Space defenders: A Foucauldian analysis of power and privilege for women in positions of K–12 leadership

This paper examines women’s experiences within K-12 educational leadership in the US through a Foucauldian lens. Our recent analysis of the experiences of these leaders revealed that challenges such as imposter syndrome1, gendered microaggressions, differential expectations based on gender, and attribution errors, were still heavily reproduced in women’s accounts of leadership in the K-12 education system. Given this finding, we seek here to reframe our analysis in order to examine the institutional features that contribute to this lack of progress. In this paper, we argue that K-12 educational institutions serve as metaphorical Foucauldian panopticons where women self-police and regulate each other in order to better perform traditional gendered expectations, or find relative success within these institutions; those who do not are punished for non-compliance. So institutionally ingrained are these regulations, that those who are rewarded by this unfair system do not name the inherent discrepancies within the system; instead, they construct their success as something that was legitimately earned.