through the state’s Division of Youth and Family Services program. However, I knew from a much younger age that I would be an adoptive parent. I am now both an adoptive and a biological parent; many have helped along the way.

Foster and state adoption is both a social and political issue.

Currently, there are approximately 500,000 children in foster care. Each year, far too many children transition into “adulthood” when they age out at eighteen years old without the typical growing-up experiences that teach self-sufficiency skills and without the family supports and community networks that help to make them successful. These young people experience very poor outcomes at a much higher rate than the general population:

• More than one in five will become homeless after age 18; • Only 58 percent will graduate high school by age 19 (compared to 87 percent of all 19 year olds); • 71 percent of young women are pregnant by 21, facing higher rates of unemployment, criminal conviction, public assistance, and involvement in the child welfare system; • At the age of 24, only half are employed; • Fewer than 3 percent will earn a college degree by age 25 (compared to 28 percent of all 25 year olds); • One in four will be involved in the justice system within two years of leaving the foster care system; and, there are financial and political issues as well, including, • COST: “(From 2003-2013) over 300,000 youth have left foster care without the support needed to successfully transition from adolescence to adulthood. We estimate the cost of their less-than-average outcomes in academic achievement, too early pregnancy and involvement in the criminal justice system at $226 billion or just under a quarter of a trillion dollars.” -- ISSUE BRIEF: COST AVOIDANCE, The Business Case for Investing In Youth Aging Out of Foster Care, Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative.

According to the Los Angeles Times, "Demand for foster beds exceeds supply by more than 30% nationally. Forty percent of parents withdraw during their first year, and an additional 20% say they want out, national studies show. Those families that remain are often stuck in deep poverty themselves." Inside the foster care system: A bleak last stop for lost youths, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 28, 2015 http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-foster-overflow-20150301-story.html

When my children came home to me nearly twenty years ago, all of my training in education came sharply into focus. It became apparent that what was lacking was a support system (emotional, psychological, and educational). Thus, in 2002, my first dissertation research centered on: “Assessing and Addressing the Educational Needs of Children in Foster Care.” A great deal of time was spent engaged in comparative qualitative studies in both New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Dozens of interviews with foster children, aged out foster children, case workers, child care supervisors, and educators were conducted in 2001 and 2002.

Life, however, interfered with my research. Parenting can do that to a person. Although I was elevated to candidacy and reached the point of defense, I never defended in 2002. It was a sad realization, but I was far too busy to care much about it. Working with actual children who need you forces one to make choices…especially if one is a single mother.

During the period of 1997-2015, I became extremely interested in additional educational topics that touched upon politics as well. I authored an article entitled “New Jersey Charter Schools: Ripe as a Jersey Peach” and contributed to two editions of a book that is widely utilized in doctoral programs around the world, Ethical Educational Leadership in Turbulent Times (principal authors: Shapiro and Gross; Routledge Publishers). Additionally, intersectionality, gender roles in leadership, and emotional-social intelligence drew my attention. Neuroscience, a long held fascination, still consumes me. Studies of great leadership, brain research, and neural constructs steered me to my most current research, “Emotional-Social Intelligence, Leadership, and Gender in Contemporary New Jersey School Districts.” I am happy to say that after a decade and a half, I have successfully defended my research and now join the ranks of other prestigious scholars who have also done so.

The brain, particularly the frontal lobe and its role in self-regulation and its role in assisting in the ability to make inferences about others’ mental states and the modular capacity that underlies humans’ ability to engage in complex social interactions, drives me to continue to investigate. The age old question of nature versus nurture repeatedly surfaces in organizational theory. Can people in an organization, whether it be a family, a business, or a school system, behave only in the manner in which they have been genetically or behaviorally and/or culturally programmed or can they change their personal and professional paths (and neural pathways)? The field of affective neuroscience and genetic expression continues to provide some answers. According to some leading researchers in this field, experience and adaptation can overcome genetic dispositions for adult behavior (Davidson et al., 2000; Lee et al., 2009). Essentially, neural circuits and tendencies can, according to quantitative science, be rewired. If this is the case, as neuroscience suggests, emotional-social competencies create arousals that, over time, create different neural pathways at biological levels. Hence, educational leaders can potentially be better trained, even on the neural and physiological levels.

Interest in gender related injustice blossomed from social justice theory with particular goals to analyze social problems more fully. The notion that multiplicities play a role in inequality goes back to DuBois (1903) when he posited that the concepts of race and class, in addition to gender (what he deemed a “personal characteristic”), be considered in any discussion relating to the topic. These concepts open additional questions at play when examining relative inequalities. Crenshaw’s work shows that systems of oppression can converge to create complex forms of inequality that are different from singular categorizations of inequality. As Crenshaw and others point out, gender related disadvantage or exclusion can be based on multiple factors rather than just a single one. As Shields (2008) states, “The facts of our lives reveal that there is no single identity category that satisfactorily describes how we respond to our social environment or are responded to by others” (p. 304). The facts of the lives of many serving in New Jersey’s schools do the same.

The study of leadership and gender related injustice has roots in Max Weber and Georg Simmel’s theories from the early Twentieth Century (Collins, 2004). Class as a social construct was not viewed as such until the early to mid-Twentieth Century. This came about as a result of workers’ movements. Weber was concerned with understanding the complexities that status and power bring to Marx’s idea of class stratification (Cox, 1950). The realization of the understanding and application of Marx’s theories has proven somewhat elusive regarding social change. The concepts of class consciousness and social change were much more difficult to achieve than Marx thought, according to Weber. For example, some have found that “status group affiliation and differences in power create concerns that may override class issues” (Collins, 2000, p. 287). Group affiliation and power differentials sometimes result in different “life chances.” The socially conditioned emergence of different life chances has been defined as a form of exploitation (Giddens, 1973). While Marxist and Weberian notions of exploitation dealt primarily with exchanges of capital and production, other researchers are attempting to investigate how organizational structures themselves may impose harm on employees (Segre, 2010). Regardless of any formally bestowed rights, inequality may cause subconscious groupthink exclusionary practices. Furthermore, Simmel was concerned with social relationships. He found that if people lived in small, rural communities, their relational and social structures were “organic” and involved little choice. He believed that social structures and settings were strongly influenced by group membership. In his view, people in such structures will have overlapping work, schooling, and religious groups that result in social homogeneity. What Simmel coined as “rational” group membership prevails in more modern, urban social structures. In such settings, people tend to see themselves as individuals with freedom of choice. In Simmel’s scheme, however, “this freedom and individuality is offset by increasing levels of anomie and the blasé attitude” (Collins, 2000, p.8). From a pupil’s perspective, it is important to consider the classroom environment. From an employee or potential educational leader’s perspective, it is important to consider the work environment. The social interaction within a classroom, for example, sometimes defines children for their entire schooling experience. In a workplace, the same dynamic can also occur, legitimizing the status quo. It might well be important to an individual’s career path to have access to certain conversations, privileges, or events if one is to advance her career. In a sense, both of Simmel and Weber’s theories are essential when contemplating contemporary small and large New Jersey school districts and the potential and actual leaders’ professional trajectories.

While the goals of gender research are many—i.e., equitable pay, equal access to education, inclusive visions of citizenship—the main objective is to bring “awareness and capacity to the social justice industry in order to expand and deepen its interventions” (Crenshaw, 2012). The core elements of a gender-based approach have been articulated in the Beijing Platform for Action and in the outcome document from the Special Session of the General Assembly entitled "Women, 2000: Gender, Equality, Development and Peace for the Twenty-First Century.” The Beijing Declaration (2000) calls for governments to "intensify efforts to ensure equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all women and girls who face multiple barriers to their empowerment and advancement.” Certainly, it can be recognized that perceived professional classes and gender provide different experiences that influence an individual’s career path. Yet, one must go beyond these general categories in order to truly examine the many barriers women face in the workplace and to possibly develop and expand interventions.

Gender and leadership is an “area with many unanswered questions” (Smith, Matkin, & Fritz, 2004, p. 52). Oppression produces different opportunities for a person. This can lead to structural discrimination where the policies of a dominant gender or class group and the behaviors of individuals who implement them control the organization. Where such policies might be neutral in intent, there is a potentially harmful or differential effect on other gender and class groups. Unwitting prejudice and stereotyping can be detected in the processes, attitudes, and behaviors of those in control. This provides a systematic way in which social norms and practices perpetuate to advantage certain groups over others. Molloy et al., (2003) warn that lifting one aspect of oppression, emphasizing one aspect over another, creates the danger of hierarchy. As Ferree notes, “The understandings of all forms of inequality are mutually stretched and bent as they encounter each other” (2009). Potential causes of career oppression are dynamic—they are as animated and living as the individuals who experience them.

There are many realities in the lives of female school leaders. Some researchers have proposed that motherhood, the responsibility of combining care for offspring and work, creates yet another important intersection within the complex patterns of inequality and privilege (O’Hagan, 2010) that may vary according to individual circumstances. In contemporary society, many women are expected to devote significant effort to the development of both their children and their careers. Women are expected to “navigate the terrain between motherhood and paid work with little social support” (Cook, 2009, p.I). Numerous studies have demonstrated that the work/life interface has significant personal and organizational outcomes (Allis & O’Driscoll, 2008; Casper & Harris, 2008; Giardini & Kabst, 2008). Many families today are “nontraditional” with larger and larger percentages of children being reared by single parents over the last few decades. In a recent review of the work/life literature, Casper et al. (2007) found that married individuals comprised 83% of the sample population of the 225 studies published between 1983 and 2003 dealing with the work/life interface. People who do not belong to such a group, single mothers, for example, are largely unrepresented as they are less likely to be depicted in the literature. As the Sloan Foundation’s Christiansen and Gomery put it, “Two parent families now have three jobs but only two people to do them. Single parents who work for pay have an even more difficult task juggling their responsibilities at work and home” (Bailyn et al., 2001, p. 5). Regardless of individual opinion, statistics show that the family concept has clearly been redefined over the last few decades. Beck-Gernsheim (2002) argue that more inclusive and relevant studies that mirror the reality of contemporary social organizations are necessary in order to understand work experiences of contemporary family members. To date, analyses are limited due to a lack of this type of perspective.

There are consequences to using categories when describing certain phenomenon. McCall (2005) suggests three potential problems when using gender to categorize exclusively. These include: anticategorical complexity—which insists that categorizing the complexity of people is inevitably reductive and simplistic and in itself causes harm; intercategorical complexity—which accepts that it may be necessary to utilize existing multiple and changing categories of individuals to explore the flows of inequality; and intracategorical complexity—which accepts categorization but focuses on the experience of those who cross boundaries of categories. Lundy (2011) states, “the challenge is to investigate adequately and understand the effects of gender as moderated not only by individuals’ other characteristics, but also as mediated by the context within which they function.” This echoes Crenshaw who noted, “The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite—that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences” (Crenshaw, 1994, p.1242). Regarding limitations on career aspirations, social structures matter. If a person is female and single-parenting in a predominately “traditional” organizational structure, this can have a critical impact on her professional career path. Women’s experiences are often shaped by other identities in their lives. In the Twenty-First Century, female educational leaders embody many identities.

In many instances, female leaders do not fit the traditional mold of the “Ideal Worker.” Hence, the talents of many are potentially underutilized due to policy, scheduling, and practice issues. While the Feminist Movement brought about many positive and significant changes to the lives of women and the world, it also failed to bring about organizational change within employment situations that might need to better reflect the changing demographic of workers. Society has changed, but organizational structures largely have not. The culture of today’s educational institutions as places of employment often emphasizes twenty-four hour, seven days per week availability. This imposes new implications for the non-work aspects of peoples’ lives. The myth of the Ideal Worker is a concept of total devotion to career, the ability to alter schedules at the drop of a hat, the implicit understanding that work always comes first because someone else will care for other domestic issues at home: “The ideal-worker norm, framed around the traditional life patterns of men, excludes most mothers of childbearing age” (Williams, 2000, p. 2).

Since the 1950s, the sharpest workforce increase is among mothers of young children (Aguilar, 2012). Acker (2006) uses the term “class” to refer to “enduring and systematic differences in access to and control over resource for provisioning and survival” (p. 445). She and others note that there are still very distinct systems of class differences regarding gender and the work-life interface in many organizations. Interlocked practices and processes result in organizational inequality and the reproduction of inequalities. In contrast to McCall’s approach (2005) regarding the analysis of gender in relation to economic activity, Acker examined “the local, ongoing practical activities of organizing work that reproduce complex inequalities” (Acker, 2006, p.442). She analyzed organizations and gender regarding promotional opportunities, employment security, pay and monetary rewards, and pleasures in work and work relations. Not surprisingly, unequal pay was a clear finding. Interestingly, in an earlier study of Swedish banks, she also found that the branch office that was “most successful in distributing tasks and decision making was the one with women employees and a preexisting participatory ethos” (Acker, 2006, p. 443). Additionally, Galinsky et al. (2008) found in a national study of employers that “organizations where women make up over fifty percent of the employees are more likely to have a high level of flexibility (35%) than organizations where women are less than twenty-four percent of the workforce (12%)” (2008, p. 35). In these studies, the workplaces that had the most obvious transformational leadership practices were ones that were run by women.

Examining the concepts of the “Ideal Worker” and the “Work Life Balance” requires close examination of role identity and cultural assumptions. Male and female roles are often perpetuated in organizations based on long held beliefs. These concepts require one to really analyze life, family, and work as they truly exist today. Gender is not just an expression of biology but also a social structure but can be considered a “dynamic set of socially constructed relationships” (Emslie & Hunt, 2009, p. 152) that morphs with time and circumstance. The facts demonstrate that attention needs to be paid to both of these ideas. In private industry, women win over fifty percent of entry-level jobs and make it to the middle of managerial status in relatively large numbers (about 53%), but then female presence falls off to 35% at the director level, 24% at the senior vice president level, and 19% at the CEO level (Barton, 2012). According to Gail Rosseau, neurosurgeon and a director of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, about half of all medical school graduates are women, but only 4.38% of practicing neurosurgeons are (Rosseau, 2012). As Barton (2012) warns, the “middle of the pipeline” where women fall off must be analyzed.

Seeking a work life balance continues to be a lofty goal for many contemporary educational leaders. It continues to be unattainable for many women who are held to both the Ideal Worker and Ideal Mother norms. While the Ideal Worker is always available to the work organization, particularly with today’s technological advances, the Ideal Mother is expected to always be available to her children and their needs. Many organizations give primacy to work obligations over family care obligations. Society and the economy are still “rigged to create imbalance” for many women who are employed (Drago, 2007, p. 3). Being employed, especially if one is a single parent, requires finding adequate child care, incurring additional expenses brought on by child care, and being absent during some critical times in the lives of family members. Socio-economic factors are critical in achieving a Work Life Balance. The ability to “outsource” life aspects is limited to individuals who are high on the socio-economic scale who are able to employ reliable, well-paid child care providers and housecleaners, for example (Halrynjo, 2009, p. 119). Regarding the Work Life Balance, mothers who work tend to compare themselves more intensively to the Ideal Mother ideology than the Ideal Worker norm (Malone, 2011). Drago argues that the “norm of motherhood leads women to expect, and be expected, to serve as caregivers for their families, and, more broadly, to care for anyone in need, and to do so for love rather than money” (Drago, 2007, p. 7). This potentially sets women up for unequal access in the workplace. It also sets them up for unrealistic expectations on the homefront. As Williams notes, “The [I]deal [W]orker standard and norm of work devotion push mothers to the margins of economic life. And a society that marginalizes its mothers impoverishes its children. That is why the paradigmatic poor family in the United States is a single mother and her child” (2012, p. 103). Although perhaps single women who exist in educational leadership positions or who aspire to do so might not be economically impoverished, they might be potentially stretched to the limit both financially, due to unequal pay, career trajectory options, and child care costs, and psychologically due to the normative expectations of work and familial commitments. Blair-Loy (2003) has called these ideals regarding being a good parent and being a good worker devotional schemas, and her research has shown these create mutually exclusive binds for women who want to combine career and family. The omnipresent Ideal Worker and Ideal Mother expectations leave today’s single parents in a difficult situation. The choice between one or the other is just not an option for many working parents today. The harmonious and holistic integration of work and outside interests and responsibilities seems to leave people with fewer and fewer options to achieve their full potential across any domain in which they play active roles.

So what, exactly, does it mean to be a female school leader, or someone who aspires to be such an individual, in contemporary school systems? On the surface, women are still underrepresented in educational administration. Most current leadership preparation programs and theories are still based on the research of leaders that were predominately white males (Gardiner et al., 2000). These programs and their theoretical perspectives may not be successfully generalized to the growing number of female administrators seeking school- and district-based administrative certification in New Jersey. The specific critique of gender and related issues provides insight into the study of the production and reproduction of inequalities, dominance, and oppression (Shields, 2008). It recognizes that gender and other work and social identities are just the starting point (Crenshaw, 2005). Further, identities must be defined in relation to one another and must be rationally defined (Anthias & Yuval-Davis, 1983; Collins, 1990). A framework that emphasizes the differences among gender and social influences and impacts can aid in understanding quantitative results. While “difference is a seductive oversimplification” (Eagly, 1998), difference in the total story of a person’s personal and professional path matters.

As more women seek and attain leadership roles in business and academic organizations, the idea that they might carry out their duties differently than men is attracting much interest. Women are working as leaders in most professions, albeit in small numbers (Clare, 1999). For several decades, the literature surrounding leadership styles in relation to gender has uncovered stark contrasts dependent upon forum. Popular periodicals have repeatedly stated that females are superior leaders and lead in very different ways than their male counterparts, yet academic writing has not largely supported this claim. Leadership style has been defined as the “relatively stable patterns of behaviors of leaders” (Eagly et al., 2003, p. 564). The possibility that men and women lead differently is an important area to study because “leaders’ own behavior is a major determinant of their effectiveness and chances for advancement” (Eagly et al. 2003, p. 569). Popular literature regarding distinctive female leadership patterns abound (Book, 2000; Helgesen, 1990; Loden, 1985; Rosener, 1995). Female leaders, these writers maintain, “are less hierarchical, more cooperative and collaborative, and more oriented to enhancing others’ self-worth” (Eagly et al., 2003, p. 569). Magazines written for the business world have also reported differences. For example, Business Week stated in a special report, “As leaders, women rule. New studies find that female managers outshine their male counterparts in almost every measure” (Sharpe, 2000, p. 121), and Fast Company reported after conducting a survey of female CEOs that “the future of business depends on women” (Hefferman, 2002, p. 2). Academic writers, however, largely disagree (Bartol & Martin, 1986; Nieva & Gutek, 1981; van der Leeden & Willemsen, 2001). These writers claim that there is “little evidence of gender differences between men and women in terms of influence, dominance, confidence, capacity to lead, motivate, or deal with problems and conflict within organizations” (Clare, 1999, p. 36). Others also minimize the differences that have been found and attribute these mainly to the lower levels of power held by the women in the majority of studies (Kanter, 1977; Kark, 2001; Powell, 1990). They suggest that women superficially appear to lead differently only because they have not generally risen to the superior levels of power to which the men included in many studies have.

In a study conducted by Russell, Rush, and Herd (1988) that examined women’s behavioral expectations of effective male and female leaders, it was found that many similarities existed among the female participants in their views of effective leadership. While there were age-related differences among the women in their expectations, particularly with regard to effective female leadership, the results suggested that women, irrespective of age, expected that a female leader should exhibit higher levels of consideration, a stereotypic female leader behavior, than a male leader. Eagly and Johnson (1990) conducted a meta-analysis of gender and leadership style that examined studies comparing men and women on task and interpersonal styles as well as democratic and autocratic styles. Evidence was found for both the presence and absence of differences between men and women. While the authors concluded that the overall search for sex differences in leader style was not demonstrated, significant gender differences were reported in the use of democratic or participatory styles of leadership. Their research revealed that women leaders are less directive than men. Eagly, Makhijani, and Klonsky (1992) later demonstrated that women are viewed less favorably when leading in a direct manner; perhaps because of this, women tend to adopt a direct style less frequently than men (Eagly, Johannesen-Schmidt, & van Engen, 2003).

In the realm of emotional intelligence, women performed about 0.5 standard deviations higher than men using previously developed tests of emotional intelligence (Mayer, Caruso, Salovey, 1999). One possible explanation for this is that women must read emotions more carefully because they possess less power in society than do men. [However], research shows that it is women in more powerful positions who have exhibited greater emotional accuracy… [Alternative explanations of this finding include the idea that] women may be socialized to pay more attention to emotions, and further, that they may be better biologically prepared to perform such tasks. Research does not address the relative contributions of these factors (Mayer, Caruso, &Salovey, 1999, p.293).

There are significant gendering processes at work in our culture. “When children are born they enter into a gender-tracking system that creates different social realities for the sexes. Parents, teachers, and peers believe that the sexes differ—and explicitly or subtly reward, punish, and ignore behaviors in accordance with prevailing stereotypes. Different physical environments are constructed for the sexes, including environments that provide different opportunities for learning physical and cognitive skills” (Russo, 1985, p. 150).

There is a prevailing belief embedded within our society that women are more emotional than men. According to commonly held beliefs, women are more emotionally responsive, experiencing and expressing most emotions more intensely than do men; men, if they are emotional at all, are believed to experience and express more anger. In contrast to these widely held beliefs, the empirical status of sex differences in emotions remains unknown (Barrett et al., 2000, p.1027).

Practical experience in working in schools and comprehensive reviews of literature further understanding regarding educational organizations in several ways. They may also help to explain why some individuals are more likely to succeed in life and work than others. Certainly they help to illuminate the notion that interpersonal relationships and the ability to communicate effectively can be the “Achilles heel of effective school leadership” (Marshall, 2011 p. 1). They can be one’s saving grace in understanding barriers to career mobility. It is evident that emotional and social responses impact behavioral responses to situational cues (Arvey et al., 1998; Mayer et al., 2000). People who lead in a caring manner rather than in limited emotional-social ways have higher goal attainment within organizations (Newman, Guy, & Mastracci, 2009). Emotionally competent group norms are related to greater team performance (Stubbs, 2005). Positive physiological and neurological effects are experienced when positive intrapersonal and interpersonal experiences occur. Leaders with heightened emotional-social intelligence are more likely to engage in transformational leadership behaviors than those who possess lower levels of these intelligences (Barling et al., 2000). Where leaders and subordinates raise one another to high levels of motivation and morality, there is a positive association with effective reform agenda implementation (Sivanathan & Fekken, 2002). Transformational leadership has the potential to increase organizational leadership, articulate shared visions, distribute responsibility, and build a school culture necessary for current reform efforts in public schools (Abu-Tineh et al., 2009).

Many researchers are currently engaged in advancing the theoretical and methodological construct of emotional-social intelligence as a human ability that can be altered or adapted. Emotional-social intelligence has a positive correlation to positive work attitudes, altruistic behaviors, and work outcomes (Carmeli, 2003). High levels of emotional-social intelligence are required to be effective transformational leaders. They also play a role in balancing the multiplicities presented by work and non-work life aspects of individuals who are impacted by varying responsibilities. There are moderate to positive correlations to work/life interfaces that prove increased emotional-social intelligence leads to greater job satisfaction (Carmeli, 2003), although inter-role conflict pressures are mutually incompatible in certain respects. Although participation in the work of the family is affected by the participation in the work of work, empirical evidence shows that people with higher emotional-social intelligence are able to balance work and family effectively. This can lead to greater organizational goal attainment, fewer work days lost, higher work and family commitment, and improved moral.

In 1909, Ella Young, the first female superintendent of the Chicago Public School system stated, “Women are destined to rule the schools. . . .In the near future we will have more women than men in executive charge of the vast educational system. It is woman’s natural field. . .” (Hansot & Tyack, 1982, p.1). In spite of this optimistic destiny predicted by Young, the reality is that women have never dominated public school administration. Shakeshaft reported: "The percentage of women in school administration in the 1980’s was less than the percentage of women in 1905. Women have seldom attained the most powerful and prestigious administrative positions in schools, and the gender structure of males as managers and females as workers has remained relatively stable for the past 100 years. Historical record, then, tells us that there never was a golden age for women administrators, only a promise unfulfilled" (1989, p.51). Mertz (2003) believes that female “scarcity in the position of superintendent . . .suggests that the position has been little affected by Title IX and that females continue to have a long, uncertain way to go to reach the top spot” (p. 5).

Males continue to dominate the highest levels of school leadership positions, despite a quantitatively measurable greater number of females who are adequately prepared and actively applying for such positions. Female leaders must have a clear understanding of obstacles they might potentially face so they might overcome these. This knowledge is especially important in the study of school superintendency due to the fact that “the negative effects of gender bias appear to be greater rather than lesser for women who occupy the most powerful administrative office in public schools” (Brunner, 1999, p. 196).

Contemporary educational organizations might be wise to consider the implications of the real lives of leaders and the lives of potential future leaders in public schools as they craft policies and practices that better reflect the realities of the lives of these individuals. It might also be wise to understand emotional and social intelligence and differing manners of leadership. If not, there will continue to be critical implications. These include: a loss of qualified human resources, increased financial pressures, increased absenteeism, high turnovers that result in lost investments in human resources, and stress “spillovers” that result in increased healthcare costs.

School districts must adapt to new realities. As educational organizations operate currently, they reflect decades old paradigms that might eventually result in an even greater number of human resource shortages and organizational crises. Institutional and cultural support must be provided to permit a healthy balance that is critical to equality. As school districts face long-term impending shortages of educational leaders, it is evident that they have a major stake in gender issues, transformational leadership practices, and emotional-social intelligence research.