Leading While Female: A Culturally Proficient Response for Gender Equity

Your take-action guide to gender equity

First, just to be clear: Leading While Female is not a book about how to get a leadership job. Nor is it about fixing or transforming women into male managers or mindsets.

Instead, Arriaga, Stanley, and Lindsey’s bigger ambition is to help both women and men educational leaders confront and close the gender equity gap―a gap that currently denies highly qualified women and women of color opportunities to better serve our millions of public school students.

Designed as both a personal and group discussion guide for taking action, Leading While Female draws on the research of feminism, intersectionality, educational leadership, and Cultural Proficiency to help us all:

• Better understand the impact of faux narratives that foster lack of confidence among girls and women
• Utilize the Tools of Cultural Proficiency to examine barriers to overcome and support functions to locate for your own career planning
• Learn from the stories of women leaders who have confronted and overcome barriers to career development, including women of color who were targets of implicit bias
• Explore and expand the roles and opportunities for our male colleagues to serve as allies, advocates, and mentors.

If we look at the data, we can safely say women are doing the work of classroom teaching while disproportionately, men are making administrative and leadership decisions. Here at last is a resource for the breaking down the barriers and leading the way for future generations of women leaders.

Dr. Stacie L. Stanley currently serves as the Assistant Superintendent in the Twin Cities Metro Area.  Stacie has served in a variety of education roles including classroom teacher, elementary school principal, math specialist, curriculum and staff development specialist, director of achievement equity and director of curriculum, assessment and instruction.  Stacie is a Senior Training Associate for The Center for Culturally Proficient Practices and served as a contributing author for the text Innovative Voices in Education: engaging diverse communities (2012).  Stacie continues to seek out and harness the voices that are missing from the table, and supports schools and districts in doing the same. She earned her doctorate degree from Bethel University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where she researched the impact of intercultural development on K-6 administrative leadership practice.  Stacie is also a graduate school adjunct faculty member at Hamline and Bethel Universities in Minnesota.  She lives with her husband, and enjoys being an empty nester, taking long walks, and spending time with their grandchildren.  

Delores B. Lindsey, Ph.D., retired as Assistant Professor of Educational Administration, at California State University, San Marcos. However, she has not retired from the educational profession. Using the lens of Cultural Proficiency, Dr. Lindsey helps educational leaders examine their policies and practices, as well as their individual beliefs and values about cross-cultural communication.  Delores’ message to her audiences focuses on socially just educational practices and diversity as assets to be nurtured. Dr. Lindsey coaches educators to develop their own inquiry and action research.  Her favorite reflective questions are: Who are we?  and Are we who we say we are? She serves schools, districts, and county offices as an Adaptive Schools Training Associate, a Cognitive Coach Training Associate, and a consultant to develop culturally  proficient  educators and schools. Her recent publications include A Culturally Proficient response to the common core: Ensuring equity through professional learning (2015, Lindsey, Kearney, Estrada, & Lindsey); and Culturally Proficient inclusive schools: All means all! (2018, Lindsey, Thousand, Jew & Piowlski).