Finding Your Path as a Woman in School Leadership: A Guide for Educators, Allies, and Advocates
By Kim Cofino and Christina Botbyl
(Routledge/Eye On Education, 2024 – Learn more)
Reviewed by DeAnna Miller
Despite making up the vast majority of educators, women are significantly underrepresented in school leadership, particularly at higher levels. Leadership can be challenging for anybody as it requires taking responsibility for the well-being and success of others; yet, school leadership presents a unique challenge due to the dual responsibility of supporting both children and adults.
These challenges make it important to find good mentors who help guide potential leaders, especially women, along their leadership journey.
While in-person mentorship is ideal, resources like books, podcasts, and webinars can offer valuable guidance and complement traditional forms of mentorship. Kim Cofino and Christina Botbyl’s book, Finding Your Path as a Woman in School Leadership, serves as an accessible mentorship resource for women seeking to enhance their leadership skills and effectiveness in education.
Finding Your Path as a Woman in School Leadership provides practical advice and reflection exercises for current, new, and aspiring female leaders. These authors use research-based evidence along with excerpts from interviews with experienced women leaders. They also include exercises at each level of leadership (developing leaders, established leaders supporting developing and aspiring leaders, and school or organizational leaders) to create a guidebook that readers can use throughout their leadership journey.
Broken into three sections – Seeing Yourself as a Leader, Facing the Realities of Leadership for Women, and Strategies and Skills for Success – each chapter of the book guides the reader toward self-discovery as a leader as well as providing historical context behind the need for more women leaders, especially in the upper echelons of education.
Each chapter follows a similar layout: what research says, what experienced female leaders in the field say, and what one woman’s journey into leadership looked like. Each chapter concludes with a “Take Action” section. This feature encourages reader reflection and provides opportunities for practical application of the chapter’s content. Additionally, a reference list of the research cited is included for further reading.
While many may read the book front to back, the authors recognize that each person’s approach to reading the book will be as unique as their approach to leadership and so suggest reading/using the book however it’s needed to fit each unique situation.
Breaking down the parts
In Part I: Seeing Yourself as a Leader, readers begin the journey of self-reflection and recognition of their leadership qualities. This section of the book encourages women to recognize their leadership potential. It then outlines essential skills for women in school leadership roles and addresses the common experience of ‘Imposter Syndrome’ that many women experience during their career advancement. The final chapter of this section focuses on the transformative power of mentorship, a recurring theme throughout the rest of the book.
In Part II: Facing the Realities of Leadership for Women, Cofino and Botbyl address many of the obstacles and stereotyping that women leaders face on their leadership journey. These include navigating double standards such as assertive behavior that may be perceived as aggression, as well as overcoming the informal networks, sometimes referred to as the “old boys’ club,” that can be prevalent in school leadership, particularly in higher levels of school administration. Cofino and Botbyl also address the lack of opportunity for women in leadership, both real and perceived. The authors reaffirm the need for female mentors to help overcome many of the perceived opportunity gaps while also addressing the competition among female leaders that can undermine meaningful mentoring relationships.
Finally, in Part III: Strategies and Skills for Success, Cofino and Botbyl help readers develop skills to see the big picture, have hard conversations, and prioritize personal well-being in order to be effective leaders. They write, “While the culture of work often values being ‘busy’ and experiencing ‘burnout,’ it should not be viewed as a badge of honor for school leaders.” They emphasize that effective leaders look for ways to prioritize their personal well-being so as to better support a positive and healthy school climate and culture.
Finding Your Path as a Woman in School Leadership offers valuable insights for both women who aspire to leadership roles and those interested in mentoring future leaders. Cofino and Botbyl advocate for women in leadership to support and encourage other aspiring female leaders to achieve their leadership goals, particularly given the scarcity of female leaders and mentors in higher leadership roles.
Furthermore, Cofino and Botbyl highlight the importance of authenticity in female leaders, stating, “The lived experiences of women leaders in schools around the world can help prepare the current and next generations for the individualized ways this [leadership] pathway can take shape.”
In lifting each other up, women not only transform their schools – they redefine what leadership looks like.
After serving as a middle school English teacher, instructional coach, assistant principal and online curriculum developer, DeAnna Miller started the 2025-2026 school year as the new principal of Bay Haven Charter Academy in Panama City, Florida. She is an Army veteran married to a retired First Sergeant. She’s also a runner, avid reader and writer, and an “extreme Disney fanatic.” From 2020 to 2023 she wrote the MiddleWeb blog, My AP Life.
