Eureka! Institutional Repository

Education is traditionally a "feminine" job in Europe. However, the percentage of women exercising and leading positions is extremely low and also declines to the highest level of education. There are a variety of issues that need to be addressed under the perspectives of new challenges in education. Some of them are not new, but others such as gender equality in educational leadership have appeared relatively recently. The purpose of this work was to identify the specific gender issues in the educational leadership by thoroughly investigating the context of Greek primary education. The basic rationale is that the role of women is vital to meeting the new demands of the school in a dramatically changing society that performs a different leadership style. The sample consisted of 131 Primary Education Teachers from West Thessaloniki. According to this study, the obstacles that arise for the development of women's careers in the leadership of education are mainly the sense that leadership requires knowledge, skills, qualifications more than they have and their conviction that leadership deprived of the pleasure they draw from teaching and contact with their pupils in the classroom, and the determining factor is the impossibility of imposing on colleagues and meeting the demands of the role of the administration. Moreover, the low representation of women is attributed mainly to the absence of free time due to increased family responsibilities and the lack of ambitions and interests of women themselves, while stereotypes and prejudices do not, in the opinion of the subjects of the survey, affect the presence of women as leaders education.