The Burden of the Middle: Deconstructing Resilience and Reimagining Systemic Support for Women Educational Leaders

Women in "middle leadership,” department chairs, associate deans, program directors, assistant principals, and mid-level administrators, often serve as the vital connective tissue of educational institutions. However, they occupy a precarious space: they must implement senior-level mandates while managing grassroots morale, all while navigating "gendered organizations" that reward masculine-coded norms of leadership. They must also lead with influence over actual power and authority. This Research Topic seeks to challenge the traditional "resilience narrative." Instead of asking how women can become more resilient to survive toxic or under-resourced environments, we ask: What institutional structures must change to make individual resilience less of a survival requirement? "Resilience is often the code word for 'we aren't going to fix the system, so we need you to get stronger.' We are looking for research that demands the system get stronger instead." There is a growing and necessary movement in academia and leadership development that critiques "resilience" as a form of systemic gaslighting. These scholars argue that by praising women for being "resilient," institutions avoid the responsibility of fixing the toxic or exclusionary environments that make that resilience necessary in the first place. The urgency of this Research Topic lies at the intersection of a global educator retention crisis and a stalled leadership pipeline. While extensive research addresses the "glass ceiling" at executive levels (presidencies, superintendencies) or the barriers facing entry-level educators, the mid-career space remains a critical, under-theorized zone of attrition. As education grapples with what has been termed the "Great Exhaustion," focusing on middle leadership is not merely an academic exercise; it is a structural necessity for the survival of educational institutions. If institutions fail to address the systemic pressures at the mid-career level, the pipeline to senior leadership will fundamentally collapse. Women represent the vast majority of the educational workforce, yet their representation drops precipitously at every ascending rung of leadership. When middle management becomes a site of unsustainable emotional and structural burden, mid-career women opt out of the advancement track entirely. This creates a permanent deficit of diverse, experienced leaders ready for senior executive roles. This Research Topic offers a vital paradigm shift by deconstructing the dominant neoliberal discourse of "grit" and individual resilience. By treating resilience as an individual virtue rather than a systemic failure, institutions effectively commodify women’s endurance. The significance of this collection lies in its refusal to offer self-care strategies as band aids for structural fractures. Instead, this collective body of work will provide an empirical and theoretical roadmap for moving from individual fortitude to institutional accountability. It shifts the scholarly conversation from how women can survive the system to how the system must change to support women. The significance of this issue is further amplified by its explicit commitment to intersectionality. The "middle squeeze" is not experienced uniformly. For women of color, disabled women, and queer women, the middle of the hierarchy is compounded by unique systemic vectors. By centering these intersectional realities, this issue moves past monolithic, white-centric feminist critiques of leadership. It exposes how institutions rely on the hyper-resilience of marginalized women to maintain stability, while denying them the structural safety nets required to thrive. Ultimately, this Research Topic will serve as both a theoretical intervention and a practical toolkit. It will challenge organizational theory by redefining what "effective leadership" looks like when stripped of gendered, colonial assumptions of power. For practitioners, policy-makers, and human resource departments, this issue will provide actionable, policy-based alternatives to traditional leadership development—replacing superficial "wellness webinars" with concrete frameworks for workload redistribution, equitable tenure/promotion clocks, and transparent, protected boundaries for mid-level roles. We invite original research and conceptual papers on the following topics: ● The "Relational Tax": Analyzing the invisible emotional labor performed by mid-level women leaders in mediating institutional conflict. ● The “Emotional Tax”: The hidden labor of mediating and nurturing within gendered hierarchies. ● Beyond the Glass Cliff: Examining why women are disproportionately appointed to mid-level "troubleshooting" roles during institutional crises. ● Intersectional Middle Leadership: How race, disability, and sexuality compound the systemic barriers for women leading from the middle. ● Institutional Healing vs. Self-Care: Case studies of schools/universities that have replaced "resilience training" with structural reforms (e.g., workload redistribution, equitable tenure clocks). ● Abolishing "Grit": Moving toward Institutional Resilience (policy-based support) over individual endurance. ● Intersectional Realities: How systemic racism and sexism create a "compounded squeeze" for women of color leading from the middle. ● Subversive Kinship: Using "Other-sistering" and radical networks to challenge institutional status quos. Topic editors: Whitney Sherman Newcomb, Noelle W Arnold Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82212/the-burden-of-the-middle-deconstructing-resilience-and-reimagining-systemic-support-for-women-educational-leaders