Nearly 30 years have passed since US researchers raised the question “Why do women teach and men manage?” (Strober and Tyack 1980). At that time there was little research into the issues of school leadership and management and even less attention to questions of gender. Times have changed. A good deal of recent educational research has focused on the role of the school principal in terms of, inter alia, leadership style, more effective school management, comprehensive and transparent reporting, keeping up with the most recent policy and practice and motivating the teachers (Day et al 2008; Caldwell, 2005, Leithwood et al, 2008; Mulford, 2008). In much of this work the principal is configured as a gender neutral repository of sets of skills and competencies. Another strand of the related literature is critical of the managerialist turn in educational leadership and laments the degree to which the traditional understanding of schooling has been overtaken by a new model in which the school is seen as a business venture, preoccupied with economic sustainability and efficient throughput (Ball, 1995; Grace, 1995). In both strands the leadership is discussed in terms that resonate with masculine qualities. Despite the increasing presence of women among the ranks of school leaders it seems that there has been little attention to the question of gender in either past or current constructions of school leadership, although some impressive inroads have been made by a few in broader leadership categories (Blackmore & Sachs,2000,2007; Sinclair 2008). The central question for this paper concerns the way in which the current research agendas around school leadership are played out in the daily work experience of a cross section of school principals.

The ways in which this gender imbalance has impacted on student experience and understanding is illustrated with reference to material from the author’s ethnographic studies of schooling. Then, using data drawn from a current qualitative interview based study of the experience of school principals across sectors and school levels, this paper analyses the principals accounts and highlights the gendered dimensions that impact on the daily lives of people running the school.

In particular the analysis focuses on the ways in which systemic schools are increasingly caught up in an atmosphere of managerialist policy and neo-liberal conditioning, and discusses the problems occurring in terms of this development and women’s positioning. In contrast, principals in the independent or private school sector, many more of whom are male, have a much greater degree of autonomy and are able to conduct their leadership in self chosen ways through which they stylise themselves as the successful educational leader (du Gay, 1994). The paper concludes by urging more attention to the gendered dimensions of school leadership as conceptualised and practised in the interest of promoting greater equity in present school organisation and student futures.