Advancing women’s careers: Advancing women’s

careers: What can

What can we learn from we learn from
co-principals’
co-principals’ stories? stories?

by Marian Court, Department of Social and Policy Studies in Education,

Massey University, PN900, Private Bag 11222, Palmerston North, New
Zealand
Purpose
This article draws on longitudinal research into the establishment of
co-principalships (Court, 2001). It discusses this innovative approach to
school management in relation to women’s negotiations of their motiva-
tions, aspirations and strategies for career advancement and work/life bal-
ance.
Methodology
Longitudinal case studies of three primary school co-principal initiatives
were carried out between 1995 and 2000. Repeat interviews and observa-
tions with co-principals, board chairpersons and school staff were con-
ducted. Interviews were also undertaken with parents; students; and
representatives of state education agencies, national governing boards, prin-
cipals’ associations and teacher unions, alongside analysis of school and
state policy documents. The resulting case study narratives described how
each co-principalship was initiated and either established or dis-established.
A discourse analysis of these narratives then examined how links between
discourse, knowledge and power were being negotiated and challenged, as
the new subject position of ‘co-principal’ was being constructed in New
Zealand (Court, 2001; 2004).
Findings
This article analyses the significance of the similarities and differences in
the women’s career backgrounds, motivations and strategies for moving
into management positions. As they initiated their co-principalships, the
women variously went ‘against the grain’ and/or co-opted elements of the
new public management corporate executive model for school leadership,
which was introduced within the radical state restructuring during the late
1980s and early 90s in New Zealand.
Implications for the themes of this Special Issue of Equal Oportunities
International
Research into this innovatory leadership approach in education has shown
how it can assist development of more flexible and inclusive workplace
structures, by ‘flattening’ management hierarchies and distributing leader-

Volume 23 Number 7/8 2004 39

 ship opportunities more widely (Court, 2003). This article examines links
between the women’s aspirations for these kinds of changes and their initia-
Advancing women’s
tion of co-principalships. The discussion also draws out how some women
careers: What can
were negotiating these motivations and their conflicting desires to be ‘a
we learn from
good wife and mother’. Despite these dilemmas, the women were
co-principals’
proactively constructing collective ways of ‘leading together’. These en-
stories?
abled them to manage the constraints of the ‘double shift’ on their career ad-
vancement, while also challenging the hegemony of the corporate executive
leadership model for education. The article thus raises some different ques-
tions about women’s career development, shifting the focus away from ex-
amining strategies for assisting women to move ‘up’ in an existing model
and towards ways that corporate executive structures and practices could
change to be more inclusive of members of the organisation.

Abstract

Research into shared leadership in education has shown how it can assist de-
velopment of more flexible and inclusive workplace structures, by ‘flatten-
ing’ management hierarchies and distributing leadership opportunities more
widely (Court, 2003). This article examines links between some women
teachers’ aspirations for these kinds of changes and their initiation of
co-principalships. It draws on a longitudinal research study to (re)tell some
of the women’s stories about their career backgrounds and pathways to-
wards establishing their co-principalships in three primary schools in New
Zealand. The discussion illustrates how these seemingly very similar
women co-principals cannot be treated as a homogeneous group. In drawing
out differences in their past experiences, their values and aspirations, it ar-
gues that a cultural feminist framework is an inadequate tool for thinking
about such differences and hence for considering strategies that could assist
different women’s career advancement. A feminist poststructural approach
to discourse analysis is explained and used to illustrate how these women
were variously going ‘against the grain’ and/or co-opting elements of the
dominant educational leadership discourses in New Zealand: that is, the
new public management corporate executive model for school leadership
and a professional discourse of collaborative leadership. Their different re-
sponses to feminist discourses of gender power relations and women’s col-
lectivity are explored also as part of making the argument that a ‘one model
fits all’ career development strategy is unlikely to be fully effective in assist-
ing more women to gain corporate leadership positions and to suggest that
asking questions about how the corporate executive leadership model could
change, may be ultimately more useful.

Introduction

This article draws on a longitudinal research study of co-principal partner-

ships that were established in the early 1990s in three New Zealand primary
schools (Court 2001). It (re)tells the stories seven women educators told me

40 Equal Opportunities International

about their personal backgrounds, career experiences and motivations for
initiating their shared leadership partnerships. In my discussions, I tease out
Advancing women’s
the nature of some similarities and differences between the women, a focus
careers: What can
that was sparked when I first read the brief for this special issue of Equal
we learn from
Opportunities International. I was concerned that the issue’s aim to develop
co-principals’
“an understanding of the unique challenges faced by women managers and
stories?
professionals” could lead inadvertently into a continuation of analyses
within a universalising framework, such as cultural feminism. This ap-
proach, which sees all women as possessing similar qualities and aspirations
that are different to men’s, has been very influential in shaping understand-
ings of women experiences in educational leadership. Indeed, as Blackmore
(1999) has commented, it has become almost a ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault
1980) in this field of gender analysis. In this article I explain why cultural
feminism has only a limited potential for enabling effective insights into dif-
ferent women’s experiences and illustrate how a discourse analysis ap-
proach may be more useful for informing thinking about strategies that
could assist different women’s access to leadership positions in corporate
and professional organisations.
In describing how some of these women co-principals were negotiat-
ing ‘double shifts’ of professional and family/nurturing responsibilities, I
aim also to keep to the fore the significance of this continuing constraint on
some women’s career opportunities. Despite painful dilemmas such as those
I outline in Kate’s story, however, my co-principal study highlights how
women can be creatively proactive in such situations. In this case, women
were constructing collective ways of ‘leading together’ that enabled some of
them to manage the constraints of the ‘double shift’ on their career advance-
ment, and all of them to challenge the hegemony of the hierarchical corpo-
rate executive leadership model for education. Their stories thus raise some
different questions about women’s and men’s careers and leadership oppor-
tunities, shifting the focus away from merely examining strategies for assist-
ing women to move ‘up’ in an existing model and towards ways that
corporate executive structures and practices could change to be more inclu-
sive of all members of an organisation.
Before I present the women’s stories, I provide a brief outline of the
research design and methods I used (Court 2001).
The research approach
The fieldwork for the case studies of the three co-principal initiatives was
undertaken between 1995 and 2000. Repeat interviews and observations
with co-principals, board chairpersons and school staff were conducted in
each school and interviews were undertaken also with parents, students and
representatives of state education agencies, national governing boards, prin-
cipals’ associations and teacher unions. School and state policy documents
were collected, read and analysed during the years when I was visiting the
schools and all of this research material was drawn on as I developed case

Volume 23 Number 7/8 2004 41

 study narratives that describe how each co-principalship was initiated, es-
tablished and in two instances, later dis-established. A discourse analysis of
Advancing women’s
the narratives was also undertaken, to examine how links between dis-
careers: What can
course, knowledge and power were being negotiated and challenged, both
we learn from
while the new subject position of ‘co-principal’ was being constructed in
co-principals’
New Zealand and later, when the legitimacy of this approach to leadership
stories?
was being challenged by those who espoused a new public management
model in education. A more detailed discussion and analysis of the research
approach can be found in Court (2004b) and an analysis of the ways issues
of accountability were invoked by some who opposed one of the co-princi-
pal initiatives is in Court (2001). Here, though, I will focus on the women’s
pathways towards their initiation of shared leaderships in each of their
schools.
Introducing the women co-principals
We might expect that a group of primary school women teachers who have
initiated innovatory shared leaderships might have had the same kinds of as-
pirations, values and past work experiences. And indeed, within this small
group of women co-principals, there were many similarities. They were all
Pakeha (white non Maori), middle class, had trained as primary teachers in
the New Zealand state education system and had taken some steps ‘up’ the
traditional educational professional career ladder while also caring for ei-
ther their own husbands and children, or for their elderly parents or other
family members. Thus, although Liz, Jane and Brigid were single women
with no children of their own, they like the other women had experienced
the strains of the now well researched ‘double shift’ of juggling care-giving
and paid work/career demands.
Despite these commonalities, there were some significant differences
in the women’s personal and professional experiences, as the following sto-
ries will show.
The Hillcrest Avenue School Co-principals1
Karen Lane. After leaving school, Karen trained and worked as a social
worker for four years. When she married and had a family, she took seven
years out of the paid workforce to care for her children, during which time
she studied part-time and attained her BA degree. After she separated from
her husband in 1978, she decided to train for teaching, because this fitted in
with the children being at school and she would not have to put them into af-
ter school care programmes. She said, I felt my prime responsibility was as a
parent and to them.
Karen taught for several years, but said, It was only after my children
became less dependent that I decided that I would look at going up the lad-
der a bit – when someone told me that I should be applying for deputy princi-
pal positions. I didn’t realise I was a good teacher. It had been a very lonely
existence, on my own with the family and guiding them through their educa-

42 Equal Opportunities International

tion and I guess I hadn’t had much time to reflect on how I was going. She
won a senior teacher position at Hillcrest Avenue School, a small three
Advancing women’s
teacher school in an inner city suburb, with a roll of around 60 children. She
careers: What can
worked very closely and happily for three years with Jim, the principal, and
we learn from
Felicity, the third teacher, collaborating in a team approach to planning all
co-principals’
the teaching and learning programmes. They did not change the traditional
stories?
principal/teacher structure, despite the fact that Jim used to say, ‘This is ri-
diculous. We should be taking the principalship a turn about, one term
each.’ We were thinking in terms of one principal at a time - we didn’t think
leadership could be shared, Karen said.
When Jim and Felicity left the school for other positions, Karen de-
cided that she wanted to move up another step in her career and she applied
for the principal’s position, unaware that Liz Nicholson and Jane Gilmore
were also preparing their applications and a proposal to the board that they
share the two jobs of principal and senior teacher as a co-principalship.
Liz Nicholson and Jane Gilmore had met several years earlier when they
joined the same women’s group in education. They had enjoyed working to-
gether later with a group preparing national resource material for non-sexist
teaching and when they ran a middle management course for teachers. They
held many similar beliefs about the value of shared decision making and col-
laborative management practice in education, but there were some differ-
ences in their background experiences that fed into their aspirations for
sharing the leadership at Hillcrest School.
Liz Nicholson said that as a young person at secondary school she was a re-
ally quiet, mouse-ish person - I just used to sit there and be terribly good.
She never felt she fitted in to the quiet rural town where she grew up. Her
mother was a strong woman, however, who told her to get out and do things
with her life. So straight after finishing school she left to train as a teacher
then travelled overseas for two years. Over the next 11 years, she worked in
several different schools and became involved in union politics with women
teacher activists, who were challenging the government’s broken service
policy. (This policy was introduced in 1975, as a response to a surplus of
bonded teachers. It meant that teachers who had not had continuous service
(mainly women who had taken time out of teaching for child-care) were not
eligible for re-appointment.) Liz was inspired by these union women and
the work they were doing in developing a re-training scheme for women
teachers caught by the above policy. She said, They gave me a strong politi-
cal sense of myself and understandings about how to work for change in
ways that were strategic and focused on particular issues. Consequently, she
said, she was working within the structures of education to bring about a spe-
cific change in the hierarchical ways that schools are run, so that there
could be a more power sharing way of working.
Liz said that in her case it was radical feminism that was driving the
idea for a co-principalship. She believed strongly that women had feminine

Volume 23 Number 7/8 2004 43

 qualities of being inter-connective, sensitively listening, caring and nurtur-
ing, but said her feminism was stronger than that. It’s about a change in a
Advancing women’s
power structure in society and a belief in the importance and power of
careers: What can
women in the world. She hoped that the co-principalship would not only
we learn from
benefit the women who would be working together, but would also benefit
co-principals’
the children in the school: They might not necessarily take notice or believe
stories?
in its teamwork, but they will have experienced it -otherwise they think that
things always work the same way.
Liz had earlier tried out her feminist beliefs about collectivity and
power sharing during the time she was seconded into a school liaison team
as an advisor and while she worked in a very collaborative deputy princi-
pal/principal partnership. She had also tested out her ideas in relation to aca-
demic literature that theorised the effectiveness of collaborative and
diffused leadership styles when she participated in a reflective principal
course. Rose Fleming, who was a lecturer on this course, (one that Jane
Gilmore also attended), said that Some of the key ideas in the leadership
courses were about having a kind of diffused leadership so that all the teach-
ers in the school were sharing that role. We were talking about it in theory,
but I knew that Jane and Liz were doing it in practice - already - in their work
as deputy principals in their own schools (Rose:1).
It is perhaps not surprising then, that when the two vacancies were ad-
vertised at Hillcrest Avenue School, Liz thought that Jane might be inter-
ested in applying with her to share these positions as co-principals.
Jane Gilmore had originally trained as an occupational therapist, then
worked briefly in a Steiner home for children with special needs before trav-
elling overseas for two years. On her return to New Zealand, she decided to
enter teaching, but at the time when she completed her training in the early
1970s, there was an over-supply of teachers and she had difficulty getting a
permanent position. In her first 10 years of teaching, therefore, she worked
in relieving positions in seven different schools, with 14 different princi-
pals. This gave her many opportunities to observe principals in action and
one she worked with in the early 1980s particularly impressed her. She said,
He involved all the staff in a review of the school. Scale A teachers’ ideas
were considered equally to those who held positions of responsibility. So as
a relieving Scale A teacher, I was the leader of a three teacher syndicate.
That was quite influential for me.
Jane also said that feminism was influential for her. I think intuitively
I was a feminist - not consciously, but doing a Gender and Education paper
as part of completing my BEd honours, made me think about things that ha-
ven’t felt right ... things like fairness - and some awful things have been done
to women, myself included. She described how on another occasion she had
not been able to get back into teaching, this time after she had taken more
than three months out to look after her brother’s family. When her appeal on
compassionate grounds was turned down, she said I got about eight people

44 Equal Opportunities International

to write to different MPs, and I got a letter to say that I was being classified
as having continuous service (which meant I could get back in). I was quite
Advancing women’s
shocked... It was the classic thing of ‘who you know’ – people in influential
careers: What can
positions can change things. She told me that her realisation that the system
we learn from
had flaws, but individuals could effect change, led into her liberal feminism
co-principals’
and her thinking about finding ways to reorganise school structures so they
stories?
could be more inclusive of all teachers’ initiatives and leadership potentials.
When she later won a position as a deputy principal and then acting princi-
pal, she told the board and staff that she would only accept if it was within a
co-operative-type approach.
Thus, although Liz and Jane’s feminist beliefs were different, they
shared a commitment to collaborative teamwork. When Liz asked her to join
her in a co-principalship, Jane told me that she was a little nervous; she said,
I saw Liz as strong, charismatic and vibrant and I wondered if I’d be able to
keep up with her! I agreed though, thinking that I was going to be the key
learner. She also knew though, that she had particular skills that were differ-
ent to Liz’s; I had learned a lot of parental skills... and I knew I was able to
see lots of points of view. She felt that together they would be a good balance.

When they sent their application and co-principal proposal to the

Hillcrest Avenue School board, Liz and Jane stated that if appointed, they
wanted to work towards including the third teacher in the school, Karen, in a
three-way teaching co-principalship the board were thrilled with their appli-
cation and proposal, but when they put the idea to Karen, she was not very
keen: her beliefs about and experience of team leadership were different,
and she worried about what would happen if things went wrong. However,
the board were sure that the contract they were developing would protect all
parties: they appointed Liz and Jane as co-principals and persuaded Karen to
work closely with them to see if she would be comfortable joining them later
in the co-principalship. And after a year she did, convinced of the worth and
viability of the ‘team of equals, sharing leadership’ approach the three of
them had together developed. Their approach and work has been one of the
most successful of all the co-principalships I have found, but that is another
story that can be found in Court (2003).
Telford School Co-principals
Kate Walker (with Ann Howell) initiated a co-principalship in 1995, at Tel-
ford School, a unique five teacher primary school that had three teaching
strands: the original state strand of two classes, a Montessori strand of two
classes and a full immersion Maori language class.
Kate Walker came to this school in 1994 as an acting principal, after having
taught for 20 years across the range of Year 3 - 9 classes. During that time,
she had taught in England for six years, working in three different primary
schools, each with a woman principal. When she returned to New Zealand,
she was shocked at how under-represented women were in school leader-

Volume 23 Number 7/8 2004 45

 ship positions and she was surprised that a hierarchical management model
was still strong in New Zealand primary schools, with even the few women
Advancing women’s
principals she knew also tending to work in hierarchical ways.
careers: What can
we learn from In the early 1990s, however, when she was appointed to a new school,
co-principals’ like Jane, she was delighted to find herself working with a very collabora-
stories? tive male principal. He strongly encouraged her to seek promotion and she
said that consequently, although she had decided to have a family, she be-
came convinced and determined that she could do both. She won a senior
teacher position around the same time as she had her first child and not long
after, she was again promoted, this time to a deputy principal position. She
worked in this position for three years, during which time she had her sec-
ond child and became very involved in helping at the creche where she had
placed her children. She said, That workload became almost as demanding
as a third job and it was this pressure, along with stress emerging out of an
increasingly unhappy workplace in her school, that led her to resign from
her teaching job. She told me, I knew that by resigning I was making a deci-
sion to actually cut the career path. It was very, very hard - it was full of grief
... of regret for lost opportunity.
As she was going through this trauma and cutting off from teaching,
Kate saw an advertisement for a relieving principal position at Telford
School, which was in the suburb where she lived. She applied, thinking, If I
get it, I could just see what it’s like and if I don’t like it I can leave. She won
the position and the board and four other staff were delighted with her out-
standing teaching and management abilities.
Kate enjoyed the challenges of the teaching principalship, but she
soon became disillusioned with the managerial emphases in the new public
management model of educational administration (introduced in New Zea-
land in 1988). She disagreed with its construction of the principal’s role as a
chief executive officer, with primary responsibilities to tighten up account-
ability and run a tight ship, as she put it. She disliked the ever increasing
emphasis on requirements for principals to control teachers’ work through
performance management. She had always felt that a hierarchy is not a suit-
able way to organise a primary school, and it is especially not appropriate
in a small school like Telford, and she hated the assumption within the NPM
model that effective school management doesn’t have to be connected to an
educational philosophy. She was also concerned about the pressure of the
work – especially the paperwork that was cutting into the time she could
spend with her family. She thought that she would have to leave.
But then Kate heard about the co-principalship that had been intro-
duced at Hillcrest Avenue School and this offered her a way of ameliorating
her high workload, as well as an alternative collegial and inclusive educa-
tional leadership approach. She suggested to Ann Howell that they could
share the principalship, with Ann representing the Montessori strand, while
she represented the state strand and, because of her fluency in Mäori, the im-

46 Equal Opportunities International

mersion Mäori language strand, while they worked together towards in-
cluding the other teachers in school-wide decision making. Advancing women’s
careers: What can
Ann Howell had been at Telford since 1992, when she had been appointed to we learn from
establish a Montessori unit there. She had trained as a teacher in the state co-principals’
system, graduating in 1968, after which she had taught for two years in ju- stories?
nior classes before travelling overseas with her husband. While in England
for two years she had taught for a while, but on her return to New Zealand
with a pre-school aged child, she could not get a full time teaching position
(again because of the ‘broken service’ policy). So she worked part-time at a
university creche, and then part-time with an interior decorating firm, hav-
ing another child during these years. Between 1977 and 1991, she worked
for a while as a long term reliever at a girls’ college and in two different
Montessori pre-schools, gaining her Certificate in Montessori Method of
Education, and then becoming directress in a Montessori pre-school. While
working there, she was approached by the then principal at Telford to set up
a new Montessori unit there. (This was motivated primarily by a need to
‘staunch’ a falling school roll.)

When Kate later suggested the co-principal partnership to her, Ann

liked the idea but, she said, Being honest about it, I had never thought of be-
ing a principal. Philosophically I didn’t like that hierarchical aspect and I
could never see myself fitting into that. And being a working mother, I
wasn’t prepared to work those long hours at the expense of my family ... But
I’m the sort of person who likes a challenge ... and I knew I could work with
Kate.

Although Ann had had no management experience in the state system,

the two women knew they had similar philosophies for building collabora-
tive teaching and management cultures and especially, Ann said, the idea of
sharing as a good role model for the children. Consequently, as they devel-
oped their co-principal proposal and application they prioritised an aim to
try to involve all the staff in the development of shared decision making and
responsibility. Ann said, We didn’t want it to be Kate and I up here, at the
top, but more circular where everybody feels that they’re of value and of im-
portance. Like at staff meetings we wanted to have everyone having input
and taking a turn at leading it.

The Telford School board were delighted with Kate’s and Ann’s appli-
cation and appointed them as co-principals to start at the beginning of 1994.
Their ambitious aims to include the teachers and parents of all three strands
equally in school wide decision making were dogged, however, by a number
of difficulties, which I have described and discussed elsewhere (see Court,
2003 2004). Suffice to say here, that two years later the board chair per-
suaded them to return to a single principalship. Staff in the school remained

Volume 23 Number 7/8 2004 47

 committed to the principle of shared decision-making, however, and later
on two of them successfully shared the position of deputy principal.
Advancing women’s
careers: What can St Mary’s School Co-principals
we learn from
co-principals’ Brigid Kirkwood, with Carrie Perkins, initiated the co-principalship at St
stories? Mary’s School, a six teacher integrated (Catholic) primary school in a city
suburb.

Brigid Kirkwood was described by teachers and parents alike as an out-

standing teacher, dedicated to her job, enthusiastic and skilled. She had en-
tered teacher training straight from school in 1978, and after graduating and
teaching for a year she travelled overseas for six years, teaching part-time
for two years in the UK. She returned to New Zealand in 1987 and taught in
different schools across all year levels 1-8, before she won promotion to the
deputy principal position at St Mary’s School in 1993.

Brigid believed strongly in teamwork, telling me that Working

closely with other people is just the way I’ve always liked doing things, and
she supported the principal as much as she could when she could see that he
was getting snowed under. When he took extended sick leave, Brigid was
appointed as acting principal, but she did not enjoy this experience. She
said, I was swamped by the paperwork - I didn’t have enough time to sit
down and think about it, let alone do it. She also found it a very lonely job:
Often at the end of the day, I was the only one left here doing things and mak-
ing decisions. She did such a fine job though, that when the principal de-
cided to retire, the board asked her to apply for the position. Brigid did not
want to - her belief that one person shouldn’t hold all the responsibility had
been reinforced by her acting principal experience.

When one of the other teachers in the school resigned, however, and
an Education Review Officer suggested that she could initiate a
co-principalship, Bridget, like Kate, was attracted to the idea as a logical
way of dealing with both the huge workload issues that beset sole teaching
principals and as way of working in a more equal collaboration. She thought
her friend, Carrie Perkins would be the perfect person to share the leader-
ship: I knew Carrie was an excellent teacher and thought along the same
lines as I did. I knew I’d love to work with her in the school.

Four years earlier, Carrie Perkins had worked in Bridget’s classroom

as a third year student teacher on teaching practice. Although around the
same age as Brigid (both were in their mid thirties), Carrie had entered
teaching as a second career, after first training and working as a lab techni-
cian, and then, like Ann, taking some years out of paid work to care for her
family of four children. She then decided to re- train as a teacher and after
completing her BA (Education), she taught in a relieving position at St
Mary’s for six months, during which time she and Brigid developed a close
friendship. They kept in touch when she got her first permanent position,

48 Equal Opportunities International

sharing experiences and ideas as she was promoted to deputy principal and
then for a time, acting principal in her school.
Advancing women’s
When Brigid invited her to join her in a joint application for a careers: What can
co-principalship at St Mary’s, Carrie was excited and honoured as she ad- we learn from
mired Brigid greatly as a brilliant teacher. She was also a little nervous, co-principals’
though, worrying that she had not had as much experience as Brigid, having stories?
taught at that stage for only three years. I was thinking, I hope I can live up to
your expectations of me. However, she knew that she had a good knowledge
of education and that she and Brigid agreed on their basic philosophy about
teaching. And she knew that she also brought skills from having had my own
family and I’ve worked on committees and things like organising parent
groups. When I was a lab technician I ended up running the lab - I seem al-
ways to take on the leadership thing. People seem to look to me to tidy up
shambles - and it was a joy to be able to change some things when I was
briefly an acting principal. She saw Brigid’s suggestion as an opportunity to
work in this way with her. There was also some serendipity about the timing:
she told me My long term goal is to become non teaching at some stage, go
into a non teaching principal’s position, and she saw a co-principalship as a
good opportunity to learn more.

The board was impressed with Brigid and Carrie’s combined applica-
tion and appointed them. Their co-principalship was very successful for two
years, achieving far more, the board chair told me, than a sole principal
could have done. Despite this success, while Brigid was on a year’s study
leave, a new board was elected for St Mary’s School and this board was con-
cerned about the ‘legality’ of the co-principalship. They thought there
should be clearer single accountability lines and this commitment to NPM
principles, combined with Carrie’s career aspiration to be a sole principal
(and enjoyment of having worked alone in the role while Brigid was away, a
fact known to the board) contributed to the board’s decision to dissolve the
co-principalship. This caused Brigid a great deal of pain and severely
strained her friendship with Carrie. Happily, however, Brigid joined an edu-
cation advisory team (where she greatly enjoyed collaborative work rela-
tions) and she returned in that capacity to work occasionally at St Mary’s
School, where Carrie had remained as principal. The two women mended
their strained relationship and they are friends today.
* * *

A discourse approach to analysing difference

From these brief resumes of the women’s stories we can see how, cutting
through their similarities, there were some marked differences in their per-
sonal and professional values and beliefs and their earlier career experi-
ences. In the next parts of this article I want to draw on a feminist
poststructural approach to discourse analysis to illuminate how these differ-
ences impacted on and shaped their different motivations for initiating or

Volume 23 Number 7/8 2004 49

 joining a co-principal partnership. These analyses have implications for
women’s career development and strategies to assist these.
Advancing women’s
careers: What can My feminist poststructural approach builds on a Foucauldian under-
we learn from standing of discourse as historically, socially and culturally specific bodies
co-principals’ of meaning and knowledge that exist in language, practices and representa-
stories? tions (Foucault 1980; Weedon 1987). They are coherent sets of statements,
ideas, beliefs, values and practices that offer different views of the ‘way
things are’ (or should be) in the world. Thus a range of different and some-
times conflicting discourses can be in circulation simultaneously in a field
like education, and in the following discussions, I refer to the discourses of
new public management, professional collaborative leadership and less
well known discourses of feminist leadership and collective organisation.
In a focus on gender power relations, a feminist poststructural ap-
proach acknowledges some other feminist arguments that (many) women
have been historically subordinated within patriarchal power relations and
sexual divisions of labour that have constructed women’s roles as primarily
in home and family relationships, constraining their participation in public
organisations and positions of power.
Feminist poststructuralists disagree however, with a cultural feminist
insistence that (all) women have ‘natural’ orientations towards caring, nur-
turing, inclusive and participatory styles and that in management they prac-
tice these styles as part of a “female ethos” (Albino 1992; Helgesen 1990;
Rogers 1988) or a “woman’s ways of leading” (Rosener 1990). While there
may be some truth in cultural feminist arguments that in earlier decades
many women learned “to share, show compassion, be caring and nurturing”
and many men learned “to win at all costs ... to compete according to the ‘old
boys’ club rules” (Robins & Terrell 1987), such ‘homogenising’ of both
men’s and women’s natures and experiences is too simplistic. For example,
it does not account for the existence of caring, nurturing men in organisa-
tions, nor for the women managers who are bullies (Reay & Ball 2000).
There is an even more significant weakness in a cultural feminist approach
in relation to analysis of women’s career advancement, however. Its promo-
tion of women as the primary possessors of caring, nurturing and empathetic
relational abilities in contrast to men’s so-called ‘typically’ entrepreneurial,
competitive and rational abilities, actually re-embeds the oppositional gen-
der stereotypes which underpin assumptions that women are better suited to
HR positions (focussing on people rather than systems) and ‘support’ levels
of organisations, rather than the ‘top’ strategic and policy executive leader-
ship positions that are held mainly by men.
Recent studies of women in educational leadership show, however,
that there is as much variety in women’s abilities, styles and practices in
leadership, as there are in men’s, and that such differences emerge out of
complex interactions between individuals’ own personal values, beliefs,
cultural identifications and what is considered appropriate in different

50 Equal Opportunities International

school and community contexts (Smulyan 1999; Weiner 1995). Thus my re-
search into the women co-principals’ aspirations for and innovations in edu-
Advancing women’s
cational leadership has aimed (among other things) to build on this move
careers: What can
away from cultural feminist explanations of women’s orientations and expe-
we learn from
riences, towards more carefully nuanced poststructuralist analyses of differ-
co-principals’
ences within seemingly similar groups of women and the implications of
stories?
such differences – for women’s careers and for educational leadership itself.
The strength of a feminist poststructural approach is that it enables in-
vestigations of how different discourses offer particular ways of being in the
world, through constructing different subject positions that individuals can
take up as their own (Davies, 1989; MacNaughton, 2000) It can thus illumi-
nate how individuals (such as the women co-principals) may experience di-
lemmas when they position themselves (or are positioned by others) within
two or more conflicting discourses. It can also assist analysis of how indi-
vidual agency can be enacted within and against a dominant set of power re-
lations, for example through investigation of how people can modify
dominant discourses by combining elements of its ideas, statements and
practices with elements of other discourses, and in effect, creating a counter,
or ‘hybrid’ discourse - such as the counter discourse of co-principalship as
shared chief executive leadership. I am hopeful that my following illustra-
tions of a feminist poststructuralist approach to analysis may usefully in-
form career analyst thinking about what kinds of strategies may be
successful in enabling more women to contribute their talents to organisa-
tional leadership.
Negotiating the New Public Management (NPM) discourse in educa-
tion
All of the women co-principals were working within the new public man-
agement version of market managerialism, which had been imposed across
all sectors of education in New Zealand in the late 1980s restructuring of the
state public service (see Court 2004a for a discussion of this restructuring
and some of its effects in education). Some of the women’s stories, Brigid’s
and Carrie’s in particular, illustrate how this dominant discourse could con-
strain a shared leadership approach, through its assertions that singular ac-
countability lines are essential for improving schooling efficiencies and
effectiveness. In the wider study I explain how the appointing boards in each
school had difficulty gaining official acceptance for the initiatives because
having more than one principal would mean things could ‘slip through the
cracks’. The board had to agree to name one of the women as principal to
meet the legal requirement for ‘a principal’ in the school. The boards refused
to make this designation public however, and it was rotated each year.
The NPM emphasis on single line accountabilities and ‘paper trail’
surveillance resulted in increased stress and heavier workloads for many
teachers and principals (Sullivan 1994; Wylie 1995; 1997) and these are ev-
ident also in some of the women’s accounts. It is worth noting here that

Volume 23 Number 7/8 2004 51

 Kate’s and Brigid’s desire to alleviate their high workloads through initiat-
ing a shared leadership is echoed in studies of co-principalship initiatives in
Advancing women’s
other parts of the world (Dass 1995; Gordon & Meadows 1986; Groover
careers: What can
1989; Korba 1982; Shockley, Smith & McCrum 1981; Thurman 1969; West
we learn from
1978). Such studies have agreed that this approach can not only provide sup-
co-principals’
port and camaraderie for those in positions of school leadership, breaking
stories?
down personal isolation and lessening stress; it can also “double the in-
sights” and the achievements (Gordon & Matthews, 1986, p.29).
In terms of the arguments I am developing in this article however, it
must be noted that not all of the women in my study had experienced in-
creased stress while holding a position of responsibility in the late 1980s and
early 90s. Indeed, Carrie’s story notes how she was stimulated by the extra
demands and the opportunities the acting principal position afforded for her
to effect some changes in her school. It was her enjoyment of this that con-
tributed to her seeing Brigid’s offer of a co-principal partnership as an op-
portunity to further develop her skills as part of a career path towards a sole
principalship. Some other studies of women’s shared leadership initiatives
have also found that these can be a useful professional development strategy
that can give women with family care-giving responsibilities a way of man-
age the dual demands of home and school, while also advancing in their ca-
reers Gordon (Gordon & Meadows 1986; White 1991). Job-shared
co-principalships, where the two partners alternate (time on, time off) in the
principal’s position, can be particularly effective here Court (Court 2004c).
Yet Carrie also seemed to have no difficulty ‘juggling’ the higher
workload of the acting principalship with the needs of her family of four
children. Later, as a co-principal, she was quite disciplined about leaving
school at 4.30, taking work home to do after her children were in bed. We
could well ask, was she falling prey to the ‘superwoman syndrome’ here
Nash (Briar, Munford & Nash 1992) and having to working twice as hard to
prove that she was as good as any man as Shakeshaft’s (1987) earlier analy-
sis of research on women in educational leadership suggested? Carrie’s sto-
ries suggest otherwise, however: she genuinely loved the challenge and
stimulation of keeping all the ‘balls in the air’.
This was a surprise to me, as was my finding that in the women’s ac-
counts of the beginnings of their co-principalships, NPM discourse did not
feature as strongly as I thought it might have done when I originally de-
signed this study. I thought then that their co-principal initiatives might be a
conscious resistant strategy to counter the increased hierarchy that many
commentators were pointing out as a weakness of the NPM (see, for exam-
ple, Codd 1990; Sullivan 1994). While there is some evidence that some of
the women (Liz and Kate in particular) were consciously resisting
managerialist imperatives, the research also showed that after their appoint-
ment to co-principalship, all of the women took some pleasure in the man-
agement parts of their work (such as being strategic in their planning,
organising the files and/or changing systems). Indeed, like one of the femi-

52 Equal Opportunities International

nist principals Strachan (1999) studied, who was consciously appropriating
parts of the new right business and accountability discourse in her approach
Advancing women’s
to leadership, Carrie and Karen believed that a business approach and care-
careers: What can
ful management documentation of performance and accountability systems,
we learn from
could improve a collaborative approach to school leadership and schooling
co-principals’
provision. This kind of selective taking up of elements of what may seem to
stories?
be contradictory discourses is not surprising within feminist post-
structuralist understandings of the ways that subjectivity and agency are
constituted within a range of discourses (Davies 1989; Weedon 1987).

I have been touching on the ways that some of the women were work-
ing within and against the grain of the NPM approach to educational leader-
ship. What about their positionings within professional collaborative
leadership discourse, the other discourse of school organisation and man-
agement that was (still) influential at the time the co-principalships were ini-
tiated?

Working within and against the grain of professional collaborative dis-

course

While I was carrying out this research, some people commented to me that
co-principalships would only appeal to those people who enjoyed working
in teams. And indeed, an orientation towards collaborative teamwork ap-
pears strongly in all the women’s stories. Apart from Carrie, all the women’s
descriptions of the educational working relationships they had enjoyed most
before they became co-principals were framed within a professional collab-
orative practitioner discourse. They said things such as, We had complemen-
tary skills and were used to cooperative ways of working together (Karen).
There was a lot of power sharing and that was quite influential for me (Jane).
I worked with a very collaborative principal who had some vision and
worked very collaboratively with staff. I learned a lot from him (Kate).
Working closely with other people is just the way I’ve always liked doing
things” (Brigid). I didn’t like that hierarchical aspect and I could never see
myself fitting into that (Ann). Significantly, the collaborative relationships
they described were not just between women, but also between women and
men. And interestingly also, although Carrie was motivated initially more
by the opportunity to gain leadership experience so she could later become a
sole principal, as her partnership with Brigid developed, comments about
collegiality and collaboration became increasingly evident in her stories
too. These were the kinds of comments I was expecting to hear from the
women.

As I listened more carefully, however, I realised that the women’s ex-

pressions of distaste for hierarchical, authoritarian, controlling leadership
practices were linked more to their past experiences of professional leader-
ship, than to the more recent NPM discourse in education. Let me look at this
seeming contradiction in some more detail.

Volume 23 Number 7/8 2004 53

 The stories told by Ann, Kate, Jane and Karen all include references
to the bureaucratic version of team discourse that was predominant in New
Advancing women’s
Zealand schools during the 1970s and 80s and persisted into the 1990s. In
careers: What can
this discourse, the principal’s positioning at the head of a hierarchy of con-
we learn from
trol is taken for granted as necessary for effective school organisation and
co-principals’
leadership. The principal may have been constructed as an instructional
stories?
team leader working collaboratively with staff, but in practice this was en-
acted through a bureaucratic senior and middle management hierarchy that
gave a largely unproblematised status, authority and control to him/her (De-
partment of Education 1976; 1984). During the late 1980s and early 90s,
however, there was a shift in New Zealand’s academic literature and profes-
sional training programmes to a transformative leadership discourse that
constructed the effective principal more as a reflective ‘servant’ leader with
the role of facilitating change through supporting the agency of other staff
(Stewart & Prebble 1993). Liz and Jane attended a course where this ap-
proach was explained. While it may have validated for them a desire to have
a more inclusive shared leadership approach, this discourse had little impact
in challenging the fairly embedded hierarchical power and status of the prin-
cipal as the final ‘authority’ in schools, as this was embedded into law in
1989 within the NPM version of principalship (Education Act 1989).
The point that needs noting here, is that the NPM was not introducing
a new version of hierarchy in schools. It was merely bolstering the existing
model (by its increased emphasis on the principal’s responsibility and
power to control teachers’ work, through performance management for ex-
ample). Liz’s and Jane’s aspirations towards a structural change that could
(in Jane’s liberal feminist discourse) validate more inclusive leadership
practices, were thus an expression of their resistance not just to new
managerialism, but also to long established professional hierarchies of
power and control.
They were not alone here. Their aims resonate with some other
co-principals’ aspirations to build wider democratic processes in schools. In
a New Zealand large secondary school, for example, two co-principals re-
linquished their veto power over decisions made by teacher project teams
(Glenny, Lewis & White 1996), while in a more radical vein, some schools
in Norway and the US had eschewed appointing a principal altogether. Re-
searchers of the resulting teacher team leaderships have shown how this ap-
proach has enabled all the teachers to be involved in policy and decision
making in their schools (Barnett, McKowen & Bloom 1998; Bergersen
1988; Gursky 1990). Although they did not realise it at the time, it was this
teaching co-principal collective leadership approach that Liz and Jane initi-
ated at Hillcrest Avenue School.
Some seeming inconsistencies cut across the women co-principals’
accounts of aspirations for collaborative practice, however. For example, al-
though Brigid said that she favoured and enjoyed working closely with
other people, she had never worked in a team teaching situation. Ann regret-

54 Equal Opportunities International

ted that she had not had more experience of working with a collaborative
principal, but she was anxious about whether she should take up Kate’s invi-
Advancing women’s
tation to join her in a co-principalship. And although Karen had enjoyed
careers: What can
working previously in a close teaching team, she could not envision how a
we learn from
‘flat’ three-way teaching co-principalship could work effectively. This is
co-principals’
probably not surprising, given that Karen had previously positioned herself
stories?
within a more ‘commonsense’ sport discourse of teamwork, where a captain
‘calls the game’ and each member has a particular role to play. This dis-
course is similar to the team leadership approach propounded by Belbin
(1993). He advocated that a team leader should gather around him/her indi-
viduals who had a range of different skills, devising roles to suit their differ-
ent capabilities and moulding them into a cohesive, efficient entity. In his
view a leader should have “the driving force to project a vision ... and the
preparedness for the confrontation involved in defending the vision suc-
cessfully and seeing off rival visions and goals” (1993, p.96). Belbin’s dis-
cussion of team leadership is highly individualistic, combative, competitive
- it is a version of team leadership that has been commonly promoted as the
kind an enterprise culture requires.
Rejecting, taking up and/or negotiating different gendered discourses
In the preceding discussions I have been showing how the women were
speaking and acting both within and against managerial and professional
discourses. I want to look now at how their understandings of gender and
their varying positionings of themselves in (or outside) feminist discourses
impacted differently on their personal goals as educational leaders. Feminist
analyses of gender discourses are routinely overlooked in many leadership
and management articles, with the effect that over-simplified solutions to
women’s under-representation in leadership positions are often offered.
In her studies of newly appointed Australian women principals who
had lived through the feminist politics of the 1970s, however, Blackmore
(1999, p.193) found that while many “had fought for equal pay and equal
opportunity legislation and actively worked as change agents through the
1980s, others had little need to reflect on gendered politics once in power.
Gender was not part of their sense of individual ability and worth”. Both
Grace (1995) and Hall (1996) reported similar findings in their studies of
women educational leaders in the UK. Each of these researchers noted also
that several of their women leaders specifically disclaimed any feminist af-
filiation and Blackmore also stated that while not all of the Australian
women educators identified themselves as feminist, many were drawing, al-
beit it unknowingly at times, on “particular readings of feminist discourses”
(1999, p.196). The most influential of these were “liberal feminism with its
emphasis on individuals and proceduralism, and cultural feminism’s advo-
cacy of caring and sharing” (ibid). She argued that for the women she stud-
ied, these discourses “were more comfortable than radical or socialist
feminisms which focus on gender politics, difference and conflictual social
relations” (ibid).

Volume 23 Number 7/8 2004 55

 Some of these dynamics and differences were evident also among the
New Zealand women co-principals I studied. While Liz was very comfort-
Advancing women’s
able espousing radical, women-centred politics, Brigid described herself as
careers: What can
probably a liberal feminist. She said that she was interested in working for
we learn from
change in equity areas, but she laughed about her sisters’ comments, “There
co-principals’
goes Brigid, doing her feminist ‘left’ thing again,” because she saw the gen-
stories?
der and cultural equity programmes she had initiated in her school as natural
ways of working as a concerned educator. Brigid’s feminism was not articu-
lated by her as an influential factor in her decision to initiate a
co-principalship with Carrie. It could be argued that her feminism was thus
not as consciously politicised as that of either Liz or Jane.
I have already noted Jane’s commitment to liberal feminism and the
way she traced this to her university study. Perhaps it was this that alerted
her (when she was not able to get back into teaching after looking after her
brother’s family) to the contradictions between the rhetoric of liberal egali-
tarian discourse and discriminatory state educational employment practice.
She also took action here, however, on her own behalf. Foucault’s (1977)
analysis of power as produced in social interactions, rather than being
owned by an individual or group and always exercised repressively to the
disadvantage of a subordinated individual or group, provides a useful com-
mentary on this. He stated that:
All those on who power is exercised to their detriment ... can begin the
struggle on their own terrain ... In engaging in a struggle that concerns
their own interests, whose objectives they clearly understand and whose
methods only they can determine, they enter a revolutionary process... in
specific struggle against the particularized power, the constraints and
controls that are exercised over them (Foucault, 1977, p.216).
It was not just experiences of discrimination and learning about femi-
nism that fed into Jane’s motivations for school organisational change, how-
ever: she pointed out that her experience of a male principal’s power sharing
approach made a big impression on her. This gives the lie to some cultural
feminist assertions about negative qualities in ‘male’ leadership styles, such
as those presented by Loden (1985), when she described masculine leader-
ship as competitive, hierarchical, rational, unemotional, analytic, strategic
and controlling, and feminine leadership as cooperative, team working, in-
tuitive/rational, focused on high performance, empathetic and collabora-
tive.
Although Ann (like Carrie and Karen) did not call herself a feminist,
she drew on such a cultural feminist dichotomy when she described collabo-
rative decision making as constructed within a woman’s way of leading. She
saw this exemplified in her own and Kate’s approaches, which she de-
scribed as naturally anti-hierarchy. Blackmore (1999, p.188) found that
most of the Australian women educators she studied used this cultural femi-
nist discourse unproblematically and in my study, Liz also subscribed to this
way of thinking, as did many of the other teachers, parents and board I talked

56 Equal Opportunities International

to during this study, when they suggested that the co-principalship was a
to-be-expected outcome of women’s ‘natural’ affinities for relational ways
Advancing women’s
of working. It is these kinds of beliefs that underpin many people’s assump-
careers: What can
tions that women are ‘more suited’ to care-giving and family responsibili-
we learn from
ties than men – and concomitantly, that women will give more priority to
co-principals’
those areas of life than to paid work and career advancement. Such assump-
stories?
tions and beliefs are shaped within the persisting cult of domesticity dis-
course that was brought to New Zealand from Britain during colonisation.
Within the cult of domesticity discourse, a preconstructed heteronormative
strand assumes that social relations are organised around heterosexual cou-
ples where men are positioned in paid work as the primary ‘breadwinners’
for the family while women carry primary responsibility for care-giving and
domestic work in the home. (James & Saville-Smith 1989).

Karen’s stories are interesting in regard to this discourse. She (like some
women described by Blackmore, Grace and Hall) explicitly disavowed any
form of gendered identification for herself, calling herself a person who
happens to be female. She had taken it for granted though, that she ‘should’
put her own career on hold while she devoted herself to bringing up her chil-
dren. She did not recognise this as a gendered discursive imperative, de-
scribing it rather as emerging out of her own commitments to her family, as
part of her personal integrity as a good parent. A discourse analysis of her
stories suggests, however, that for her, the material realities of being a sole
parent, who needed to work to support herself and her children, were inter-
secting with the cult of domesticity discourse of mothering as women’s pri-
mary role. Consequently any idea of moving into a more responsible and/or
demanding career role was not seen by her as viable while her children were
growing up.

Kate negotiated the ‘call’ of the cult of domesticity discourse rather

more painfully than Karen. As indicated in her story, she experienced con-
flicting personal dilemmas and guilt that emerged from her contradictory
positionings of herself within elements of liberal and radical feminist dis-
courses and the cult of domesticity discursive construction of women’s role
as being primarily ‘a good wife and mother’. Although she decided that she
could ‘do’ both career and family, she suffered considerable stress and pain
– from a combination of work overload and guilt that she was not spending
enough time with her family.

Some of the women co-principals’ stories in the wider study illustrate

further how continuities and contestations around discourses of teaching
and leadership, gender and feminism, were cut through by different experi-
ences of, and commitments to, struggles over ethnicity and class. As McNay
has stated, in people’s lives, there are:

Volume 23 Number 7/8 2004 57

 multiple factors which conflict and interlink with each other,
producing differential effects. An individual’s own identification
Advancing women’s
with and investment in different subject positions and power
careers: What can relations makes it difficult to speak of gender as some kind of
we learn from unifying or bonding experience (McNay 1992).
co-principals’
stories? Conclusion
The preceding discussions have shown that this group of apparently similar
women primary school co-principals did not all have the same aspirations,
desires, values and understandings in relation to sharing school leadership
and they did not take up just one discourse or another as they aspired to ca-
reer positions of leadership. Neither were they similar in terms of a desire to
be principally ‘a caring, nurturing woman’, as is implied in a cultural femi-
nist discourse of ‘natural femininity’. Indeed, an individual women’s career
ambitions may, like those of Carrie, be expressed even at the expense of a
close friend’s commitment to collegiality. In relation to the themes of this
special issue, the message is clear, I hope: strategies to assist women into
leadership positions need to take into account individual differences across
a range of factors, including the complexities of varying gender
positionings, and different commitments to and negotiations of discursive
constructions of leadership and management in circulation in their organisa-
tions and wider social and political contexts.
The discussion has also drawn out how some women were negotiat-
ing conflicting family/career desires and responsibilities by proactively
constructing collective ways of ‘leading together’. This not only enabled
them to ‘manage’ their ‘double shifts’: it resulted in co-principal shared
leaderships that pose a challenge to the hegemony of the singular corporate
executive leader model in education. The article thus raises a different set of
questions for women’s career development, suggesting that considerations
of strategies to assist women to move ‘up’ within an existing corporate lead-
ership model could include questions about how those corporate executive
structures and practices could change, to be more inclusive of women mem-
bers of the organisation.
Endnote
1. All names of places and people are pseudonyms.

58 Equal Opportunities International

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