Arab Women in Management and Leadership: Stories from Israel

The opening section of the book could be read as a simple introduction that presents the authors and the women interviewed. However, reading this section gives the reader an intriguing “inside view” into the differing dynamics among Jews and Arabs in Israeli society. This book is the work of four authors, two Arab men and two Jewish women, with different biographies, different ages and holding different perceptions of and personal experiences with the Arab society and with the Arab educational system in Israel. The book begins by presenting each author, her/his personal experience and motivation for the investigation of Arab women leaders in Israel. The women participating in the study are then presented in a very vivid manner, giving a unique voice to each participant. The Arab women interviewed in the book come from varied backgrounds in terms of religious affiliation (i.e. Muslim, Christian and Druze), marital status and children, age (between 38 and 55 years) and religious orientations (i.e. secular or religious). This group provides a diverse representation of Arab women school principals in Israel, and allows for their different voices to be heard.

This introduction of the authors and the interviewees in a holistic, personal and non-hierarchical manner brings to life all the participants in the making of this book, giving readers a sense that they too have entered a “round table conversation” with the women managers and the authors. This, as well as the long quotations of the managers’ original words and stories throughout the book, is a point of strength of the book. It enables the readers to listen to the life stories of the women, as well as read the authors’ interpretations, in both an intimate and non-detached manner, enabling them to also take part in the process of analyses and interpretation.

While the collaboration between the four authors is fruitful, I found myself wondering about the symbolic aspects of a structure of two Arab men and two Jewish women, who are the ones to give a voice to the experiences of Arab women managers. This can still portray the disadvantage of Arab women leaders and implies that there is still a need for a space in which Arab women can write their own story about their struggles to power and their understandings and insights into managerial positions.

Following the introduction chapter, the second chapter, “Arab women’s leadership: Definition and context”, provides a sound background and review of the literature and the research on women’s leadership in different contexts, considering the different waves of feminist activism. Most interesting in this section is the review on the changes in status that women are undergoing in the Arab world, in particular the recent manifestations in the “Arab Spring”. This chapter also gives a wide overview of Arab society and Arab women in Israel and more specifically on women’s leadership in this context.

The subsequent chapters present the analysis of the in-depth interviews with the managers. These chapters map the terrain of their experiences as managers in roles which are only recently being held by women in the Arab society in Israel. The first of these chapters, which is titled “They didn’t consider me, and no one even took me into account”, describes different aspects of school principals’ life stories, focusing on the childhood and early adulthood development of their personal abilities in their families of origin. It also considers socio-political aspects of their appointment to management and entry into the public sphere as well as their current contribution to Arab education and their society. The following chapter, “Challenging cultural norms”, focuses on the perspectives, practices and experiences of a small number of exceptional women who were the first to manage high schools in the Arab education system, a post considered secondary only to the position of mayor in their local municipalities. The fifth chapter titled “Women in male territory” relates to women who have managed to attain a higher managerial position in the Ministry of Education, where they were able to gain more power and contribute to shaping the Arab educational system in Israel.

These chapters unfold the complex stories of the route these women walk when addressing the transitions and opportunities they face. Starting from their childhood experiences in their villages, cities and families of origin, their paths as educated women are traced as they move outside their local domains, where they become acquainted with the Israeli-Jewish majority culture and are exposed to new lifestyles and philosophies that influence their own self-definition. The authors consider the ways the women carve out their paths as educators and managers, holding onto multiple identities as they shape the culture and education system where they work. The authors consider the dynamic ways in which these women adopt many aspects of the modern lifestyles they encounter in their professional developmental process and the changes they introduce and lead when returning to the Arab educational systems, while carefully weaving and integrating these changes within the existing traditional systems. Finally, the authors further consider the “subversive” activities these women lead and the potential change they bring about to the existing social order, while overcoming challenges imposed by a patriarchal society that still tends to perceive female leadership as a threat. All these processes are well described, drawing closely on the women’s narratives and bringing their situated knowledge and understandings of the “road less traveled” that they have followed.

The section that I found most interesting is the closing chapter, titled “I was always a believer, only the clothing was missing”. This chapter focuses on an intriguing topic: the ways in which Muslim women who are school principals use their choice of clothing, mostly in terms of a traditional dress and head covering, to shape, negotiate and signal, internally and externally, their self-identity. In this chapter, the authors present a somewhat surprising finding that was revealed by the in-depth interviews: that many of them, sometime after being appointed to senior positions and after their successful struggles to attain the managerial role, altered their appearance, transitioning from a secular Western dress code to a traditional one. This was enacted especially by wearing salient head coverings of different sorts. For example, one of the managers described how she started wearing a head scarf:

Another woman describes the reaction of the people surrounding her to her decision to change her attire (by putting a head scarf) and the way she was reinforced by complying with social expectations:

According to the authors' analyses for many of the women leaders this was described as a “natural process of personal choice”. However, re-reading the quotes it seems that many of them also describe the ambivalence and complexity of this process, as well as the strong symbolic aspects it holds. Among the stories there are only a few women that maintained their modern Western dress style after becoming a school principle. One of them stated: “I’m not willing to manage the school; I mean, assessing the success of this school, by whether I wear or don’t wear it (traditional dress)” (Suheir, p. 122).

This change of appearance is viewed by the authors through different lenses. First, they provide background and place this phenomenon within an international context, showing similar trends among British and American Muslim women and discuss how Muslim women demonstrate authority and cope with conflicting cultural identities. They then present the transition from the point of view of the women in relationship to their appointment to principal, as a means they use to gain power, respect and protection and how they report that this enables them to develop a stronger link to their community. Another interesting issue that is raised is the way the women describe the ways their colleagues in the Jewish community reacted to this change of clothing with mixed emotions.

This chapter on identity and religion brings to the forefront complex and conflicting emotions, thoughts and understandings, which are treated by the team of authors with sensitivity, while offering a complex analysis and understanding of this phenomenon and how it relates to the women’s identities and management role. Missing, however, was a more challenging, nuanced and critical analysis of these findings and alternative explanations that may derive from them, mostly in terms of understanding women’s struggle for power, leadership and legitimation. Many questions warrant further investigation and re-reading into the stories such as: What are the implications of the findings that when women are at a stage in which they have attained powerful positions they display a need to become more religiously traditional and symbolically subservient to a male-dominated religious establishment? Is this a way to temper their power? To become less threatening to their society and possibly underplay their power? Is this a form of “tax” they need to pay to attain legitimization? Is this another form of earlier findings that show that to be perceived as effective leaders women need to show a hybrid mixture of stereotypical masculine and feminine behaviors, while tempering assertiveness and authority with friendliness and a smile (Eagly and Carli, 2007; Kark et al., 2012)? How does this relate to prior works on women and attire in the workplace (Pratt and Rafaeli, 1997; Rafaeli et al., 1997) and in what ways the expectations of women in the West to “wear a man”s suite to work to fit into a managerial role, is transformed by the expectations that they wear traditional clothing in the Arab Israeli context? Thus, although the book brings forward the women’s voices with cultural sensitivity and respect, this may also limit to some extent a more radical and critical perspective and analysis of their stories.

Finally, although this book provides food for thought on the issues of Arab women’s struggles and accomplishments, it would have been of value to have a concluding chapter that takes the analyses one step further and links the women’s stories to the wider context of leadership and of gender and leadership research. This would promote wider understanding of how this situated and contextualized knowledge about Arab women managers in the Israeli context can be fed back into the leadership theory to redefine, reshape and challenge the hegemonic, masculine and Western notion of leadership that dominates literature. It would also contribute more effectively to the understanding of leadership from the margins and the role of intersectionality in leadership processes.

In conclusion, Arar, Shapira, Azaiza and Hertz-Lazarowitz’s book is a meaningful step forward in the attempt to further uncover and understand the leadership of women coming from the margins, focusing on Arab women (Muslim, Druze and Christian) in the specific complex context of Israel. The vivid stories enrich existing scholarship by illuminating Arab women managers’ perspectives, a topic largely overlooked in current knowledge formation concerning women in leadership and management. Furthermore, understanding contextualized leadership of women from different identity groups may help shed new light on the ways we define the essence of leadership, understand and legitimize it and develop novel theories of leadership and how it can be learned, developed and nourished.

This book makes a major contribution to the literature on contemporary leadership and is an important contribution to the library of those interested in gender and leadership, contextualized leadership, Arab women’s managers or merely in obtaining a broader view of gendered leadership and management processes from a social and cultural perspective. However, one can but hope that future work on the topic of Arab women’s leadership will focus on their leadership roles in other spheres of work, such as the private sector, in which Arab women leaders are barely represented in Israel. Furthermore, I hope that future work on this topic will be undertaken and voiced by Arab women and not solely by Arab men and Jewish-Israeli women. This would indicate that Arab women have advanced a step forward in their leadership.

Ronit Kark is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Bar-Ilan University. She received a PhD degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and completed her postdoctoral studies at the University of Michigan. She is the founder and first director of the graduate program “Gender in the field: Linking theory and practice” in the Gender Studies Department at Bar-Ilan University. Her research interests include gender and leadership, positive relationships and relatedness in organizations, identity and identification processes and leading for creativity at work. Kark was awarded the Loreal-Rekanati Prize for the Study of Women and Management in Israel and was the first recipient of the Academy of Management 2012 Award for the Scholarly Contributions to Advancing Women in Leadership. Ronit Kark can be contacted at: karkronit@gmail.com