Women’s Leadership Needs Institutional Architecture, Not Exceptional Endurance

A governing body celebrates the appointment of its first woman to a senior role. Her biography is impressive. She has accumulated qualifications, served through difficult assignments, sustained a family and built credibility in rooms where she was often the only woman present. The institution presents her endurance as proof that opportunity is open to everyone.

Yet the same institution still fills roles through informal networks, announces vacancies with little notice, treats mobility as unlimited availability, schedules consequential meetings around unexamined care assumptions, tolerates gendered hostility and gives new leaders responsibility without matching resources. One exceptional appointment has crossed the system. The system itself has not changed.

Women’s leadership needs institutional architecture, not exceptional endurance. A values-based institution should examine the whole route through which people become eligible, visible, selected, authorised, supported, evaluated and succeeded. Equality is not achieved when women are permitted to carry unequal costs more impressively.

On 27 August, UNESCO’s International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa scheduled a research-and-practice session on increasing the share of female teachers and school leaders in Africa. It formed part of a wider series on gender equality, teacher voice, school leadership, governance and educational opportunity. The session was an organised knowledge exchange, not an evaluation showing that participating systems have already changed promotion or leadership outcomes.

At the same time, the East African Community reported from its…