Women’s participation in educational leadership in government and private secondary schools of Addis Ababa city administration

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to investigate the attitudinal change of the stakeholders(teachers, principals, vice principals, sub-city educational bureau department heads) and the effectiveness of the gender policy towards women’s participation in principal ship in government and private secondary school of Addis Ababa city administration. The study sites were at Bole and Arada sub-city educational bureaus and secondary schools. The study population consists 8 educational bureau department heads, 20 government, 19 private secondary school principals, 38 private and 40 government vice principals, 68 government and 17 private secondary school female teachers, 246 government secondary school male teachers and 118 private male teachers and also 16 women’s affairs. Department heads were included in both sub-cities. From these 100% of female teachers and 70% of male teachers were included to fill the questionnaires which consists of 85 female teachers and 264 male teachers were selected using simple random sampling specifically lottery method. The data was collected using questionnaires, interview and focus group discussion as instrument. The study employed descriptive survey method because it was preferred as it enables to make investigations with prediction, narration of events, comparisons and drawing conclusions based on the information obtained from relatively large and representative sample of the target population. The findings of this study indicated that there is still low participation of women in secondary school principal ship and the attitude and challenges like misperception of stakeholders, women conflict of roll between their professional duty and family issues, women’s poor self image remain unchanged. It also revealed that there is a gap in creating awareness in implementation of policies, rules and regulations in people’s attitude towards women’s secondary school principal ship. Issues like competency of female principals is not included in this study and the researcher recommended other researchers investigate such issues. Recommendations such as women should be given opportunities of training and higher education’s were made on the basis of conclusions.