The role of women's leadership advancement and development in sustaining teacher commitment to student learning

In Hong Kong, a cosmopolitan Chinese society, women are overrepresented in the teaching force but remain severely underrepresented in school leadership. This paper examines how sociocultural factors interact with leadership advancement to illustrate the consequences of women's underrepresentation in school leadership for school leadership sustainability (SLS) and teacher commitment to student learning. We first control for education, ethnicity, and family socioeconomic status (SES) to address issues concerning the frequent conflation of gender with these factors in the international literature. We then model the path directions to trace the interactions among gender, women's leadership advancement, and cultural values (uncertainty avoidance). Finally, we examine how these factors interact to contribute to school SLS and teacher commitment to student learning. The structural equation model shows that, when education, ethnicity, and SES are controlled for, women's poorer leadership advancement becomes more pronounced, shifting from weakly to strongly significant. Consequently, leadership positions are only weakly associated with women educators' ability to leverage their uncertainty avoidance values, which have a significant and positive influence on SLS (as indicated by principal leadership, middle leadership, shared values and vision, teacher leadership, collaborative learning, and reflective dialogue). As SLS strongly influences teachers' commitment to student learning, and women are perceived as having stronger capabilities only in relation to aspects that indicate conformity and obedience, the consequences are dire, reflecting the persistent lack of social inclusion measures to ensure women's representation in educational leadership. We draw insights and recommendations from the global literature and provide implications for how unaddressed gender stereotypes harm men, women, and student learning.