Abstract
Women dominate the South African educational system and the country's current gender redress legislation has made leadership positions more accessible for women. However, attaining leadership roles within the profession is often beset with political and socio-cultural challenges. Although the educational leadership terrain is riddled with challenges, women who ultimately assume leadership roles invariably enact motherly tendencies and show sensitivity to social justice issues. These qualities are often consistent with servant leadership characteristics such as nurturance, care, and an attitude of social justice – but are often devalued. The pathway and educational leadership terrain that women navigate is often un/under researched. Thus, the rationale for this study was to interrupt these silences. Therefore, the study explored the concept of social justice, servant leadership and career aspiration experiences of South African women in education leadership.
Presently, the norm is to employ qualitative methods when conducting research on women. However, there is a need to employ mixed methods to investigate and represent women’s expansive social reality. For this reason, this study adopted mixed methods research approaches and a critical feminist framework as a theoretical and conceptual lens. A transformative paradigm informed the mixed methods approaches. Data were collected from 120 women educational leaders in the Gauteng Province of South Africa, using a concurrent approach. For the qualitative component, two women self-empowerment workshops and three focus group discussions were held. The quantitative component comprised three revised scales – measuring career aspirations, servant leadership characteristics, and social justice behaviours respectively. The two data sets were analysed separately. The qualitative data were inductively analysed, using critical discourse analysis (CDA) and descriptive analysis to analyse the quantitative data for observable patterns. The two data sets were integrated, using a bidirectional approach to give rise to meta inferences.
The study established that South African women in education contend with social justice challenges on multiple levels – at personal level, within their school contexts, and within
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the wider community. Women navigate these challenges by engaging proactive responses, which are representative of servant leadership behaviours, rooted in ethical social justice pursuits. Furthermore, their social justice intentions and behaviours centre on inclusion and embracing diversity. The study also found that patriarchy has an imperious impact on women’s leadership insights. These insights have generated the perception that men are natural leaders, thus rendering leadership a male domain, and in the process, impeding the career and leadership aspirations of women. Therefore, there is a need to conscientise women of their unique leadership abilities by formal empowerment interventions and equipping them with Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) skills – such as technological knowledge, dexterity, as well as acquiring visionary insights and intuition.
Key words: career aspirations, critical feminism, mixed methods, servant leadership, social justice, South Africa, women education leaders.