West, Jacquet, King, Correll and Bergstrom (2013) observed a notable gender gap in the authorship of academic papers. Drawing on a survey of the academic journal library JSTOR’s collection of articles, they found that there was no major academic field in which women comprised most authors. Statistics for female authors by discipline showed that women publishing in Education contributed 46.35% to the publications despite education being a largely feminized profession. Internationally, Klein, Richardson, Grayson, Fox, Kramarae, Pollard and Dwyer (2007:103-105) posit that there is a perceived increase in the number of studies conducted on and about women in school leadership. They maintain that women are the best resources for shedding light on their experiences. It is against this background that this paper attempts to contribute to the emerging body of scholarship on women in school educational leadership and management through a topographical review of women in educational leadership in South African schools. Hallinger’s (2018:368) systematic topographical review of research on education leadership and management in Africa, reported that the topic female leadership and access to management comprised approximately nine percent (9%) of the 506 English language journal sources that were analyzed. Klein, Richardson, Grayson, Fox, Kramarae and Pollard (2014) argue that the dearth in research on women in leadership stems from women’s experiences being reported through an androcentric/male-dominated lens. For the topographical analysis discussed in this paper desk research was employed which involved the collection of data from existing published sources. The identification of sources unfolded with a boundless search of all English-language literature source types irrespective of date of publication. The South African women in school education leadership literature database yielded a relatively small subset of peer reviewed literature for the period 2000-2019. Eventually, data were extracted from the 31 peer-reviewed English language journal articles and was analysed quantitatively. The aim was to map the terrain with respect to a body of literature authored about women leading school education in South Africa with the intention of noting implications for future research in the field. The goal was to describe the trends and surface features of a literature database such as journals, topics and subtopics, source regions, authors and research methods used in the studies. The analysis revealed the following trends in terms of knowledge production, research topics, authorship, and impact.

Although, a small group of scholars are publishing predominantly qualitative research studies this quantitative topographical analysis provides a partial glimpse of women publishing on South African school educational leadership.