麻豆精品

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for 麻豆精品 Newsletter

In 1874, the school board of Davenport, Iowa, offered Phebe Sudlow the superintendency at less than the departing man’s salary. .

“Gentlemen, if you are cutting the salary because of my experience, I have nothing to say; but if you are doing this because I am a woman, I’ll have nothing more to do with it.”

The board paid the higher rate, and Sudlow is .听

While women no longer have to make Sudlow鈥檚 argument quite so explicitly, they are still more often asked to prove something before school boards are willing to hire them permanently.  

My firm, ILO Group, tracks every leader of the nation’s . Women now hold 170 of those positions, 34%. That鈥檚 despite making up the overwhelming majority of the educator workforce. 

That gap tells who reaches the top. The pathways into those jobs show something else: Women are still being asked to do more to get there.

Well over half of the women who were promoted internally into superintendent jobs first served in interim positions, including 35% of the women now leading the Top 500. Just 25% of the men followed that path. Women are also substantially more likely than men to arrive in the top spot from a deputy superintendent job, underscoring a pattern in which women are more often required to prove their readiness from inside the district or while already doing the work.

The additional scrutiny continues even after women step into the job.

Since 2018, 349 leaders have entered a Top 500 superintendency on an interim basis. About half were hired permanently. Yet even after doing the job, women are more likely to face another hurdle: 62% still went through a formal search for the permanent position, compared with 55% of men. 

I call this the audition tax. 

A candidate is trusted enough to run the district through a leadership transition, present the budget, manage the cabinet, answer to the board, work with the community and make critical decisions impacting thousands of children.  

Then she is asked to prove she can be superintendent.  Again. 

The shows what that tax feels like. Nine in 10 respondents report pressure to manage how they dress, speak or behave in order to be read as credible, and about half still get handed the office housework: the note-taking, event-planning and logistics that keep a team running without but don’t count toward promotion.

Sometimes the double standard is not subtle at all. One top deputy in our network, the strong contender to replace her boss, was told during the search that she was “a great No. 2” and “[her male boss] in a skirt.” About half of the women superintendents in Women Leading Ed’s 2025 survey said .

Frequently, this double standard is embedded in subjective judgments about 鈥渇it鈥� and 鈥渃ommitment.鈥� In July 2020, four months into the COVID emergency, the board in Sarasota County, Florida, passed over Marie Izquierdo, then Miami-Dade’s chief academic officer, among five finalists and the only candidate every member of the district’s 25-person advisory committee voted to advance. Two members treated her plan to relocate before her husband and high-school-age daughter as proof of shaky commitment. One member said it “was a non-starter for me.”

I wrote about that meeting at the time. Four men I have supported through leadership programs moved for top jobs while their families stayed behind, and not one was asked about commitment. 

The data keep pointing to the same stubborn truth: Women are ready for these jobs, but they are still being asked to prove it in ways men often are not.

The pipeline everyone keeps promising to build already exists. Over the past decade, I have helped more than 200 leaders navigate successful moves into top state and district superintendent roles, and talent was never the missing piece. It sits in interim offices, in deputy seats that have carried the last three budget cycles, in chief academic officer roles whose literacy plans a new hire will inherit and in the .

The harder question is what happens when those women reach the point of selection. Boards decide who gets serious consideration, which experiences count as evidence of readiness and when a candidate has done enough to be trusted with the permanent job.

A board that is serious about advancing progress in the next decade should define its priorities before a search opens and score every candidate against the same criteria. “Fit” and “style” should translate into actual job requirements and evidence. Experience gained while already on the job should count for what it is.

Capable women already want to lead. Across districts around the country, they have already proven they can do it. The challenge is getting much better at recognizing that proof when it is in plain sight.

Phebe Sudlow forced one school board to confront its double-standard in 1874. Today鈥檚 boards should not need a candidate to call it out from across the table.

Did you use this article in your work?

We鈥檇 love to hear how 麻豆精品鈥檚 reporting is helping educators, researchers, and policymakers.