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Comparative Education

ISSN: 0305-0068 (Print) 1360-0486 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cced20

Research Dilemmas Concerning Gender and the Management of Education in Third World Countries

Lynn Davies

To cite this article: Lynn Davies (1987) Research Dilemmas Concerning Gender and the Management of Education in Third World Countries, Comparative Education, 23:1, 85-94, DOI: 10.1080/0305006870230110

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Comparative Education Vol. 23 No. 1 1987 85

Research Dilemmas Concerning Gender and the Management of Education in Third World Countries LYNN DAVIES

I have a poster on my wall which depicts a chimpanzee deep in thought and sighing, "Just as I knew all of life's answers, they changed all the questions." This is nowhere more true than in investigating anything to do with gender or development. The history of our research in Birmingham into the representation of women in the senior management of schools and education offices in the Third World began with simple enough questions and generated apparently simple enough answers; inevitably it has also highlighted dilemmas and pitfalls which are the subject of this paper.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was data. The question to answer was whether there are consistent patterns in the proportions of men and women at senior levels of educational work in various parts of the world; and to this end, computer searches were conducted for previous literature, and official ministry statistics were examined, to log female representation as heads, deputies, heads of department or administrators in ministries themselves. The frustrations and tentative hypotheses from this collection have been described in detail earlier (Davies, 1986); there were indeed predicted commonalities across a range of countries, with women concentrated in the 'lower' levels of the teaching profession, and increasingly invisible in the 'top' echelons of decision-making. The explana- tions for this, which were derived from the somewhat scattered research literature, seemed to focus on the combination of personal sex role orientations; organisational constraints; and societal power relations.

A pilot questionnaire for teachers was thus devised which focussed correspondingly on areas such as individual aspiration and attitude towards career; on expected roles and promotion pathways or blockages within the institution; and on domestic commitments and the economy of the family. The results so far from Ghana and Sierra Leone indicate some predictable 'sex differences', but also some implicit warnings about our preconceptions. Visits and interviews by this writer in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Kenya, and the experience of the 1985 Nairobi conference for the Decade for Women were also influential in questioning the directions and assumptions of the research. This paper will describe the dilemmas under three headings, although they are clearly interlinked: ethnocentrism; sex-stereotyping; and definitions of 'educational management'.

(1) Ethnocentrism and Exploitation

The first dilemma is the perennial one of a First World academic defining others' problems

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for them. I would see it as iniquitous that more women are not in positions of power and responsibility in education in the UK; I therefore presuppose that others will agree that this is problematic and that similar 'barriers' to female participation will need similar disman- tling. It is convenient to assume that if the patterns of gender balances in educational establishments are similar, then the explanations for these patterns also have a universal base—which is not always the case. The Nairobi conference was comforting in some ways and disturbing in others. The presence of 14,000 women was inspiring in itself. Participants in my workshop on women in educational administration gave general and sometimes enthusiastic support to the ideas I was pursuing.

Yet in other areas the enormous differences between women were clearly and immedi- ately apparent, with great political divides and bitter debates emerging between women from different countries (and even within countries). Even if one could make the case that women are universally 'oppressed', women themselves will not necessarily agree on the root of this oppression, nor welcome well-meaning attempts by 'richer' countries to research their subordination.

First is the question of the perceived centrality of the research topic. At the Mexico World Conference in 1975, Third World women had registered their discontent at the analyses and strategies of Western women who insisted that inequality between the sexes was the fundamental issue, while Third World women argued that the primary problem was the widening inequality between their countries and the West which has resulted in the widespread poverty of their peoples. As one Nigerian participant expressed it:

It is presumptuous for anyone to presume that women of the Third World are unable to articulate their own outrage at any issue that concerns them. As a member of the Third World, I repudiate this patronizing and particularly the underlying intellectual imperialism. Women in the Third World do not need any more champions. We are bored and tired of any more Great White Hopes. (Little, 1975)

Then there is the problem of applicability. Thinking about women and promotion within teaching for example, I tended to phrase questions around reasons for 'applying for promotion', and to assume that promotion was a similar and desirable animal in all schools. Yet, of course, in many countries one does not 'apply' for higher posts: a teacher is simply informed that he or she has been redesignated, or posted to another school. This makes assumptions about 'aspiration' tenuous, to say the least. Nor is headship similarly conceived: in Tanzania for instance, salaries are simply based on age and experience, and school principals have few, if any, pecuniary advantages over their staff. They may earn less than some of their senior teachers. Thus the incentives for aiming at headship may be very different, and there could be a reluctance by both sexes to take on a job with great responsibility and enormous frustrations and yet with little financial recognition. Hence the whole of this area of what we see as 'upward mobility' is a hazardous one to make generalisations about internationally.

Finally arises the deeper issue of exploitation. Whom does all this data collection, the explanatory models and heuristic paradigms really benefit? Ironically it may help my own promotion chances, as I clock up more papers for my curriculum vitae, but as yet it has done little for those women and men who fill in the questionnaires. This research may become yet another example of the metropolis ripping off the Third World in the interests of the accumulation of cultural capital. Hence I shall return to the need for a less remote, more collaborative and more immediately applicable form of exploration.

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(2) Confirming Stereotypes through Research

Even if statistics and attitudinal data can be gathered in a reasonably acceptable and valid fashion, the second dilemma revolves around presentation. If one goes in looking for sex differences in relation to educational work, then of course one will find them. It does not take much to dredge up the Statistically Significant Finding. Our pilot questionnaires in the African schools (Davies, 1985) not surprisingly revealed women teachers spending more time on domestic tasks, and being more self-critical in their appraisal of their own teaching performance. In terms of 'ambition', half the male heads were going to be Director of Education, but none of the female heads; only men teachers wrote phrases like 'eminent educationist' or 'to reach the top'.

Yet both men and women teachers enjoyed and disliked similar things about their job, and had chosen teaching for similar reasons on the whole. And while women teachers were more likely to have to go home immediately after school to be with children and relatives, females heads also spent more time on domestic tasks than did their male counterparts, the same average amount of time as the female class teacher. It would appear that domestic commitments do not necessarily hold women back, but presumably require greater skill at time management—or simply harder work all round. It must be noted, too, that the differences in the amount of labour were not vast, and that many men also had problems doing school work at home, or experienced difficulty going out in the evenings or weekends to attend school functions.

Rather than see involvement in family life as a traditional and female 'interference' in work, it is time for management research and training to assume a level of domestic responsibility, and work from there. We have for too long accepted the Weberian bureaucra- tic notion of efficiency being achieved through sharp divisions and role specialisation, by commitment to the organisation having somehow to take automatic precedence over commitment to family. This is the western-derived, classic 'modernity' theory of role fragmentation: the more modern a country, the more segmented it was supposed to be, to avoid corruption and spillage between the various functions. Senior management roles have also been predicated on the male assumption of a 40-hour-plus week and a non-working spouse at home. Yet we all have a range of identities, and we will teach and administer more effectively if we are not made to feel guilty about our other 'lives', but rather see them as normal and even contributory to our school life and work.

We already have mountains of sex-differences research, from many parts of the world; replicating all this with regard to, say, educational management, only serves to confirm a yawning gulf between the sexes which will in the end be used to justify the 'obvious' position of men in power roles. Much of the problem is that such research may not be finally interpreted as 'differences' but as 'deficit'. There is an implicit tendency to present the male- as-norm in management terms, and to see where women differ from this. They are perhaps 'less' ambitious, 'lacking' in confidence, 'over'-emotional, 'too' family-centred, or 'under'- achieving. The net result is unintentionally to confirm that ambition, over-confidence, and maximal achievement are universal goods, and that emotions and orientations to family are somehow barriers and handicaps.

We get a different picture altogether if we portray a realistic appraisal of one's capabilities as 'normal' and couch male ambition in terms of being 'neurotic about success', or if we say that any displays of love or feeling are beneficial to an organisation and that repression of these is bad management practice. Better still, and given the enormous overlap between the sexes in terms of all these traits, it is perhaps time to play down the 'differences' research in favour of a 'commonalities' approach. We need to depict personnel in education

88 L. Davies

as human beings with similar needs and vices, which may be a composite of previously designated 'masculine' and 'feminine' traits. Otherwise we entrench the stereotypes and cause trauma about which sex role 'norms' we are approximating to.

An alternative in researching women in management has been to assemble profiles of 'successful' women, and try to learn from compositing their traits or backgrounds. Thus Nayar (1985) reported using intensive field work techniques to build a profile of Indian women educational administrators, looking at six areas: social origins, status mobility, occupational role commitment, role conflict, role performance, and career aspirations. One can find typicalities amongst them, and also factors which differentiate them from 'average' women teachers. There are, however, also dangers in such aggregated data. Ironically, the portrayal of the 'successful' career woman may merely serve to confirm her unusualness. The rest of us do not appear to have the magical combination of attributes that produce the dynamic executive or the woman Minister of Education. Focussing on the 'typical' female —at whatever level—also carries the danger of 'victim analysis': that the woman herself is blamed for her lack of aspiration or drive. Our choice of language again betrays our conception of ourselves as substandard. Talking of women principals, Nayar speaks of "the disabilities of their sex roles"; yet I would refuse to be labelled as 'disabled'. I feel perfectly sound, and my sex role is of itself not a handicap. It is other people who may define it as such, and who may erect the barriers to my progress, and it is on them that we should at least equally focus.

The challenge to both the 'sex differences' research and the 'successful women' profiles is then that they each may underplay or even ignore the relational aspect of gender, the fact that 'male' and 'female' denote not static and separate states, but two sides of a relationship. Such relationships may be balanced and equitable, but they may on the other hand be asymmetrical and reveal structures of power which need continuous acknowledgement, if we are to understand different positions in educational decision-making. This becomes clearer when we look at contemporary theorising on management.

(3) Definitions of Management

It is an irony that educational administration, as a practice, is not at all educational. It teaches nothing to those being administered, except perhaps the strategies for countering control and the devices for manipulating the managers. Nor does the theoretical 'discipline' of educational administration have much to say about the underrepresentation of certain groups within it—such as women. There has in the past been a tendency to accept current notions of management as something desirable to 'get more women into'", yet focussing on gender imbalances should provoke a fundamental critique of the concept and practice of educational administration itself, rather than spotlight the supposed shortcomings of indivi- dual women—or men—as they operate within a given system.

There is a parallel here with concerns about female underachievement and wastage in school. Programmes to channel more girls into science and technology have revealed the need for a deeper examination of the abstract and dehumanised notion of 'science' as we conceive it in our curricula. If girls do not like science, do we change girls, or do we redefine 'science'? Similarly, if women do not strive for senior positions in schools, do we remould women or do we begin to question the hierarchically ordered and increasingly technicist notions we have of 'educational administration'? We need alternative models, to avoid sex bias as well as ethnocentrism; and critical sociological perspectives provide clues for this reconceptualisation. A conflict framework on educational administration would seek to trace the different access to resources such as power that particular groups in organisations have,

Gender and Education in the Third World 89

and to identify in whose real interests an institution operates. It would ask what ideological, financial and emotional mechanisms are used in the distribution of scarce resources, and how power inequalities become legitimised—either within a school, or between a school and its paymasters.

Within a conflict perspective, there is a growing body of analysis derived from Marxist traditions which uses a radical 'critical theory' of educational administration. Starting from a concern with social class inequalities and the dilemmas of the modern State, writers such as Bates (1982, 1983), Giroux (1983) and Watkins (1983), have traced the transfer of scientific management from industrial corporations to school organisation, and have revealed educational administration as a technology of control and a legitimator of repression. Through its emphasis on 'efficiency', on 'rationality', on 'performance targets', and through a mystification of the expert management process, the growth of scientific management is seen as a means to increase control over workers—in this case teachers. Work tasks are fragmented and the decision-making capacity of the worker/teacher is reduced. By present- ing school organisational problems as technical problems, "it ignores the power relationships, class structure and legitimating ideologies around which organisations are structured" (Watkins, 1983).

The traditional idea of the charismatic head teacher relying on personality, relationships and teaching experience is being replaced by the notion of the specially trained management stylist who will raise standards (targets) and rationalise the personnel's efforts through specific and expert 'techniques'. Administrative issues become separated from the educa- tional issues, and the language of the machine replaces the negotiative communication of the responsible individual. Systems approaches, cybernetics, and feedback loops are the meta- phors which provide "uncontestable descriptions of the way things are" (Bates, 1982) and obscure the interests of the dominating elite. The current language of administrative discourse—accountability, cost-effectiveness, and staff rationalisation—"ties education to the corporate sector regardless of the continuing stratification and inequalities that exist" (Watkins, 1983).

With regard to developing countries, the cult of the 'expert' and the institutionalisation of the 'scientific' may not have had so much impact as in the West (certainly few of the heads in our survey had received management training). There is therefore a sense of urgency—before the Taylorism revival spreads its net—in realising that there may be other forms of educational organisation than the industrial, top-down and technicist models.

Clearly, newer phenomenological approaches to school organisation have gained ground over the last decade (Greenfield, 1973, 1978); but Tipton (1985), for example, argues that British and American educational administration still lacks a firm social science foundation. Questions of the social class, age, gender or ethnic group of the 'members' of school organisations have rarely been raised in terms of their own staff interaction, rather in terms of the student and the effectiveness of learning. "It is almost as if there is an assumption that anything that is good for the client must be good for the staff. In current educational administration there is a:

reliance on psychology and social psychology, and ignorance or fear of European sociology and political science, party politics and the labour movement. The first manifests itself in a preponderance of writing on leadership characteristics and effectiveness (perhaps through 'participation') and small-group behaviour in or- ganisations. The second in a preference for the politically uncomplicating frame- work of systems theory.

Tipton goes on to argue for a study of educational institutions as workplaces, looking at

90 L. Davies

orientations to employment and at the design of work—relatively well-developed themes in the sociology of work, but not in the sociology of the school. In fact there is some pioneering ethnographic work now coming from Australia, such as Teachers' Work (Connell, 1985). Yet classic studies of car workers' attitudes to their job and to the organisational setting have in the main yet to be replicated in schools; we know little of the social circumstances and out-of-work activities of teachers. Yet, given that in many countries these employees will more often than not be women, it is strange that an unexplored dimension is their important outside-work identities—as housewife, mother, or daughter of ageing parents or in-laws.

There is also urgency in rethinking our scope of analysis when we consider that the participation of women in educational administration may become more rather than less limited. In the UK, for example, we see a decline in the number of women heads. The spread of coeducation, the rationalisation of comprehensive schools and the growth of the business-oriented management ethic have all combined to project men as increasingly more suitable for the running of large-scale organisations. It might well be that men teachers in the Third World will also appropriate the image of the high-tech principal, to the exclusion of women (in the same way that agricultural technology was often appropriated by, or aimed at, men—in spite of women being the main agricultural producers in many coun- tries).

Critical theorists have traditionally been concerned with class domination rather than gender domination, because of their reliance on the language of Marxist scholars. Yet exploration of the interests and power differentials of other social groupings leads to similar conclusions and avenues of critique. How is it that women have come to be excluded from 'efficient', 'rational' and 'scientific' management? While many developing countries do suspect Western models of 'rationality' and analyse them as a means to perpetuate dependency, there needs to be a recognition that such models are not gender-neutral either, but were conceived by men and carry unexplicated masculinist biases.

A classic example of this is of course 'leadership'. Intriligator (1983) has done a wonderful demolition job on the Great Man and classical leadership theories:

Assuming that leadership theory is formed by and has impact on the culture in which it exists, it is not surprising that traditional leadership theory was proposed for, researched on and normed on male leaders in male-oriented institutions... Be- cause theories are systems for organizing past and future experience, their value is two-fold: they provide a way to pattern or understand what happened in the past, and they help us predict what will happen in the future. We create worlds reifying experience in theories. Leadership theory potentially frames the way that money, status and power to change are distributed or not distributed. By definition, leaders have their hands on the levers that move the world. Leadership theory that assumes a male perspective, or theory in which male values are so deeply embedded as to be invisible, ensures that only males, or women adopting male views, will be selected as leaders, will continue to lead and thereby set courses, define visions and create new worlds. The current realities of organizational life make this situation untenable.

Intriligator goes on to analyse the male bias by which leadership 'traits' have been identified in educational research, and discusses alternatives in conceptualising how institutions can or should operate. She suggests that social exchange theories are in fact the most relevant for the acknowledgement of gender issues in contemporary organisations, for such theories prescribe a style that is predicated on reciprocity and equity. Leadership under this analysis

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is 'characterised by an avoidance of direct confrontation between the leader and the work group'; instead of stressing their supremacy, leaders in fact 'avoid interactions that make evident power and status differentials' (Jacobs, 1971). Social exchange implies that people will be willing to devote extensive effort to their employing organisations if they feel they are receiving appropriate and equitable benefits in return. "The leader is required to persuade others that behaving in a desired fashion is in their own self-interests, which they evaluate primarily through data and logic. Obviously, in order to persuade employees that desired behaviour is in their own self-interests, the leader must know how the particular employees think, what they value and what excites them and interests them about their work or job" (Intriligator, 1983).

In stressing the need for leaders to know the orientations of employees, we see the parallels to the sociology of the workplace. approach envisaged by Tipton. However, a question mark still remains over whether it is sufficient to identify the behaviours of 'effective' leaders (even if incorporating both sexes) unless we return to the issue raised by the critical theorists of what 'effectiveness'—and hence power—is being used for, and in whose ultimate interests. It is not enough to have more women in positions of leadership, or even a different concept of 'effective leadership', if the bulk of women teachers still experience differentials in the amount of day-to-day power they can exercise in the school, and if little attention is paid to the overall socio-political structure in which schools and teachers operate (including gender imbalances in such power structures). Whereas in both Ghana and Sierra Leone we found men claiming their spouse's careers to be equally important to their own, within the school there were agreed perceptions of women teachers being suitably confined to pastoral and welfare roles, while men took on the more career- enhancing organisational activities. While most teachers said they had no preference for either a male or female Head, if they did make a choice it was far more likely to be male. The notion of economic bargaining may be appealing in management terms, but it may not finally be a fair exchange if the traders start from different capital bases, with different alliances, allegiances and access to powerful shared cultures.

Marcuse's concept of 'surplus repression' is a valuable one here: while all countries need an amount of 'socially useful repression' to contain individual desires, 'surplus repression' is 'that portion which is the result of specific societal conditions sustained in the interests of domination' (Marcuse, 1964). Just as the surplus value from work accrues to the owners of the means of production, surplus—or unnecessary—repression, embodied in the ethos and practices that characterise school, workplace and family, serves to ensure psychological acceptance of servitude. While Marcuse was talking of social class domination, it might be argued that women in particular suffer 'surplus repression'—in this case in the interests of male supremacy. Certainly the literature on female deviance and female conformity shows girls and women 'over-controlled' through child-rearing practices, educa- tional institutions, law enforcement agencies and religious doctrines (Davies, 1984). This is another reason to be hesitant about social exchange theories of management. If all that women teachers have to 'offer' in terms of attractions to management is compliance and hard work, then a bargaining model may in the end merely confirm women in supporting roles. An interesting question would be whether societies exercising surplus repression in domestic terms also have fewer women in decision-making capacities in education. The point is that it is essential to examine management theories in the social and cultural context in which they are first generated, then accepted and finally exercised in educational institutions. It would be foolhardy to attempt an international theory of educational 'leadership' without recogni- tion of the existing power dimensions among those being 'led'. Hence the need for empirical, country-based research.

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(4) New Directions

Our latest research 'tool' is therefore taking a somewhat different shape, helped also by participants in the Nairobi conference. It is in the form of a career appraisal schedule rather than a straight questionnaire for return only. After a few items of basic data on current position and career history, teachers are asked to ponder on their life and work in three areas: job and career evaluation; the organisation of the school; and out-of-school life. The aim is for teachers to complete this in any way which is useful to them, so that they can positively identify short-term and long-term directions in their lives, and possible aids or barriers to the achievement of those directions. The organisational section probes teachers' wants and needs from both the people and the structure of the educational institution, and identifies the potential and actual distribution of administrative duties. In looking at out-of- school life, the intention is to see how school and home can be better integrated, and what the organisational and training implications are of the multiple roles we all play. The schedule will be developed by using it initially in case-study schools in Anglophone Africa, and seeing whether it is in any way useful across countries in West, Central and Southern Africa, before extending the scope to S.E. Asia and the Caribbean.

The schedules are to be surrounded by ethnographies of those case-study schools. It is essential to gain an anthropological view of the immediate day-to-day contexts in which teachers operate, so that reasonable interpretations can be placed on the responses in the schedules. Observation of teachers and Heads in classrooms, in staffrooms, in meetings, and in interactions with 'subordinates' and 'superordinates' can provide the fine detail of actual and expected roles and relationships. Firstly it is important to identify whether accurate job specifications exist for all levels of educational and auxiliary staff, and how the boundaries and limits of their tasks are perceived. Secondly, the working conditions of school personnel need to be noted, in terms of both material conditions—personal space and territory, or access to support services, to secretarial and resource help, to telephones etc—and psycholo- gical conditions—the degree of professional autonomy measured by whether teachers must seek permission for various activities, must spend free time on school premises, must sign in and out and so on. Thirdly the official and unofficial communication networks of a school are of significance, in terms of access to information and who is seen as requiring information about an issue, and who not. Fourthly, the subtleties of deference and domination patterns, the body language, the forms of address, can be realised only by observing daily encounters in the various settings within the institution. Finally these roles, working conditions, information flows and subtle hierarchies relate to the overall patterns of decision-making in the school, whereby a chart needs to be drawn of which decisions are made by whom and for whom, and using what criteria. We are looking at the degree of control that teachers have over their working lives, and whether such control is mediated by gender-based perceptions.

The overall intention of this sociology of school work is two-fold: to provide a career appraisal opportunity for teachers, individually and collaboratively; and to generate a 'grounded theory' of the type of school management which would be responsive to teachers' needs. There may well be sex differences emerging from the results; but their identification is not necessarily the primary aim. It may be that other social divisions are equally or more important, and we should not let a preoccupation with gender push us into equally unbalanced concepts of viable school administration. Appraisal schedules should be in themselves a form of in-service management training. It is a truism to say that all teachers are in the business of managing people—at one level or another. If there are indeed gender (or ethnic or social class) differences in those who are sponsored for educational manage- ment, then the obvious solution is to open up the field to everyone and expose the top-down,

Gender and Education in the Third World 93

'expert' role for the elitist, semi-mystical cadre that it has become. There are indeed skills to be learned, techniques to explore, research to be read; but education is the one field where these should be available to every member of the workforce. It is curious that we can construct whole edifices to train Heads to manage, without equivalent courses for the rest of the staff on how to be managed, let alone appreciate for themselves the transmission of management skills.

Our pilot questionnaires found women receiving less 'mentoring' or encouragement from senior staff, and being less likely to be allocated the more prestigious administrative duties. If, however, management is conceived as a set of orientations masterable by everyone, it undermines the notion that only men make 'natural' leaders, and it reduces the possibility that women will not have the chance at anticipatory socialisation and the practising of administrative functions. The accountability ideology which is taking hold once more could be effectively fulfilled through self-evaluation by teachers, rather than measuring them against an agreed set of performance standards (drawn up, if in the UK, by 87% male administrators). While 'appraisal' goes on continuously in schools, it is essential to make this overt and equitable, not covert and partial. Some managers find it difficult to offer criticism to a woman, and so either avoid commenting on shortfalls in performance or unconsciously use different standards when assessing women (Manpower Services Commission (MSC), 1983). For appraisal to be equally beneficial, it must be under the control of the teacher concerned; and it should include comments on the management team, if there is one, in terms of how much support, opportunity or constraint they provide.

(5) Conclusion

The dilemmas of this paper can then, I hope, be turned to productive use. There is nothing new in developing school-based or action research to minimise researcher intrusion or indeed ethnocentrism. In addition, however, the recognition of the benefits and warnings of a gender focus can be used to generate critical theories of particular school organisations. Such a focus seems at present to turn everything on its head. The 'logic' of research or model- building has to be reversed. The traditional method for arriving at an analysis of schools has been what one might term the 'highest common multiple' approach: beginning at the sacred pinnacle and engaging in the normative 'how far' technique. How far can we apply western models to developing countries? How far can we apply commercial or public sector management to schools? How far can we control people in order to achieve political goals? How far do certain groups like women approximate to the 'normal' model of effective management? How far can we change women to achieve within this model?

Instead we should begin at the lowest common denominator, at the ground or profane level, and ask 'what' questions. What do people bring to an organisation? What power bases do they operate from and what are their existing relationships? What are their common needs and what might be their different objectives and requirements from work? What kind of management model would enable the answers to these questions to be logged and projected into a continuous dialectic with the overall objectives for an education system?

Researching women, educational administration and the Third World is paradoxically not about focussing on women at all. To do so would be to underscore a counter-productive sex differences approach and to detract from a deeper consideration of why, and for whom, power has come to be exercised in certain ways in schools. The questioning of the embedded and taken-for-granted male-derived forms and language through which educational control is mediated is but a first step in the generation of new theories of educational management which would provide greater flexibility and personal control for both women and men

94 L. Davies

teachers. It is to be hoped that future research—ours and others—could enable schools to become not just 'woman-friendly' but 'user-friendly' in general.

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