Leading While Female: A Culturally Proficient Response for Gender Equity

Your take-action guide to gender equity

First, just to be clear: Leading While Female is not a book about how to get a leadership job. Nor is it about fixing or transforming women into male managers or mindsets.

Instead, Arriaga, Stanley, and Lindsey’s bigger ambition is to help both women and men educational leaders confront and close the gender equity gap―a gap that currently denies highly qualified women and women of color opportunities to better serve our millions of public school students.

Designed as both a personal and group discussion guide for taking action, Leading While Female draws on the research of feminism, intersectionality, educational leadership, and Cultural Proficiency to help us all:

• Better understand the impact of faux narratives that foster lack of confidence among girls and women
• Utilize the Tools of Cultural Proficiency to examine barriers to overcome and support functions to locate for your own career planning
• Learn from the stories of women leaders who have confronted and overcome barriers to career development, including women of color who were targets of implicit bias
• Explore and expand the roles and opportunities for our male colleagues to serve as allies, advocates, and mentors.

If we look at the data, we can safely say women are doing the work of classroom teaching while disproportionately, men are making administrative and leadership decisions. Here at last is a resource for the breaking down the barriers and leading the way for future generations of women leaders.

Dr. Trudy T. Arriaga served the Ventura Unified School District for 14 years as the first female superintendent. She began her career as a trilingual paraeducator and enjoyed 40 years of service in education as a teacher, assistant principal, principal, director, superintendent and university instructor at all levels.
Trudy retired as superintendent in July 2015 and was honored by the naming of the VUSD District Office, The VUSD Trudy Tuttle Arriaga Education Service Center. She recently retired from Cal Lutheran University as a faculty member in the Educational Leadership Department in the Graduate School of Education. Trudy is the co-author, with her esteemed colleague Dr. Randall B. Lindsey of Opening Doors: An Implementation Template for Cultural Proficiency, which delivers a compelling account on how leaders can create and expand cultures of inclusion and equity by dismantling and crafting new organizational policies and practices on behalf of the students they serve. Her second book, “Leading While Female: A Culturally Proficient Response to Gender Equity” and co-authored with Dr. Delores Lindsey and Dr. Stacie Stanley offers a counter narrative and strategies to overcome the barriers of women in educational leadership, followed by the companion journal, “My Leading While Female Journal”. It has been her privilege to assist educational districts, institutions and organizations throughout the United States through keynote speeches, workshops, leadership and equity institutes and online professional development to align the actions of the organization with their stated values and principles in their effort to build a culturally proficient and inclusive organization for each and every one. Trudy and her husband, Raymundo, are enjoying this grand chapter of life as grandparents to Rayo Mana and Sofia Anuhea. Trudy can be contacted at trudyarriaga73@gmail.com

Dr. Stacie L. Stanley currently serves as the Superintendent of Saint Paul Public Schools, the 2nd largest school district in Minnesota. Prior to her appointment in SPPS, she served as the superintendent of Edina Public Schools. Stacie has served in a variety of education roles including math teacher, school principal, director of curriculum, assessment and instruction & prior to serving as superintendent she served as the associate superintendent of Eden Prairie Schools. Dr. Stanley fervently believes that the “answer is in the room” and building leadership capacity through dignity supports organizational transformation.
Dr. Stanley earned a doctorate degree from Bethel University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where she researched the impact of intercultural development on K-6 administrative leadership practice. She is a fierce advocate for creating safe spaces of belonging for each and every student that allows them to know their worth and thrive. Stacie is the Co-Author of Leading While Female: A Culturally Proficient Response for Gender Equity. Dr. Stanley also served as a contributing author for the text Innovative Voices in Education: Engaging diverse communities.
Dr. Stanley is a doctoral program adjunct faculty member and advisor at Bethel University in Minnesota. Stacie lives in a multi-generational home with her husband and 95-year-old father, and enjoys being an empty nester, power walking, and spending time with their grandchildren. Follow Dr. Stanley on instagram @DrStacieStanley or LinkedIn Stacie Stanley, Ed.D.

Dr. Delores B. Lindsey served as assistant principal, principal, and county office administrator. She served as Executive Director of the regional school leadership center. Delores uses her skills as Cognitive Coach and Adaptive Schools trainer blended with her understanding and skills as a cultural proficiency trainer to design and implement the 10-Day Certification Program for Culturally Proficient Educational Practice. She served as assistant professor at California State University San Marcos for more than 10 years. She retired from the institution; however, she has not retired from the education profession. Her primary focus is developing culturally proficient leaders. She helps educational leaders examine their organizations’ policies and practices and their individual beliefs and values about cross-cultural communication. Her favorite reflective questions are, Who are we? and, Are we who we say we are? Delores and her husband, Randall (her favorite SAGE/Corwin author), continue to co-write about the application of the four tools of Cultural Proficiency. Her most recent publications which are on Corwin’s bestseller list are Leading While Female: A Culturally Proficient Response for Gender Equity, and My Leading While Female Journey: A Guided Reflective Journal with Trudy Arriaga and Stacie Stanley.