You’ve likely seen the splashy, celebrity-packed Equality Can’t Wait campaign videos that recently circulated on social media. The organization is an offshoot of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which focuses on achieving parity for women across sectors: specifically, economic participation and opportunity, political empowerment, health and survival, and educational attainment. At present, the World Economic Forum estimates that it will take the United States 208 years to achieve gender equality. However, Melinda Gates just wrote a lengthy piece for the Harvard Business Review in which she details the steps she believes are necessary to achieve gender equality much sooner. She summarizes her vision as “a future in which an increased number of Americans want women to exert greater power and influence in our society.”

Her piece obviously stands alone and I sincerely recommend that you read it. So, instead of reviewing it here, my goal is to apply her identified strategies to P12 and higher education contexts. I take an initial look at two of the proposed strategies here and I’ll return to the third in my next blog post.

Strategy 1: Dismantle Barriers

As Gates’ article suggests, “many people believe gender inequalities in professional advancement are a reflection of women’s own choices—not evidence of an unequal system.” She goes on to advocate for greater representation of women in power, an end to sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace, and greater support for employees who also have caregiving responsibilities. These strategies are salient to education because men still occupy a majority of school and district leadership roles, as well as university leadership roles.

Research is clear that women’s career aspirations are not different from those of their male colleagues, but their efficacy is often reduced as a result of overwhelming home responsibilities, gender-based harassment in the workplace, or lack of mentoring and support along the career ladder. Specifically in higher education, it is not uncommon for men to be praised for their research productivity during paternity leave while women are penalized for taking a “break” during maternity leaves. These perceptions result in career pathways that privilege men, despite women earning a higher proportion of graduate degrees. Educational institutions at all levels need to consider the ways in which systems exclude women from the highest levels of leadership.

Strategy 2: Fast-track Advancement

Gates here references the New York Times finding that “in 2018, there [were] more men named James on the Fortune 500 list of CEOs than there were women.” Her firm (separate from the Gates Foundation) then analyzed sectors using six metrics (size of the sector, growth rate, average compensation, gender gap in leadership roles, visibility, and reach) to identify six sectors that must be prioritized for the advancement of women. Recommendations for the priority sectors include new pathways into the sectors and support for women’s career advancement.

Academia is one of the priority sectors, and P12 education often replicates the problems of gender equity evident in the academy. In education broadly, the “pipeline” is often blamed for the lack of women candidates for the highest positions, but, as referenced above, the pool of candidates for high-level positions does not exist in a vacuum. In fact, the pool of candidates for positions like school principals or university department chairs is strongly influenced by the degree of support and access available to women. Gates captures the erroneous pipeline argument well: “We also need to understand that when interventions to create new entry points are designed without regard for gender or race, they risk simply retrenching old inequalities and privileging the people who have historically been most privileged. That’s why we should design these new entry points to prioritize people who are most marginalized by existing systems.”

There must be training, mentoring, and networking opportunities available to women (especially women of color, trans women, and lesbian women, who are most likely to experience workplace discrimination) for the purpose of preparing them for educational leadership positions. This will require an investment of capital, time, personnel, and creativity. But we cannot expect different outcomes of the same processes. “If we simply wait for women to achieve equal power and influence through the old pipeline—one they’re less likely to enter than men are—we are going to be waiting a long time.”

How well do you think Gates’ strategies align with the pathways to gender equality in educational leadership? Leave us a comment with your thoughts.

-Lauren