Contextualising the career pathways of women principals in Hong Kong: a critical examination

Abstract

The fields of gender and educational leadership have been enriched recently by analyses of national case studies from non-western contexts. By contextualising women’s career development, these studies highlight the importance of including experiences other than those generated from Anglo-American-Australian contexts, thus broadening our knowledge base for more nuanced theorisation in the field. This paper contributes a close examination of the career histories of eight female primary school principals in Hong Kong. Our analyses identify a range of facilitators, including the expansion of promotion opportunities, strong values placed on education and training, professional encouragement and support and help in relieving family responsibilities. Valuable these factors may be, but we argue that they are incidental, informal, familial and individual, and incur the costs of burn-out and guilt. The discussion not only underlines the significance of case study and cultural and contextual specificities, it also provides a nuanced understanding of Chinese patriarchy.

Keywords:

• gender
• leadership
• culture
• Chinese patriarchy
• career pathways

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the two reviewers for their useful comments and the research support provided by Alison So.

Funding

This paper is part of a research project, Gender and Leadership: Life Histories of Female and Male Primary School Principals in Hong Kong, that was supported by a grant from the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong [grant number HKIED840209].

Notes

1. The Education and Manpower Bureau was restructured and renamed as the Education Bureau in 2007.

2. The New Town Development Programme was first initiated in 1973, when the population in Hong Kong was more than four million. There are thus far nine new towns, which were developed in three main phases: the first (Tsuen Wan, Shatin and Tuen Mun) in the early 1970s, then the second (Tai Po, Fanling/Sheung Shui and Yuen Long) in the latter part of the 1970s and the third (Tseng Kwan O, Tin Shu Wai and Tung Chung) in the 1980s and 1990s (see Civil Engineering and Development Department 2012). Although the government provided infrastructural support and transport links, the new towns were usually remote and inaccessible when they first came into use.

3. The new pay scale was higher than those of the non-graduate grade. However, as some local educators (Lai, Ko, and Cheung 2005) maintain, the new nomenclature did not bring parity between primary and secondary teachers. Even though primary and secondary teachers were all now degree holders with the same amount of teacher training, the status and pay of the former were still lower. In other words, the inequalities between primary and secondary teaching were maintained.

4. Primary schools in Hong Kong used to operate in a bi-sessional mode, in which one school used the premises in the morning and another one in the afternoon. More discussions on this practice will be provided in the later sections.