Ideology, Discourse, and Gender: How Gatekeepers Talk about Women School Superintendents

By examining how gatekeepers talk about women who work in the male-dominated occupation of the public school superintendence!, we show that gatekeepers' explanations and descriptions of women's actions and situations frequently embody the ideologies and discourses of individual achievement and gender neutrality. We argue that this contributes to the persistence of men's dominance of positions of power. We show that gatekeepers sometimes rethink taken-for-granted explanations of women's situations and thus that these powerful ideologies and discourses are not invulnerable to change.