Even recently, men maintain their dominance in the field of public education, and women remain underrepresented in school administration despite their numbers in teaching and school leadership preparation programs. Thus, men define what it means to manage and run schools and school systems. Their assumptions, beliefs and values ​​constitute what has been taken as natural and normative.

This is not to say that women have not expressed their ideas and opinions on the establishment and management of educational organizations. Women’s voices, however, have been sporadic. With the feminist and civil rights movements beginning in the 1960s to the present, women and minorities have increasingly assumed leadership positions, thus 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 reshaped what management and leadership mean for all aspirants.

The objective of this article is to support the reformulation of the traditional notions of educational management, based on the premise that these meanings are constructions engendered by men. Rather, my objective is to elaborate an alternative device to test the notion of educational management as a genre.

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 American management, three lines of argument demonstrate how this gender has historically been the masculine. First, the first management theories were developed mainly by men. The theory emphasized standardization, economic incentives, experience in large organizations, time motion studies, worker productivity, and focused 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 go in the organization, the fewer women you find. As in business administration, gender stratification is also evident in educational administration. Although women make up the majority of the country’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 all the more puzzling given that women make up at least half of those enrolled in educational administrator preparation programs. The participation of women in such programs suggests that the underrepresentation of women in school administration is less related to their lack of aspiration towards leadership positions than to structural and cultural barriers to the integration of women, such as opportunities for promotion. and proper “fitness” for administration.

Third, because men held leadership positions, social science research on organizations has largely examined the male experience. Male leaders have been the objects of study with male researchers also driving the nature and type of study. Furthermore, this research on and for white men has become so widespread that their patterns of action have become the professional norm. Mastering management theory, ownership, and research, white men shaped the assumptions, beliefs, and values ​​that have become the foundations of leadership in organizations, often uncritically accepted and professionally standardized. A gender-based management construct becomes particularly problematic when the perspectives, concerns and interests of a single gender and 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 roles are forced to operate in the field 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 broadened by taking women’s perspectives into account.

A second reason to correct the imbalance is that scrutinizing what is taken for granted in a male-dominated culture can transform those assumptions, beliefs, and values. In recent years, poststructuralist theories have contributed to exposing the contradictions of an androcentric culture. This body of theories reveals socially constructed meanings through language and suggests ways in which competing linguistic patterns might produce current notions of gender. Examining 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 useful reforms and revitalizations in current management practices. While there is reason to understand management as a gender construct and to correct for a male bias in the definition, unraveling such a construct can be difficult without the support of analytical devices that partition key aspects of the phenomenon. At the same time, such devices must preserve the composite nature and the totality of the phenomenon.