The past three decades have seen women occupying managerial roles and responsibilities that hitherto had been the prerogative of the male. Yet change has been glacial slow in some arenas despite the introduction of equality legislation in a variety of (mostly western) jurisdictions. Likewise, the introduction of a neo-liberal policy agenda by successive governments in the Anglophone world has promoted schools to be understood as organisations, employing and adopting organisational practices which have implications for social interpretation of who occupies leadership positions and the resulting consequential reproduction of the hegemonic norm.

Particularly, women’s relationship with teaching has a complex historical legacy; viewed initially as being a continuation of their nurturing roles, the so-called caring dimension which teaching requires and provides has been the focus of considerable scrutiny by scholars. Despite a plethora of initiatives by a variety of stakeholders, women continue to be marginalised at leadership level in many countries – the further along the promotional ladder they travel, the less likely they are to meet a counterpart.

In contrast, educational leadership research seems somewhat more committed to addressing issues of equality, diversity and justice within educational organisations, than it was several decades ago. In this symposium we claim that gender and biological sex are different. Thus, we view gender as a social category not a biological one and therefore each of the presenters displays the term gender within the context of their paper. The strength of the symposium is the way it considers and makes reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones.

Gender is used more broadly to denote a range of identities that do not correspond to established ideas of male and female.  In addition to using the term gender have adopted intersectionality as an approach a lens to focus and better acknowledge and capture differences across the women leaders. We loosely define intersectionality as an interconnected approach pulling social categories such as race, class and gender as they apply to a given group, creating an overlapping an interdependent system of discrimination or disadvantage, 

            The presentations in this symposium shed light on the connection between female leadership and social justice, the crisis in education caused by COVID-19, and knowledge production. They draw on data from a wide variety of countries, including Lebanon, Palestine, Turkey, South Africa, and the UK. Together they provide an account of female leaders' lives and career in different contexts. The purpose of this symposium, though, is to provide insights into the research on gender and leadership from multiple points of view and bring up issues of marginalization, diversity, and exclusiveness in our educational systems. This purpose corresponds the Bloomsbury Handbook of Gender and Educational Leadership.

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