Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The evidence for the under-representation of women and minorities in leadership roles is compelling and spans the public and private sectors. In education, seven percent of school principals are Hispanic whereas Hispanic students comprise nearly a quarter of the student population (NCES, 2013). Gender parity among school leaders has increased in recent years, but women’s representation in these positions is still disproportional to their representation of classroom teachers: 52% of principals are female compared to 76% of teachers (NCES, 2013).

When controlling for qualifications and interest, men are more likely to be promoted to principal positions than women (Joy, 1998) and minority applicants are less likely to receive job offers than their white counterparts (DeAngelis & O’Connor, 2012). Other research has found that African Americans are more likely to be fired and less likely to be promoted if their manager is of a different race (Giuliano, Levine & Leonard, 2009) and teachers report higher job satisfaction and less turnover when the principal is the same gender (Grissom, Nicholson-Crotty & Keiser, 2012).

The research on gender and race bias, while suggestive, is built largely on self-report or administrative data and is uniformly limited in that the findings cannot distinguish from agency on the part of labor supply (applicant preferences) or agency on the part of labor demand (hiring bias). Thus, the existing literature has established race and gender based asymmetries in the education leadership labor market but has not been able to closely examine the role of bias.

Our study draws from application data from the majority (372 of 424) of Wisconsin districts, representing 17,242 applications from 1,948 individuals applying to 349 principal and assistant principal vacancies. Participating districts represent 76% of Wisconsin school districts and 88% of Wisconsin school leadership positions. For the last five years the proportion of female teachers has been stable at 71% while 42% of principals and assistant principals are female. In contrast to the gender trends, minoritized educators are more likely to be represented in school leadership. Black and Hispanic educators represent 2.2 and 1.5% of Wisconsin teachers; yet represent 14% and 3% of principals (respectively).

When we examine applications to leadership vacancies, preliminary results show that the gender asymmetry is largely attributable to male candidates being more proactive on the leadership job market, accounting for 51% of all school leadership applicants and 57% of all school leadership applications. Black and Hispanic candidates are also more active on the school leadership job market, accounting for 4.2% and 2.1% of all school leadership applications but only 1.3% and 1.5% of other vacancies.

Our full paper will examine the characteristics of schools preferred by female and minoritized leadership candidates, including distance from the school at which they are currently employed and anticipated salary. We will also model the role gender and race plays in being hired (using staffing data, which will be released in June 2016), conditional on the candidates in the applicant pool. These findings substantially advance our state of knowledge on this important equity issue.