Scopus Journal Call for paper: Journal for Multicultural Education (Moving Forward: Women Building the Leadership Path Across Pipelines and Settings)

Women remain underrepresented in K-20 education leadership. For example, in the U.S. K-12 space, while women represent more than 77% of teachers, they represent 69% of elementary school principals and only 36% of high school principals (IES, 2021). Only 23% of principals in U.S. public schools were people of color, and only 7% were Black women. Additionally, while such disparities also affect women of other minoritized racial and ethnic identities and other marginalized identities (e.g., sexuality, disability status, religion), data on their experiences remains sparse.
This limited representation at the school level then affects women’s access to becoming superintendents. Only 29% of superintendents today are women (and even fewer are women of color); this percentage has barely budged in 20 years. Similar disparities are present all over the world with women and particularly those with multiple minoritized identities consistently being overrepresented in teaching and underrepresented in leadership (OECD, 2017).
This imbalance in leadership also holds in higher education, women generally continue to be underrepresented in leadership with even higher gaps for women of color (Townsend, 2021). A UNESCO-IESALC and Times Higher Education report (Bothwell et al., 2022) indicates that women higher education leaders in Latin American and European institutions was under 20% despite there being almost 40% women researchers in institutions globally. These gaps persist even as women have come to comprise higher numbers of those earning Ph.D.s than men do (Melidona et al., 2023). As true in the K-12 space, research on gender in higher education suggests that this disproportionality is related to the continued societal and institutional barriers women in the academy face (Islam et al., 2023; Le Fevre et al., 2024; Meza-Mejia et al., 2023).
Together, and across the international K-20 spectrum, this work illuminates why centering the voices and stories of women in educational leadership is so critical. Moreover, the persistent threats to and gaps in women’s leadership opportunities and ability to thrive in such positions suggest a need for new ways of thinking about these issues and solutions to address them. The fight is far from over; we need and have created this special issue to encourage new and better ways to think about how to create more opportunities for women to thrive. This includes explicitly challenging Eurocentrism and Whiteness and their role in shaping the field and whose stories are told and by whom. We welcome international voices and new perspectives as well as all methodological approaches.

List of Topic Areas

Feminization and Professional Stratification;
The Exploitation of Care Work;
Intersectionality and Education Leadership;
Attending to the Broken “Rung” – pipeline practices to recruit, hire and retain more women leaders;
Reimagining a More Inclusive Model of Education Leadership;
Women’s Voices Influencing Equitable and Responsive Education, Women leaders wellbeing and rest as resistance

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available here: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jfme
Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see here: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/jme
Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to ““Please select the issue you are submitting to”.
Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.