Abstract
Women's representation in leadership globally has not been in parity for a long time. Literature has identified various factors from which such a challenge emanates. Amongst the factors, political, structural, sociocultural, individual choices, and others seem to dominate in promulgating this concern. In the education system in the Kingdom of Eswatini, women's underrepresentation in leadership organogram has been a norm, yet the teaching profession is more feminised. This study was then conducted to establish whether women who are student teachers aspire to be in leadership as they move in their career path, ascertain if they aspire to be servant leaders, find out what they perceive as barriers that impede women from advancing into leadership in education; and how women can be accelerated in filling up leadership spaces. Data was gathered through two surveys administered to 154 respondents, completing the Career Aspiration Scale-Revised (CAS-R) and the Servant Leadership (SL) instrument, using the critical feminist lens and explanatory sequencing mixed method design. For reliability, the Cronbach’s Alpha for the CAS-R was at 0.72 and for the SL at 0.71. Further data was also collected through Focus Group Discussions (FGDS) with 15 participants who shared their insights on the barriers that impede women’s access to educational leadership and how women can be accelerated to leadership spaces. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 26 was used, and data was presented as descriptive statistics in graphs, tables, and pie charts to analyse the data from the surveys. Data analysis for the FGDs (qualitative) used the thematic and critical discourse format of analyses, and results were presented in narrative and verbatim ways. The findings reflected that women aspired to be in educational leadership and were willing to adopt the servant leadership style of leading in their tenure as leaders. However, some barriers emerged in personal, organisational, socio-cultural, and structural settings that became labyrinths in women's path to power access. The participants also shared some strategies they thought could be implemented to accelerate women in educational leadership. The themes emerging from the strategy included women's empowerment, sociocultural endeavours to adopt, institutional undertakings and leadership styles to consider. The study concluded by suggesting that women were to empower themselves and be transformative leaders willing to confront and disrupt the oppressive powers that have been silencing their leadership growth and advocate for laws, frameworks and policies addressing gender equality.
Keywords: career aspirations, servant leadership, critical feminist, barriers, acceleration strategies, empowerment, transformative mixed methods.