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Dive Brief:
- An overwhelming majority — 87% — of women education leaders say they want to advance in their careers, and 68% reported taking on expanded leadership responsibilities in the last two years, according to a recent national survey from Women Leading Ed.
- However, an even larger majority — 92% — say stress is a significant problem in education leadership, and nearly 4 in 5 say their work-life balance is not good, the nonprofit found. Top stressors include funding and budgets, followed by declining enrollment and challenges with staffing pipelines and relationships with their boards.
- Lower numbers reported access to training and development in these areas, with less than a third (32%) saying they received high-quality professional development in finance and budgeting, and even fewer (29%) in negotiation.
Dive Insight:
Work-life balance is “at crisis level” for women education leaders, who are “held to a different set of expectations” at work, according to Women Leading Ed’s report released April 9. For example, 86% of women report making career sacrifices that they say their male counterparts do not have to make. In addition, 9 in 10 say they feel pressure about their appearance, behavior or perception in order to be seen as credible in leadership roles, the report said.
They also face more responsibilities outside of work than men do, such as caring for aging parents and managing household work, according to research cited by the nonprofit.
“While women are carrying more at home, formalized supports to help leaders balance these responsibilities remain limited,” said the Women Leading Ed report, which surveyed over 200 women education leaders across 40 states in January. “It is hardly surprising, then, that indicators of that strain, such as work-life balance, have reached crisis levels.”
The survey found that 80% of women leaders said they had actively sought a promotion in the last year.
That stands in contrast to a 2025 McKinsey & Co. report that pointed to “a notable ambition gap” between men and women, saying that women were less interested in being promoted. The gap, however, closes when women get the same career support that men do, the McKinsey report found.
Women Leading Ed said its report “directly challenges” McKinsey’s finding that the ambition gap is growing for women.
“The idea that women are losing ambition just doesn’t match what we see every day,” said Julia Rafal-Baer, founder and CEO of Women Leading Ed, in an April 9 statement.
“These are leaders who are raising their hands for more responsibility in one of the hardest moments education has faced. In many ways, the sector is being held together by the bootstraps of hardworking women, and it’s on all of us to make sure they have the support to advance and lead at the level they’re ready for,” Rafal-Baer said.
Women now hold about one-third of superintendent positions in the nation’s 500 largest districts, reaching the highest share recorded in recent years, according to research from the ILO Group. ILO Group is a K-12 education strategy and policy firm also founded and led by Rafal-Baer.
Still, the ILO annual analysis found that equal representation is still about three decades away.
Meanwhile, a report by AASA, The School Superintendents Association, found similar levels of female representation in education leadership — and that the percentage of women superintendents increased from 13% in 2000 to 30% in 2025.
But the AASA report also found that women and people of color remain “dramatically underrepresented” in the superintendency. The ILO report shared four solutions to address the disparities women face in education leadership:
- Make pathways to education leadership for women explicit and accessible, such as through creating pipelines, ensuring equitable access to high-impact opportunities, and investing in leadership cohorts.
- Make leadership positions sustainable by examining workload structures, staffing models, and political dynamics that can lead to burnout.
- Expand access to training — specifically in finance, operations and governance — and give women consistent opportunities to apply their skills in those areas
- Invest in state-level infrastructure for responsible AI leadership, such as by developing model policies and guidance.
