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Turning the tables on gender leadership 

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India's dusty villages are a long way from Norway's snowy fjords, but when it comes to female leadership there appears to be striking similarities between subcontinental village politics and Norwegian corporate life.

Norway is a shining star among countries helping women to combine work and family life. It's close to gender balance in the workforce, in parliament and in government, and a 2003 law mandates that 40 per cent of board positions be reserved for women. Yet the Norwegian Gender Balance Scorecard shows that 89.5 per cent of the CEOs in Norway's top 200 companies are male.

The picture is similar in Australia. Women in Leadership: Lessons from Companies Leading the Way, a major report by McKinsey & Co, found that women make up about 42 per cent of all employees and a quarter of all executives, but they fall at the last hurdle, making up only 10 per cent of CEOs. The 2017 report was based on data from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency and interviews inside pace-setting members of the Business Council of Australia.

What's going on? Lata Gangadharan, an experimental economist at Monash University, has published two studies that put some popular explanations to the test. Social Identity and Governance: The behavioral response to female leaders reports on whether male backlash is more than a myth. Leadership Selection: Can changing the default break the glass ceiling? explores whether women really are reluctant to put their hands up, and finds they are more likely to be promoted if all candidates are considered unless they deliberately "opt out".

Male backlash

Could there really be a male backlash against women as leaders? To test this idea, Gangadharan conducted a field experiment in India that focused "on men's willingness to contribute to collective activities, and whether they behave differently when women are leaders".
The research was conducted against the background of a natural experiment resulting from the Indian government's 1992 decision to mandate quotas for women in the role of village head.

Gangadharan and her team conducted a simulation game in 40 villages, forming groups of four people, two men and two women. Each participant was handed a small sum of money and given the option of putting some into a "public pot". This group account notionally represented a collective enterprise, such as a school building or a water purification project.

"What we see in real life is that when collective things need to be done, some people contribute a lot and others don't," Gangadharan says. "Incentives and social norms are important in this, and we tried to replicate that in the game. The members of the group could walk away with all the money they were given, or put some in the public pot and walk away with more."

In half the groups, the position of leader was assigned to a woman. The result? "We found that men, as citizens, contribute much less to the collective project when they have a female leader than when they have a male leader."

Significantly, this male backlash against female leadership was stronger in villages where there had been at least one female head. Surveys in other villages confirmed men believe it is more socially inappropriate for women to become village heads.

But then came an unexpected result. The bias wasn't found in villages where there had been large numbers of female leaders since the quota system came into effect. As Gangadharan puts it: "The men had got used to it."

It's no surprise that some Australians have a similar reaction when their gender roles and sense of entitlement are challenged. Women in Leadership notes several "below the surface" fears among employees, including worries that women will be promoted on their gender, not merit.

Men say they are afraid of losing their jobs and missing out on opportunities. One staffer asked his boss: "Does that mean my son will never get a job here?"

The personality factor

Another argument is sometimes put forward to explain why women aren't progressing through the career pipeline at the same rate as men. They're simply less competitive, the theory goes. They don't like to put their hands up because they're worried about being perceived as aggressive.

To put this idea to the test, and see if there was a way to get around the problem, Gangadharan conducted a separate study comparing two approaches to selecting the talent pool - "opt in" and "opt out".

In one round of the game, played by groups of students in Melbourne, participants had to consciously "opt in" for promotion to a leadership role. In another round, under the "opt out" policy, "everyone was automatically placed in contention for promotion unless they actively said they did not want to be considered".

Under the opt-in system, more men than women put themselves forward, "but with opt-out the gender difference largely disappears", Gangadharan says.

"Many junior people, especially women, are being advised to do many different things - put yourself forward, put your hand up, sit at the table, lean in. It's fine if your personality is like that, but we wanted to focus less on fixing women and more on fixing the institution."

Does this mean companies might end up with leaders who aren't suited to lead? Unlikely, she says. The opt-in process attracts people who are assertive risk-takers and rewards individuals who like to compete and to win. But the opt-out process allows people with a far broader range of personality traits to rise to the top.

Gangadharan's discoveries are crucial pieces in the puzzle, as organisations try to work out why decades of education, rafts of affirmative action and never-ending pep talks haven't fully achieved their goals.

The Women in Leadership report on Australian corporations shows some companies are already taking such ideas out of the laboratory and into the office. One female CEO says: "There's a discomfort amongst women to say 'I want that' and declare their ambition. I try to normalise that."

Another organisation requires 50 per cent of candidates for almost all roles to be women. The results are encouraging, says an executive. "I've received comments from managers sharing that, on paper, they would not have put forward certain candidates, but they were the strongest in the interview process. The process is yielding results."

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India's dusty villages are a long way from Norway's snowy fjords, but when it comes to female leadership there appears to be striking similarities between subcontinental village politics and Norwegian corporate life. Norway is a shining star among countries helping women to combine work and family life.

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For a number of years the evidence has been telling us that school principal wellbeing is on the decline. Only last week a principal in Western Australia died at her desk.

It's sad and shocking and it's a very clear reminder of just how much they are suffering.

The research of Associate Professor Philip Riley from the Australian Catholic University's Institute showed that principals are experiencing workplace demands that are 1.5 times higher than the general population.

That makes them subject to higher levels of burnout (1.6 times higher), stress symptoms (1.7 times higher), difficulty sleeping (2.2 times higher), and depressive symptoms (1.3 times higher).

Why, I hear you ask? The answer is complicated but it was the focus of our research.

Without a doubt the workloads of principals have increased exponentially for a multitude of reasons.

The risk-adverse nature of our society means they have more reporting and compliance to do. This ensures that standards are met, that principals are delivering on expectations of students, parents, staff, the community, the department and even of themselves.

However as a service giving profession like nurses, there has been a long-standing view (often held by the principal themselves) that they are required to do all of this in addition to their more publicly perceived role of leading the school.

They have less time to lead, mentor and support staff as well as engage with students, which is the reason they became an educator in the first place.

Principals interrupted 70 times a day

Our research found a principal's administrative load is about 25 per cent of their available time, with 34 per cent of this completed outside of school hours.

They have more than 12 different and distinct areas of work, many of which require different skills sets as well as emotional agility in order to cope while moving from one highly stressful task to another.

School stakeholders are far more demanding than any other time in human history.(ABC: Mary Lloyd)

The stakeholders are far more demanding than ever. In our research, some principals were interrupted on average 70 times a day in school hours.

In an age where their accountability and pressure is high and far more visible than ever with social media, any mistake that is made in a school finds itself on the front page of the newspaper and is blown up with hyperbole, thus they agonise over every decision.

Social media itself has led to all sorts of challenges for principals in the student and staff population, as well as the parent body.

Lastly, the sheer volume of work and the rise of portable technology means they simply never turn off, working evenings and weekends to keep up. It's a lonely job.

All in all what we discovered is that being a school principal is the broadest and most complex job we have examined.

Not only is it emotionally draining, it's varied and requires an amazing amount of self-control, critical thinking and agility.

A behemoth of a challenge

So how do we help principals improve their wellbeing? It's a behemoth of a challenge, with more than 3,000 principals across NSW and over 9,300 across Australia.

While there are common threads in the challenges they face, they have different geographical locations, cultural differences, socio-economic differences and differences in between primary and secondary to contend with.

There's no one solution, quick fix or silver bullet. It's involves a change in approach among students, parents, staff, government and principals and society as a whole.

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It's a mix of students, parents, staff, government and principals as well as societies changing as a whole that have given rise to the situation today.

The way in which we work and live today is very different (for example, the introduction of the smart phone has changed the way we interact), and this impacts on each of these stakeholders, culminating in an extraordinarily difficult role for principals as the centre point within a school environment.

It's evident that the role of the principals has significantly changed and the load is simply too great for any one person to continue to bear.

The Riley report made recommendations for principal wellbeing that suggested increasing the principals' connection to the people with whom they work, helping them work more effectively, and improving their work-life balance.

From our research we designed a 12-month program to address the issues facing the principals, acknowledging that the job has dramatically changed over the years and focussing on:

Wellbeing, especially recovery using strategies to rest, reset and reflect;

Efficiency, which focuses on reducing interruptions with better email and telephone use, as well as effective and healthy use of portable technology;

Resilience which focuses coping with unhelpful thoughts and emotions using different psychological techniques; and

Purpose which focuses on reconnecting them back to their passion for the role and the reason they became a principal in the first place.

There are also many ideas for strategies involving stakeholders, including educating parents on the role of principals and whom they should go to for which concerns (ie. often issues regarding individual students can be dealt with at a teacher level); changes or reductions to the compliance requirements of principals; and a streamlining of school administration systems - although it would take time for the impact to be noticeable.

Less being led astray, more leading

Among the 228 principals involved in the project, there was a marked (360 per cent) increase in number coping well, and huge reductions in the number just coping or having difficulties coping; a 56 per cent improvement in how positive they felt about work; an increase in work-life balance; and boost in reported energy levels when they went home.

[kids in a classroom]

Twenty per cent of principals went into the program with the mentality that they were going to leave the profession because of the stress. They are all now staying, and many of them have received promotions.

Efficiency had improved drastically with time required to complete admin and compliance reduced, mainly due to them controlling their environment better (reducing the amount of time spent on email and the phone) and shutting their door to have periods of time with no distractions.

Importantly, the time gained was then spent on leading people, developing staff and engaging with students.
Dr Adam Fraser led The Flourish Project, a collaboration with the Deakin University Business School and The Shoalhaven Primary Principals' Council designed to reduce burnout and boost efficiency for principals.

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'It's a lonely job': how can we help stressed-out principals?

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Challenging kids, demanding parents, social media - no wonder our school principals are finding it harder than ever to cope with the demands of the job. But recent research shows there are ways to help them, which in turn helps us all, writes Adam Fraser.

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This is a great article from Kevin Treston.