Institutional responses to sexual harassment and misogyny towards women teachers from boys in Australian schools in the post-#metoo era

ABSTRACT

Sexual harassment and misogyny are historical experiences of the teaching workforce in Australia. While #metoo promised a moment of reckoning for all girls and women, this reckoning has been less acutely felt in Australian schools, evidenced by a persistence of sexual harassment and misogyny despite progress allegedly made in political and public discourse. In this paper, we draw on data from interviews with 30 women teachers and critically examine their reflections on responses from their school leadership to sexual harassment and misogyny from boys. We demonstrate that school-level responses to misogyny do not reflect broader attitudinal shifts initiated by #metoo, indicating that school leadership largely remains beholden to institutional norms and gender regimes that legitimate and consolidate practices of hegemonic masculinity that subordinate girls and women. We conclude by calling for a renewed focus on addressing cultures of misogyny and sexism in schools at both a policy and classroom level.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexual harassment
• educational leadership
• Andrew Tate
• gender regimes
• gender order

View correction statement:

Correction

Introduction

Initiated by American activist Tarana Bourke and popularised on Twitter by American actress Alyssa Milano calling for women to share stories of sexual harassment and assault, #metoo was widely lauded as a turning point in cultures of pervasive sexual assault and harassment. As a slew of Hollywood men were outed as predators and rapists, public attention subsequently turned to politics and other institutions in calls for justice for women who had endured assaults and harassment as normalised and inevitable experiences of being in the world. However, the ubiquity of sexual harassment and assault made visible by women’s participation in #metoo disclosures did not by virtue of its scope eradicate the stigma that casts doubt upon victims’ testimony. #metoo’s follow-up call-to-action, #believewomen – calling for victims’ accounts to be believed at face value – attended to the persistence of social and cultural conditioning that places unreasonable burdens of proof upon women making allegations. Subsequent incidents, such as the support lent by figures such as Elon Musk to Russell Brand following the 2023 Sunday Times article revealing rape allegations against the latter, and the continued platforming of the masculinity influencer, Andrew Tate, despite charges laid against him for rape and human trafficking, indicate that women’s testimonies still carry less weight than the power and reputation of their accused.

While #metoo promised a moment of reckoning for all girls and women, this promise has remained unfulfilled in Australian schools, where sexism, sexual harassment and misogyny persist despite progress allegedly made in political and public discourse (Variyan and Wilkinson 2022; Wescott, Roberts, and Zhao 2023). This is underscored by findings from a survey of almost 2000 members of the Australian Education Union (AEU) (AEU 2019), reporting that women account for 80% of those who have experienced sexual harassment in schools. In particular, sexual harassment includes enacting unwanted touching, obscene gestures, and/or name-calling with sexual epithets to women teachers (Moon, McCluskey, and Morash 2019), as well as sexualising women teachers’ appearance, language and movement (Lahelma, Palmu, and Gordon 2000); behaviours that significantly compromise women’s safety and satisfaction at work.

Australia has made great strides in commitment to funding and bodies dedicated to the prevention of violence against women. For example, in 2022, the Australian, state and territory governments introduced the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children for the next ten years, to guide and support society, including communities, schools and individuals, to achieve the vision of ending gender-based violence (Department of Social Service 2022). This does not, though, isolate or overtly consider sexism and sexual harassment in schools. Similarly, the Respectful Relationships initiative was conceived and implemented as a school-based intervention into endemic levels of violence against women in Australia. However, a review into its implementation commissioned by the Victorian Department of Education (DET), found that competing priorities within schools, staff turnover and the specifics of school contexts impede its complete and intended deliverance (Acil Allen 2021).

Previous studies reveal that incidents of sexual harassment perpetrated by boys against women teachers result in women teachers’ feelings of humiliation, fear, psychological harm, lower self-efficacy, less effective outputs in professional and personal spaces, distrust in students, and thoughts about leaving the teaching profession (Lahelma, Palmu, and Gordon 2000; Moon, McCluskey, and Morash 2019; Moon and McCluskey 2020; Rajbhandari and Rana 2022; Wescott, Roberts, and Zhao 2023). Yet, in many cases of sexual harassment in schools, it is women teachers – rather than boys – who are seen as the problem (Keddie 2007; Robinson 2000), causing women teachers to internalise the issue and assign blame to themselves (Keddie 2007; Robinson 2000; Variyan and Wilkinson 2022). These affective and material impacts speak to a lack of effective responses and support from school leadership to women teachers when dealing with incidents of sexual harassment and assault.

This ineffectiveness, we suggest, correlates with Connell’s (1987; 2015) concept of the gender order; that being what drives ‘the dynamic relationships between the institutions of society in shaping gendered experiences across society’ (Maharaj 1995, 59), and gender regimes, which is ‘the patterning of gender relations in [an] institution, and especially the continuing pattern, which provides the structural context of particular relationships and individual practices’ (Connell 2005, 6). Given that ‘the gender order is upheld by the constant differentiation between masculinity and femininity’ (Cockburn 2004; Jewkes et al. 2015, 116), this apparatus allows us to understand the association of authority and masculinity in power relations in schools. Such gendered authority (Robinson 2000) cements and is constitutive of the marginalisation of femininity, which perpetuates the value and practices of hegemonic masculinity in schools. Although previous studies have explored women teachers’ experiences of sexual harassment and misogyny from their boy students, there is no systematic, targeted research in Australia investigating institutional and/or school leadership responses to women teachers’ experience of sexual harassment from boys. This present paper speaks to this concern, drawing on qualitative data with 30 women teachers to centre their experiences of their school leadership’s responses to boys’ sexually harassing behaviours and misogynistic attitudes in this post-#metoo era. The study’s findings are valuable for policymakers and school leaders interested in providing relevant support to women teachers’ well-being.

We first offer an overview of the literature on the pervasive problem of boys’ sexual harassment towards women teachers and the institutional responses to boys’ misbehaviours. Then we outline our theoretical framework and research methods before reporting our analysis of the data which is structured around three major themes: 1) supportiveness, remedial responses and restorative practices from leadership; 2) changes in leadership priorities in the post-lockdown era; and 3) issues in school leadership responses/governance. These three themes intertwine and indicate the concerning problem of the lack of, and limited effectiveness in, responses and support, and amplified through school leadership’s reluctance to accurately name the problem as sexual harassment and misogyny. This results in women teachers’ dissatisfaction, disappointment, re-traumatisation, and thereby thoughts of leaving the teaching profession. We conclude with a summary of our findings and some recommendations for future research.

An overview of the issue of sexual harassment of women teachers

Boys: the perpetrators

Sexism and sexual harassment by boys towards women teachers in educational contexts are historical problems in many English-speaking countries (Willis and Kenway 1986; Skelton 1997; Robinson 2000; Keddie 2007; Variyan and Wilkinson 2022). Despite decades of research activism, this issue persists. A recent survey of more than 1,500 UK women teachers showed that 72% of respondents have faced sexual harassment from pupils in schools (Weale 2022). Research notes that sexual harassment from students – particularly from boys – to women teachers causes the latter feelings of fear and humiliation, lower self-efficacy and thoughts about leaving teaching profession (Lahelma, Palmu, and Gordon 2000; Moon and McCluskey 2020; Moon, McCluskey, and Morash 2019; Rajbhandari and Rana 2022). Research also finds that young women teachers tend to be more vulnerable to sexual harassment than more senior colleagues, a dynamic that further marginalises newly-qualified teachers (Moon, McCluskey, and Morash 2019; Rajbhandari and Rana 2022; Robinson 2000). These findings point to ongoing risks that cannot be ignored, and that accelerate the need to address pervasive sexism and sexual harassment and protect women teachers from further violence and victimisation.

Influential studies, including those by Stein (1995) in the US, Skelton (1997) in the UK, and Robinson (2000) in Australia, asserted that boys’ sexual harassment of women teachers is not a discipline problem but an issue of gender and power. Such behaviours are aligned with the ‘excessive displays of aggression, physical domination, violence and the denigration of the feminine’ (Keddie 2006, 521) that often comprise the practice of hegemonic masculinity – the culturally esteemed version of manhood, and one that legitimates gender inequality (Connell 1987; Messerschmidt 2019). Leveraging this point, Robinson (2000) usefully contended that gendered authority, through the discourse and practice of hegemonic masculinity, fundamentally drives boys’ sexualisation of girls and women in school settings. Accessing and mobilising these gendered discourses of sexualisation allows boys to subvert women teachers’ power and to undermine, challenge and de-legitimize women’s authority in gender relations and to simultaneously maintain or enhance boys’ sense of an ascendant position (Keddie 2006; 2007; Lahelma, Palmu, and Gordon 2000; Robinson 2000, Wescott, Roberts, and Zhao 2023).

Colleagues: the poor allies

Another consistent finding across decades is that women teachers’ colleagues – mostly men colleagues – disbelieve, deny or diminish such accounts, or blame victims and thus perpetuate difficulties in reporting sexual harassment (Variyan and Wilkinson 2022; Robinson 2000). Studies by Variyan and Wilkinson (2022) and Robinson (2000) found such practices associate women with irrationality, situating them as looking ‘crazy’ or as ‘overreacting’. This locates women as the problem and fails to situate boys’ sexually harassing behaviours as the key factor. Similarly, research finds that women teachers are afraid of being regarded as incompetent or ineffective teachers by their colleagues if they are unable to deal with the student/s who harass/es them (Robinson 2000; Lahelma, Palmu, and Gordon 2000). This happens since many teachers, particularly men teachers, tend to attribute blame to women who experience sexual harassment, viewing it as a consequence of them being poor disciplinarians and/or lacking necessary ‘masculine attributes’ to control (especially older) boys in classrooms (Robinson 2000), which reinforces the alignment of control and discipline with masculinity and trivialises femininity (Jackson 2010). Yet, compared to women teachers, men teachers have not only a privileged status but also blindness around their privilege (Variyan and Wilkinson 2022). This likely contributes to men teachers’ lack of perspectives on their women counterparts’ experience of sexual harassment and can lead to them being poor allies in resisting gender injustice in schools. Further, the inaction and/or denial from colleagues can both further undermine women’s authority in students’ eyes and perpetuate boys’ sexual harassment.

Leadership: the absence of support

Echoing colleagues’ lack of support and denial, school leadership’s typical lack of responses and downplaying of the problem silence the issue of boys’ sexual harassment of their women teachers (Robinson 2000; Variyan and Wilkinson 2022; Keddie 2007; Rajbhandari and Rana 2022; Wescott and Roberts 2023). In an AEU survey (2019), 78% of the respondents who experienced sexual harassment (80% of them are women) were unsatisfied with the resolution in workplace. Meanwhile, research suggests that the ubiquity of sexism and sexual harassment of women teachers is further trivialised and hindered due to leadership not accurately naming the problem; instead, identifying it more prosaically as a discipline issue (Robinson 2000; Keddie 2007; Variyan and Wilkinson 2022). This further entrenches women teachers’ silence about the sexual harassment they experience from boy students since they feel an absence of support and response from school leaders, which further drives women teachers’ thoughts of leaving teaching profession altogether (Lahelma, Palmu, and Gordon 2000; Moon, McCluskey, and Morash 2019; Moon and McCluskey 2020, Wescott, Roberts, and Zhao 2023).

While similar to colleagues’ denials of the issue, school heads’ silencing of sexism and sexual harassment perpetuates boys’ fearlessness of the repercussions of challenging and degrading women teachers’ authority, making institutions complicit in this negative experience (Robinson 2000; Keddie 2007; Variyan and Wilkinson 2022). This is also pervasive and potentially more unique in its manifestation in elite private boys’ schools, since many administrators of such schools view parents and their children as ‘clients’ and ‘customers’ and, as an implication of high tuition fees, view keeping parents happy to be a teacher’s job (Variyan and Wilkinson 2022) – which can be extended to denials or playing down of sexism. Importantly, teachers feel more frustrated when principals acknowledge the experience of sexual harassment and bullying but prioritize school business and minimise particular issues (Keddie 2007; Rajbhandari and Rana 2022; Variyan and Wilkinson 2022). Ironically, boys are aware of and utilise parent-school relations to act as a cover for their perpetration of sexually harassing women teachers (Variyan and Wilkinson 2022). Therefore, boys’ sexism and sexual harassment of women teachers, colleagues’ lack of support, and the administrative absence of deterrents to curb and prevent such violence against women teachers intersect and intertwine to form a vicious cycle perpetuating victimisation of women teachers. This is, though, not an accident and instead reflects the ways that institutions embody and perpetuate the established societal gender order.

Theoretical framework

This article draws on Connell’s theoretical work of gender regimes (2020) and gender order (1987; 2015) in schools to analyse the responses and/or lack of responses from school leadership to women teachers’ experience of sexual harassment from boy students. Work on the gender order is indebted to the original conception by the social historian, Matthews (1984), referring to ‘the initial social differentiation by gender that permeates and underpins all other distinctions’ (Cockburn 2004, 33). Building on this work in profoundly generative and influential ways, Connell (2020, 138) establishes that gender regimes in a school are ‘the pattern of gender relations institutionalised’ which ‘embodies patterns of authority’ as an important component of the political order of the school. Meanwhile, schools’ gender regimes are amendable and subject to social-cultural change while interwoven with the gender order of a society – the wider patterns of gender relations acting as the current state of play in the macro-politics of gender (Connell 1987; 2015). This suggests that schools’ gender regimes are a reflection of the gender order of the society through which a school functions and embeds gender in local arrangements.

Importantly, while a ‘local gender regime is likely to share many features with the gender order of the wider society, [it] may depart from it in specific ways’ (Connell 2005, 6). Connell (1996; 2015) elucidated that schools’ gender regimes are intersectional with four dimensions of gender relations: power relations, division of labour, emotional relations and symbolisation. Connell (2005, 7) explains that the gender regime of an institution ‘involves all the dimensions of gender relations, no matter what the institution is or does’, but clarifies that while these are interwoven, for analytic purposes they can be delineated. Accordingly, and driven by the data, our attention in this paper is directed to exploring the power relations and emotional relations in schools to investigate boys’ sexual harassment towards their women teachers and school leadership’s responses to the problem.

The first dimension of relationships of gender regimes is power relations, including the patterns of authority in a school, often associated with masculinity, especially heterosexual masculinity (Connell 1996; 2020). A familiar example can be the concentration of men in leadership roles in the power and authority structures of primary and secondary schools. This dominant modern Western discourse of authority emphasises hegemonic masculine values and practices while marginalising femininity and other masculinities (e.g. queer or marginalised masculinities) (Connell 2020). This influences the students’ and teachers’ gendered perceptions and behaviours of gender, power and authority, ultimately, as above, leaving women viewed as the ‘problem’ rather than boys’ behaviour (Robinson 2000). These discursive and material practices of patriarchal gender regimes and bureaucracies in schools undermine women’s authority and legitimate gender inequalities. Their structural entrenchment within normative school operations and culture makes their undermining and resistance highly challenging, even despite allegedly significant progress made in broader society.

Another dominant dimension of gender regimes and the gender order in schools is patterns of emotion, which are highly associated with sexuality (Connell 1996; 2015). Emotional relations are discursively practised and constituted by both students and teachers and influence the way men and boys interact with women and girls in schools, comprising both positive (loving) and negative (hostile) emotions (Connell 2015). Negative emotions can lead to sexism and sexual harassment of women teachers as well as enable entrenched misogyny and homophobia (Connell 2015). The negative emotional relations also correlate with school leadership’s – predominately men leaders’ – ignorance and trivialisation of women teachers’ experience of sexual harassment from boys, which promotes the values and practices of hegemonic masculinity that constitute the legitimation of the subordination of women and girls in institutions of schooling.

In addition to patterns of emotion, Robinson (2000, 76) argues that the silence around boys’ sexual harassment against women teachers is correlated with other dominant discourses, including constructing the boy perpetrator as ‘an easily identifiable culprit’ who is ‘abnormal’, ‘deviant’, or from a specific ethnicity or cultural background (see Roberts (2018) and Roberts and Elliott (2020) for fuller exploration of this latter point, including the complicity of some masculinities scholarship). Additionally, the social-cultural stereotypical gendered discourse also contributes to hiding the nature of the issue of sexual harassment, that is, trivialisation and denial of boys’ sexual harassment through the cover of men’s innate lack of control and responsibilities (Robinson 2000; Wardman 2017).

While outside of scope here, we appreciate that there are alternative perspectives on the utility of Connell’s theorising, both in terms of her most cited concept ‘hegemonic masculinity’, but also her broader theorising of the gender order. Debates around these issues are longstanding, many and diverse. For example, Pollert (1996) argued that Connell and other scholars too readily unravel the interlocking systems of class and gender and leave absent a necessary dialectic for understanding oppression. Dialectical absences also sit at the base of Donaldson’s (1993) concerns with how Connell does not fully consider the two-way relationship between the dominant and dominated/marginalised in the production of hegemony that characterises the gender order. Beasley (2012, 755) contends that ‘the identities [Connell] outlines are largely conceived as unified and stable platforms for action whether complicit or resistant’, in a way emblematic of a variety of post structuralist critiques of how the gender order appears to be theorised as too stable with no prospect for change, and with no-to-limited conceptions of agency (Ralph 2024). There remains a prominent divide in gender scholarship, largely on the grounds of an ontological debate that shows no sign of being resolved, with some scholars drawing on Butler to suggest Connell is hamstrung by an inescapable essentialism that starts from a prediscursive self (Botton 2020). On the other hand, the use of Connell’s conceptual tool box, notably hegemonic masculinity, but her approach overall, remains hugely influential (Messerschmidt 2019), and she remains far from the only major gender theorist to retain a focus on gender and structure (see e.g. the ongoing, parallel work of Risman 2018). We are aligned with the latter school of thought, and our intention mirrors and builds from recent empirical studies that have deployed the concept of the gender order to elaborate the sometimes ‘invisible background expectancies’ of gender in different industries (e.g. Zinn and Hofmeister 2022).

Methods

Our data are drawn from a qualitative study investigating Australian women teachers’ accounts of boys’ classroom behaviour and its associations with the discourses espoused by the masculinity influencer, Andrew Tate (Wescott, Roberts, and Zhao 2023). Using flyers shared across social media channels, we recruited 30 women teachers currently working in schools, spanning both primary and secondary settings in all states of Australia except the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory. Our sample includes teachers employed across all sectors: government, Catholic and Independent, in all career stages, from graduate to highly accomplished. Teachers participated in one-to-one semi-structured online (via Zoom) interviews averaging 60 min in length, conducted by a woman researcher. Interview questions explored women’s relationships with boys over their careers, perceived changes to these relationships in post-lockdown schooling (a timeline that aligns with Tate’s rise in popularity), experiences of sexism, sexual harassment and misogyny in schools, and their school leaders’ responses to increasing and escalating shifts in boys’ behaviour. Interview data was first coded thematically by third author, and then cross coded by other authors using thematic analysis as proposed by Braun and Clarke (2006). The major pursuit in our data collection and analysis was, as we have documented elsewhere, to detail women’s accounts of the details of boys’ sexist behaviours and its relationship with social media ‘manfluencer’ discourses. Alongside this, and unearthed inductively, another major theme pertained to institutional response to teachers’ highlighting of this as variously problematic. Accordingly, in this paper, we examine how institutional responses, or lack of responses, to sexism in schools constitute gender regimes (Connell 2020) and which reproduce the normative gender order (Connell 1987; 2015). This is a critical endeavour since institutional inactions perpetuate victimisation and violence towards Australian women teachers when experiencing misogyny and sexual harassment from boys, which need to be revealed, conceded and brought to policymakers’ awareness. The participants’ perspectives and experiences were divided into different codes and then interconnections were made between these codes to elaborate the main themes to present Australian schools’ responses to women teachers’ experience of sexual harassment by boys. The themes presented in this paper were those codes that generally dominated the discussion.

Institutional responses as evidence of a gender regime

Our findings are divided into three key themes encompassing 1) supportiveness, remedial responses and restorative practices from leadership; 2) changes in leadership priorities in the post-COVID era; and 3) issues in school leadership responses/governance. These themes intersect with each other and are underpinned by the two of four dimensions of gender relations theorised by Connell discussed above, which associate authority and power with masculinity and engage with negative emotions, particularly hostility towards women and girls, leading to and perpetuating the pervasive problem of boys’ sexual harassment and misogyny to women teachers. These, we argue, are constitutive parts of the gender regimes which are likely to slightly differ from school to school (Connell 2005); however, commensurate with Zinn and Hofmeister (2022, 944) we find that ‘[b]ringing together data that originates in distinct settings helps indicate how surprisingly consistent the gender order is’.

Supportiveness, remedial responses and restorative practices from leadership

Some women teachers reported experiencing supportiveness, remedial responses and restorative practices from school leadership to grapple with boys’ misogynistic attitudes and sexually harassing behaviours. This consists of taking the issue of sexual harassment seriously and dealing with incidents of misogyny and sexual harassment promptly to prevent women teachers from further victimisation. Moreover, some participants mentioned different types of sanctions used by their schools to punish/educate the boy perpetrator/s who sexually harass/es their women teachers; however, it must be noted that proactive interventions from leadership and school principals were described in the minority of participants’ schools, and unfortunately, the actions – even sanctions – do not substantively tackle the ingrained sexist and misogynistic ideologies.

Among the few remedial leadership-driven support and restorative practices described were sanctions, organising well-being sessions, inviting guest speakers and holding year-level assemblies only for boys. For instance, Emilia, an English teacher at a government school in New South Wales, recalled the support from her head teacher:

I think particularly my head teacher […] is really good at trying to get boys to think about their values, their attitudes, what they stand for, but also in everything he does, he just exudes respect. So he wants to teach ‘em to be respectful, and if kids are disrespectful, […], he talks to him about that. Like, ‘[…] This is why what you did to your teacher was disrespectful, but you need to go and apologise to her. You need to acknowledge what you’ve done’.

In Emilia’s account, the man headteacher acts as a supportive ally by talking to the boy/s who disrespected women teachers and challenged women’s authority through sexual harassment. Yet, with or without awareness, the way that Emilia’s head teacher ‘exudes respect’ demonstrates that men in leadership command a different level of authority than women (see also Messner 2000 on how this is amplified through the intersection of masculinity and whiteness; and Aronson 2017 on the White Savior Industrial Complex in teaching in the US). This may manifest a dynamic that reinforces gender regimes in schools emphasising the pattern of authority associated with masculinity (Connell 2020). In addition, having the (man) leader step into an incident reinforces the existing regime, with gender roles revolving around pernicious gender stereotypes. That is, in conjunction with a ‘masculine’ style, respect/authority is not automatically ascribed to women and femininity, and a woman teacher cannot achieve it ‘simply because they are not men’ (Jackson 2010, 511); men in leadership have to step in and assert it for them, which, again, locates men leaders as more effective disciplinarians than women and degrades women’s authority.

Participants also noticed a negligible influence of the individualised/small-grouped instructional conversation on redirecting boy students’ aggressive attitudes and misbehaviours. For example, Cathy, who teaches at a state government school, explained that after a restorative conversation with the school assistant principal, a boy ‘immediately went back to doing the behaviour that he was doing, which was running across the top of the tables in the classroom’. Similarly, Rachel, a state high school teacher in Queensland, recalled a student’s inappropriate, sexualised language, where he said: ‘Miss, don’t you reckon Andrew Tate would have the biggest dick? Like, don’t you think his dick would be down to his knees?’ The school’s deputy principal had a ‘restorative’ conversation with the boy, but the boy consequently situated Rachel as being too ‘sensitive’ to his words, saying, ‘Miss, I get it. […] I’ll just be really careful to not say anything that you’ll find upsetting anymore’. This prompted Rachel to see restorative practices as unable to ‘change anything’, nor allow the boy to ‘understand how far across the boundary’ his words were. This echoes previous studies (Robinson 2000; Variyan and Wilkinson 2022; Keddie 2007) that highlight boys’ fearlessness of the consequences means that restorative conversations are often ineffective. The remorseless attitudes that teachers described correlate with boys’ emotions, particularly hostility towards women and girls (Connell 1996; 2015), which manifested in their disrespectful behaviours and attitudes and the use of sexually aggressive languages.

Additionally, only a minority of participants reported that their school leaders and administrators use serious sanctions to educate and/or punish boys for their abusive language and/or sexual harassment to women teachers. For instance, Chris explained that one boy student was suspended for calling a woman teacher ‘bitch’, and Lily’s school administrator put a suspension on boys who were ‘saying really grotesque and sexual things about female students and female teachers’. Additionally, Cathy recalled that four boys in her school had been expelled on account of ‘a total disrespect for women and girls’ as a result of ‘lots of inappropriate behaviour’. Expulsion is the most serious sanction deployed by participants’ school leadership, and only two participants reported that their school leaders used this type of sanction to deal with misogyny and sexual harassment of women teachers. While not representative of leadership responses to these behaviours more broadly, it reflects multiple participant sentiments across our study that characterise leadership responses to sexism and sexual harassment as inadequate (see below). Most participants, indeed, expressed disappointment and exasperation with leadership’s lack of action around boys’ escalating behaviour.

Noteworthy is that participants suggested that women leaders generally respond more supportively and resolutely than their male colleagues to women teachers’ experience of sexual harassment from boys. For example, Madelyn shared:

I’m finding that only leaders who identify as female have been taking this behaviour seriously. Whereas male leaders have been like, ‘oh, you know, I had a talk to ‘em and told them that they shouldn’t do that’. And then the women are like ‘I want these boys out’.

These accounts imply a gendered difference in responses from women and men leaders to boys’ behaviour and indicate that some men in schools minimise the seriousness of such behaviour and its effect on women. Indeed, many participants in our study expressed that they would like their male colleagues to step up more readily as their allies. Madelyn’s colleague’s statement that he ‘had a talk to ‘em’ is also indicative of a shared code between men in schools and boys, in which particular behaviour is mutually understood as a betrayal of the code, conversations which women are excluded from. This correlates with gender regimes in schools that associate authority with masculinity which degrade women’s authority (Connell 2020). It also reflects the dominant modern Western discourse of authority that highlights the value and practices of hegemonic masculinity (Robinson 2000; Jackson 2010); this, again, marginalises femininity and reinforces gender inequalities in schools.

Changes in leadership priorities in the post-lockdown era

Participants in this study also reported changes in the priorities of school leadership which arose after students returned to face-to-face schooling after a period of remote learning during COVID lockdowns. Most participants observed and reported a reduction of authority in school leadership in enacting discipline and/or sanctions when students misbehave, including in instances of sexual harassment and misogyny. This correlates with the shifted emphasis of schooling on supporting students’ well-being due to amplified mental health issues during and after the pandemic (Modan 2021; Prytz and Carey 2020) and seems to inform the negligible influence of remedial and restorative practices by school leadership to deal with boys’ sexual harassment of women teachers. Moreover, our findings show that school leadership has become more ‘careful’ and ‘cautious’ in post-lockdown schooling when interacting with students and responding to their parents, corresponding with the three main factors illustrated below.

First, due to students’ remote schooling during the COVID lockdown and now being allowed to have in-person interactions in schools, there has been a shift in many parents’ attitudes towards education. For example, Ella, a teacher in a Catholic boys’ school, discerned ‘a real shift in the way parents […] are allowing their son to take high-risk behaviours’ since parents deem ‘at least they’re off screen’. Yet, parents’ passive attitudes and absence of support for school and teachers hinder school leadership in dealing with incidents of sexual harassment, which aggravates and perpetuates the sexual harassment of victims. In addition, teachers are also aware of the curtailment of school leadership’s authority and power in enacting disciplinary interventions in the post-COVID era. As Hanna stated:

I do think they’re (school leaders) in a position where they actually can’t exercise authority anymore. I mean, suspending kids is a big deal now. […] It should be a process. But everything requires an appeal and sufficient paperwork and a certain amount of crosses against their name before a suspension. So if people aren’t documenting it cuz they’re tired or burnt out and I’m the only one putting something up, nothing’s happening.

Hanna’s observation implies that the cultural shift in schooling to support students’ well-being after the COVID pandemic unpredictably inhibits school leaders’ support and responses to women teachers when they experience sexual harassment from their boy students.

The second factor that provokes the lack of authority of school leadership is correlated with the established pushback and defensive attitudes from parents of students from middle-high socioeconomic backgrounds – mostly occurring in elite private boys’ schools – to handle their son’s behaviour of sexual harassment to women and girls. For instance, Ella shared her experience of having ‘a couple of meetings where a lawyer arrived with the parents’ to deal with boys’ problematic and/or sexually harassing behaviours in schools. Similarly, Amy stated:

I have definitely seen what white male privilege is. They (boys) think that they’re above the rules. They don’t have to worry about it cuz mommy and daddy are going to come in and they’re gonna sort it out for them.

What emerges here is the ways that the incidents of sexual harassment of boys to their women teachers are inflected by intersections between gender and other forms of social power. In particular, boys from a more advantageous socioeconomic background are manipulative of the exercise of privilege and power with the ‘support’ from their parents (see also Robinson 2000; Variyan and Wilkinson 2022). While not emergent in our data – because of the relative homogeneity of the participant sample – it is likely that Whiteness, as a source of privilege and a vehicle for oppression, also operates in such situations, in line with other education research that deploys an intersectionality lens (e.g. Bhopal 2020). Situations like Amy described above can heighten boys’ fearlessness of the repercussions of sexually harassing women and girls in schools. This parallels Variyan and Wilkinson’s (2022, 189) argument that boys in elite private schools may ‘mobilise the power-relations already manifest in the unique relations’ between school and their elite parents to act as a cover for their perpetration of sexual harassment. Some participants understand the lack of authority of school administration since the parents of students flagrantly and defensively shield their sons’ sexual harassment, as Amy said, ‘Which I guess is why admin are kind of like, there’s only so much we can do. Like, why are we fighting this? We just have to lean in.’ This also ultimately de-legitimates women’s authority and reinstates hegemonic masculinity and patriarchal regimes as normative (Connell 2020).

The last factor refers to the hierarchy of demands that schools tend to prioritise more pressingly, particularly with the significantly increasing mental health issues among children and adolescents due to lockdown restrictions during the COVID pandemic in Australia (Carison, Babl, and O’Donnell 2022). For example, Elva explained, ‘If you’ve got something above, […] How do you deal with the low-level stuff when you’ve got massive stuff?’ Similarly, Hanna said, ‘Leadership had to pick the bigger things to prioritise. So what they’d see are all those little microaggressions, whilst I think they are a huge issue and they are going to become something big, they’ve gotta prioritise the fight that happened.’ To grapple with the rising mental health challenges experienced by many young people (Prytz and Carey 2020), schools commit to and prioritise offering mental health support to students. This inevitably limits the time, effort and human resources on grappling with incidents of sexism and sexual harassment from boys to their women teachers.

Issues in school leadership responses/governance

Although some participants’ school leaders provide seemingly active responses and support when grappling with incidents of sexual harassment, the majority of women in this study have reported multiple issues in their leadership’s responses. We identified two predominant issues and attended to each of them separately.

One issue relates to experiences of school leadership’s attitudes and behaviours of victim-blaming, trivialisation, and disregarding of sexual harassment and misogyny from boys to women teachers, which markedly manifests among men leaders. For example, when Gillian, a private school teacher in Queensland, reported to her leaders that some boy students made ‘sexual moaning noises’ in her classes and constantly asked her personal questions, the response from her school leadership included quoting a set of professional teaching standards, in order to assign responsibility to Gillian’s ‘teaching lack of behaviour management’ as the issue. Further, Gillian’s leadership ‘disregarded the whole thing and didn’t acknowledge any of it as inappropriate’. Similarly, Lily recalled the absence of support from her school leadership, by saying,

Every single time it was, ‘Oh, well, you’ve just gotta try these strategies.’ […] And you brought, ‘[…] so I am doing those strategies. […] These boys are just too difficult for me, and they don’t respect me.’ But there was just nothing. There’s no help. […] They’ll pull these kids up for coming to class late, but they won’t pull them up for intimidating their teacher. It’s often seen as the teacher’s fault, I think.

Both the responses from the school leaderships of Gillian and Lily reveal the intersectional attitudes comprising blaming victims and disregarding the issue of sexual harassment and misogyny. This is analogous with findings of previous studies (Robinson 2000; Variyan and Wilkinson 2022; Keddie 2007; Rajbhandari and Rana 2022) that document school leaderships’ lack of appropriate responses to women teachers’ experience of sexism and sexual harassment from boys and their downplaying of the issues. This often leads to women teachers reporting dissatisfaction with the resolution (AEU 2019), thereby driving ruminations on leaving the teaching profession (Lahelma, Palmu, and Gordon 2000; Moon, McCluskey, and Morash 2019; Moon and McCluskey 2020; Wescott, Roberts, and Zhao 2023). In this study, Angie, a math teacher who previously worked in a private school and now has left teaching because of the absence of proper response and support from her school leadership to her experience of boy students’ sexual harassment, shared:

… it wasn’t the behaviour. That was bad behaviour, but that’s not what prompted me to leave. It was the way management was dealing with that behaviour that I didn’t have an out. […] We all understood the school management couldn’t stop the students from behaving in that way. But they could certainly educate, help educate and acknowledge and put systems in place to deal with this kind of stuff.

Angie’s reflection indicates that while there is acknowledgement of the normalisation of sexual harassment in school contexts, it is the unmet expectations of appropriate leadership responses that are the most affecting for women. In this case, and many other women’s, school leaderships’ lack of response to sexual harassment symbolically and materially reinstates and reproduces the gender regimes (Connell 2020) through marginalising and normalising sexual harassment, enforcing the victims to internalise the problems themselves.

A potential factor behind school leadership’s inaction and/or absence of appropriate interventions to boys’ sexual harassment of women teachers could be a lack of empathy from men who predominate in positions of power and authority in schools (Connell 2020) and have a blindness around their privilege (Variyan and Wilkinson 2022). Illustrative here, Ivy thought-provokingly asked:

When we have these conversations with men, our colleagues or males and leadership, have they listened? Have they done the reading? Have they done the critical engagement? I think the answer is no. So I think they want to move in this direction and there’s a few that I particularly have faith in, but I’m not sure how across it they are, and I don’t think they’re as informed as a good section of female teachers here.

Ivy’s account is indicative of the dimension of power relations in school’s gender regimes– predominantly men in positions of power – that reinforces associating masculinity with authority, perpetuating the ideologies of men’s dominance and subordination of women and girls (Connell 1996; 2020). Meanwhile, boys’ differentiated and gendered interactions with men and women in schools also contribute to hindering men leaders from understanding women’s emotions and feelings caused by suffering sexual harassment by boys. For example, Jenifer shared an example of how gender determines relationships and expectations in schools, saying:

They (boys) would not dare think about it with any young, new, green male teacher at all. And so I don’t think any of our male leadership would necessarily know that the boys set a bar far higher for our female staff to cover.

This dynamic, whereby women are held to higher standards of practice than men, hinders their ability to seek support for men in leadership, whose potentially substantially different experiences within the same student cohorts colour their perceptions of problematic behaviour. Yet, a subsequent problem of the school-level lack of responses is boys’ misunderstanding of gender and power and may promote the ideological apparatus of male supremacy among boys, which perpetuates their sexual harassment to their women teachers and legitimates the subordination and devaluation of women and girls. For instance, Julia said, ‘I really think that kids pick up on what leadership and what other teachers are saying or not saying or doing or not doing and that kind of thing. And I think that it perpetuates itself … ’. This implies that the absence of school leadership’s appropriate interventions fails to model egalitarian gender relations for boys, but reinforces the ideologies of hegemonic masculinity and de-legitimates women’s authority.

The other major issue in school-level responses to boys’ sexual harassment of women teachers concerns school leadership’s hesitancy to accurately name particular behaviours as misogyny and sexual harassment, often identifying it instead as a disrespect/discipline problem. For instance, Katie said: ‘Even if you’ve been spotlighted on the national stage as having an issue in that arena, they really do not wanna name it.’ An analogous argument is made by Gillian, saying:

When I’ve used the term sexual harassment, people really shy away from agreeing or using that term. Like they’ll just be like, ‘Oh wow, like that sounds like a lot.’ Or they won’t really kind of outwardly agree and use that term. And I think that term scares people because it seems really like an accusation or something very serious.

Schools evading using precise language has material implications for this issue, as an avoidance of recording behaviour accurately means an absence of data and record-keeping that might illustrate the scope of the problem. Without accurate recordings of instances of sexual harassment and misogyny, classifying this behaviour instead as the ambiguous ‘disrespect’, women’s accounts become purely anecdotal and therefore able to be derided as unreliable testimony. In schools driven by data logics (Lewis and Holloway 2019; Selwyn 2018), a problem made invisible by uncaptured data is a problem that can be undermined and discarded.

Conclusion

Framed by Connell’s (2005; 2020) theorising of the gender order – the ‘set of shared practical knowledge about gender relations that is locally accomplished, but which goes well beyond its presence here and now’ (Zinn and Hofmeister 2022, 942) – we have examined the responses and/or lack of responses from school leadership – predominantly men in positions of power – to women teachers’ experience of sexual harassment from boys. These responses are informed by and simultaneously reproduce local gender regimes, but serve to remind us of ‘how normative gender arrangements are repeated’ (Zinn and Hofmeister 2022, 942) and in the process reproduce and sustain gender inequality.

Firstly, we explored school-level supportive attitudes, remedial responses and restorative practices in dealing with boys’ sexual harassment and misogyny to their women teachers. We observe that, among our sample, punitive measures are undertaken in very few of the participants’ schools and tend to underwhelm in tackling the progressively normalised issue of sexual harassment and misogyny in school contexts. This, in fact, is interconnected with the second theme derived from the analysis of data – changes in leadership priorities in the post-lockdown era – which indicates a reduction in the authority of school leadership in enacting discipline and/or sanctions when students perpetrate misbehaviours, such as sexual harassment and misogyny. Lastly, differentiated from the first theme and second theme – either leadership’s proactive support or lack of authority in intervening in women teachers’ experience of sexual harassment – the third theme revealed the concerning issue of school-level responses that do the opposite of supporting women teachers when dealing with sexual harassment and misogyny through processes of subtle and less than subtle denial or reframing of the problem. This includes school leadership’s attitudes and behaviours of disregarding the problem and not accurately naming the problem as sexual harassment and misogyny. This, however, re-traumatises women teachers who experienced sexual harassment and thereby leads to marginalisation and normalisation of sexual harassment from boys to women teachers, associating with teachers’ internalisation of the problem and consequent leaving the teaching profession.

The women’s accounts of persistent sexual harassment and sexism captured here emerge during a time when school populations are managing the infiltration of Andrew Tate’s extremist misogynist ideology (AUTHORS). Though placed historically within existing scholarship that illustrates a long history of these behaviours perpetrated against women teachers, their recent resurgence – a formidable and discernible presence in the daily work of women teachers and influenced largely by Tate’s discourses on girls and women – indicates that very little remedial progress has been made toward implementing affirmative and effective responses by school administrators. The testimonies of women in this paper and the failures of their leadership to hear them, see them and respond, erode any delusions of post-#metoo sweeping social and attitudinal change reaching women and girls in schools. While momentum inflated by social media engagement with #metoo, brave testimonies by countless women and proportionate action and responses by organisations across Western nations to hold perpetrators to account shaped a narrative that no institutions were beyond reproach, the reality for women working in schools is that these effects have been either piecemeal, fleeting, or non-existent. Indeed, the responses to sexism, sexual harassment and misogyny by school administrators documented here evidence that there is still much to be done. The normative gender order remains palpable in Australian schools.

Future research agendas could centre an intersectional approach that explores institutional responses to those whose social locations are characterised by interlocking systems of domination. In particular, the experiences of Indigenous, Black, Brown and other women of colour in the teaching profession, and also those of diverse sexual and gender identities, would nuance and add significantly to our understanding of the issues outlined in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2024.2326308)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xuenan Zhao

Xuenan Zhao is a PhD candidate in the School of Education, Culture and Society at Monash University Faculty of Education. Her research explores parents' responses to the influence of harmful masculinity on their sons.

Steven Roberts

Steven Roberts is a professor of Education and Social Justice in the School of Education, Culture & Society at Monash University Faculty of Education. He is a sociologist and has published widely in the areas of Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities and Critical Youth Studies.

Stephanie Wescott

Dr Stephanie Wescott is a lecturer in humanities and social sciences in the Faculty of Education's School of Education, Culture and Society.