Even recently, men maintain their dominance in the field of public education and women continue to be underrepresented in school administration despite their numbers in teaching and school leadership preparation programs. Thus, men define what it means to administer and direct schools and school systems. Their assumptions, beliefs, and values ​​constitute what has remained natural and normative.

This is not to say that women have not expressed their ideas and opinions about the establishment and management of educational organizations. The voices of women, however, have been sporadic. With the feminist and civil rights movements that began in the 1960s to the present, women and minorities have increasingly assumed leadership positions, thereby gaining greater access to previously male-dominated arenas. By integrating into school administration, women and minorities have brought alternative approaches to educational leadership and have reframed the meaning of management and leadership for all applicants.

The objective of this article is to support the reformulation of traditionally held notions of educational management, beginning with the premise that these meanings are male-engendered constructions. Rather, my goal is to create an alternative device to probe the notion of educational management as gender.

To argue that management is a construction of gender is to postulate that there is a gender, masculine or feminine, that defines and dominates the discourse in the field of study.

In the case of the US administration, three lines of argument show how this gender has historically been masculine. First, the earliest management theories were developed primarily by men. The theory emphasized standardization, economic incentives, experience in large organizations, time movement studies, worker productivity and concentrated on administrative management, proposing top-down control through functions such as planning, organization, command, coordination and control.

Second, men held leadership positions. For various reasons, men dominated the field with more white men in leadership positions than women or minorities. The higher you move up in the organization, the fewer women you find. As in business administration, gender stratification is also evident in educational administration. Although women comprised the majority of the nation’s public school teaching force: 70 percent of all elementary, middle, and high school teachers are women, the majority of school administrators are men. This statistic is even more puzzling given that women make up at least half of those enrolled in education administrator training programs. The participation of women in such programs suggests that the under-representation of women in school administration is less related to their lack of aspiration to leadership positions than to structural and cultural barriers to the integration of women, as opportunities for advancement and a proper “fit” for administration.

Third, since men held leadership positions, social science research on organizations has largely examined the male experience. Male leaders have been studied with male researchers who have also conducted the nature and type of study. Additionally, this research on and for white men has been generalized in ways that make their action patterns the professional norm. Mastering management in theory, concern, and research, white men shaped the assumptions, beliefs, and values ​​that have become the foundation for leadership in organizations, often accepted uncritically and professionally standardized. A gender-based management construct becomes particularly problematic when the perspectives, concerns and interests of a single gender and a class are represented as general and a one-sided point of view comes to be seen as natural and obvious. Any noticeable deviation from those perspectives, concerns and interests is considered a deviation.

Women and minorities in leadership positions are forced to operate on terrain they did not create, negotiating the tensions between their professional and personal selves.

Correcting this conceptual imbalance is necessary for several reasons. First, a field of study that does not include the experiences of historically marginalized people is limited and less complete, accurate, or valid than those that do. The shift from an ethic of justice to an ethic of care suggests how the conception of morality could be expanded taking into account the perspectives of women.

A second reason for correcting the imbalance is that scrutiny of what is taken for granted in a male-dominated culture can transform those assumptions, beliefs, and values. In recent years, poststructuralist theories have helped to expose the contradictions of an androcentric culture. This body of theories reveals socially constructed meanings through language and suggests ways in which competing language patterns can produce current notions of gender. Sifting through these established meanings is key to the transformation process. It postulates that transforming knowledge about women implies changing our thinking, criticizing our actions and reforming our institutions. But, the process begins with our thinking about the familiar and reframing what has been assumed in new ways.

Third, a feminist theory of management offers a useful reform and revitalization of current management practices. While there is justification for understanding management as a gender construct and for correcting a masculine bias in the definition, unraveling such a construct can be difficult without the support of analytical devices that divide the key aspects of the phenomenon. At the same time, such devices must preserve the composite nature and integrity of the phenomenon.