by Zoe Enser @greeborunner

I never really understood networking. It was something which was increasingly mentioned as I moved into leadership, but I never knew quite what it meant or indeed why it was a good thing. People said it would help me with my career and enable me to do my job better, but never really told me how. It was also based on the premise I was ambitious and wanted to progress, as opposed to just being happy in what I was doing, but that is a whole other discussion. Networking had also become a bit of a dirty word to me.

by Lizana Oberholzer  @LO_EduforAll

Women play a pivotal role as role models to inspire the future generation of female leaders in education, whether it is in schools or in Higher Education. According to Hewitt (2020) and Osho (2018), 56.6% of the university student body is comprised of women. The Higher Education workforce, however, reflects a different picture where 45.3% of the workforce are women, as outlined by the Higher Education Statistics Agency’s (HESA) data. What is interesting to note is that the representation of women in the leadership and management workforce is even lower at 27.5%.

 by Anna Ambrose  @AnnaAmbrose

On Friday 6th March, 2021, I noticed a thing on my Facebook feed. It was the last day (for now at least, fingers crossed) of home-schooling for families in England. And men were busy thanking their amazing wives* for home-schooling their children. There were gifts. Flowers. Champagne. The works. How lovely.

[*Obviously not everyone is married. But these posts were genuinely all about wives, so I may over-use the word in what follows.]

by Kerry Jordan-Daus @KerryJordanDaus  #IWD2021

International Women’s Day 2021, a call out to challenge, there is a choice to be made. But what is IT I am choosing to challenge?

For me, this is a choice about what would make life fairer. I want to challenge the unfairness that is so deeply embedded in the everyday that IT is not noticed as unfairness. IT is normalised. IT has become learnt behaviour.

by Lynn How @Positive_Y_Mind    www.positiveyoungmind.com

Could you be a great educational leader if you had more flexibility? I see leadership potential in women everywhere I turn in education. Unfortunately, many of these are woman who have motherhood and childcare to balance alongside their careers, many choose parenting over their career. If I needed to make that binary choice, I would choose the same but what if you could have both?

by Claire Young @curiousCY

I want more circles and fewer lines. I am at my best when I’m working shoulder to shoulder with the people around me and we can see each other eye to eye. My problem with lines is that they leave the people exposed. My problem with lines is that we can only see a section of the people we’re working with, making it all too easy to lose connection with experiences and perspectives we really need to hear. So, my 10% braver work is playing my part in building collaborative cultures within my school community where we connect, we centre our wellbeing, and we form circles not lines.

by Chris Reddy @@brightleadcoach  Founder of @brightleadersUK

Confession time!

When I stumbled across @WomenEd a few years back on Twitter, I did wonder what it was all about. Why do women educators need support over men? It’s worth noting, I was brought up around great women. My grandmothers headed up big, beautiful families and were outstanding role models. My mum is a wonderfully kind, caring and strong retired deputy head teacher.

by Niamh Thompson @toal_niamh

Ever since a young age, I always dreamed of becoming a teacher. Suffering from severe dyslexia, however, I didn’t think this would always be possible. As I began my A levels in Sociology and Irish, my aspirations of becoming a teacher were confirmed - I knew I wanted to pursue a teaching career. With my parents’ unwavering support and belief in me, I was able to overcome my dyslexia struggles and graduate with a degree in Irish and Sociology from QUB. The next step on my teaching path took me to apply for a PGCE in Irish. I was very nervous and failed the interview miserably. I felt like I had let everyone down.