Conference Agenda

Teacher well-being has emerged as a critical concern in education systems worldwide, as increasing job demands, emotional labour, and organizational pressures contribute to stress, burnout, and attrition. Research consistently shows that teachers’ psychological, physical, and social well-being are closely linked to instructional quality, student outcomes, and school sustainability. In fast-developing education systems such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), these challenges are intensified by rapid reforms, accountability pressures, and culturally diverse school environments.

Leadership has been identified as a key organizational factor shaping teachers’ work experiences and well-being. While traditional leadership models emphasize authority, control, and performance outcomes, emerging scholarship highlights the importance of relational, people-centred leadership approaches. One such approach is soft leadership, which emphasizes communication skills, emotional self-regulation, ethical conduct, initiative, training orientation, and team-building capabilities.

Despite growing interest in leadership styles and teacher well-being, empirical evidence on soft leadership, particularly within non-Western contexts, remains limited. The UAE public and private school systems offer a unique setting to explore how culturally grounded, relational leadership practices influence teachers’ well-being amid systemic transformation. This study addresses this gap by examining how principals’ soft leadership competencies relate to teachers’ psychological, professional, and organizational well-being.

Aligned with the ECER 2026 theme, this research bridges knowing (understanding leadership–wellbeing relationships through empirical analysis) and acting (offering evidence-informed implications for leadership development, policy, and practice).

The study is guided by the following research question:

Does principals’ gender pose a differentiating factor of their soft leadership practices?

Does teachers’ gender pose a differentiating factor of their well-being?

What distinct profiles of soft leadership practices can be identified among principals based on their leadership behaviors?

A small body of literature addresses women in PK-20 STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine) leadership (Labov & Olsen, 2014; McKay et al., 2018; Geesa et al., 2020). In addition to the current limitations on the literature, the investigations on STEMM women’s leadership do not address the nuances of the variety of intersections that affect women in these roles. This investigation sought to examine the progress, successes, and challenges of these women through intersections that included, but were not limited to, race and ethnicity, age, gender, religion, socioeconomic background (class), and professional position. The qualitative study’s research question was, What are the intersections that affect the progresses, successes, challenges, and intersectional factors of women in PK-20 STEMM leadership? We examine how now, more than ever, we should address the moral imperative to recognize the multiple factors affecting women in STEMM leadership and seek to pave the way for an equitable future.

This study is based on the limited literature regarding STEMM women in educational leadership specifically and the broader international literature of women in educational leadership. We present four themes from that literature: sense of belonging, understanding one’s experiences, the role of gatekeepers, and recognition of achievements, social support, and work-life balance. Second, the study is grounded in the perspectives of intersectionality theory. We summarize with the relationship between educational leadership and intersectionality theory. Those themes and the theory are briefly summarized here.

Related Literature

Many factors contribute to a sense of belonging in a field- feeling accepted and trusted when executing a role or engaging in work supports a sense of self-worth and builds confidence (McClure and Brown, 2008; Good, Rattan and Dweck, 2012). Having a growth mindset is more critical for women than men when it comes to career choice and progression for “stereotypical classifications of professions and subjects have strong implications for females” (Erti, Luttenberger & Paechter, 2017, p. 703). Role models are important for women in STEMM. The axiom, “you can’t be what you can’t see,” illustrates the importance of visibility and the sharing of experiences so that females are exposed to and learn about the work of women in STEMM for as McCullough (2019, p. 1) notes, “As more women take on STEM leadership roles, understanding what their experiences are can help promote other women’s aspirations to, and success in, leadership.”

Montgomery (2020), in exploring who is promoted in the academy and why, offers insight into gatekeeping. She questions if promotion is about box ticking and thereby perpetuating staleness and supporting the status quo or does the academy support individual talent and provide a landscape which encourages thriving? Who gets to lead in this environment and who shines? This has huge implications for women in leadership in STEMM. Women feel most supported when positive work and non-work climates align. Amon (2017) concludes that, for women in STEMM, the impact of being in male dominated careers can be mitigated by organizational cultures which offer a work-life balance where collaboration, collegiality and a commitment to the recognition of achievements regardless of gender.

Even as equality of opportunity legislation comes on stream that proports to provide scaffolding for women who wish to engage in careers hitherto considered male dominated arenas, there are frequently insidious agents at work which operate to challenge and make more difficult the opening of roles and career progression in STEMM to women (Amon, 2017).

School leaders across national contexts are increasingly exposed to multiple and often competing forms of pressure. They are expected to deliver high levels of student learning outcomes (OECD, 2016), expectations intensified through national and transnational regimes of comparison and performance measurement (Steiner-Khamsi, 2019). At the same time, school leaders are held responsible for fostering productive work and learning environments for teachers and students (Laursen, 2024), while also managing conflicts and expectations from parents and other stakeholders under conditions of heightened accountability and public scrutiny (Wade, 2025). Taken together, these demands place school leaders in complex and often strained positions. While existing research has documented many of these pressures individually, there is still limited knowledge of how they interact, how they are experienced by school leaders, and how they shape leaders’ well-being and everyday practices. Drawing on Bourdieu’s (1992) concepts of field, habitus, and capital, this paper explores how school leaders experience and navigate pressures from administrators, teachers, and parents, understood as cross-field, and at times contradictory logics.

According to Pierre Bourdieu, a field is a structured social space in which agents occupy different positions that are defined relationally through domination and subordination (Bourdieu, 1992). Although fields may display a degree of autonomy, Bourdieu also emphasizes that they are often shaped by logics originating outside their boundaries (Bourdieu, 2004). In the field of education, such cross-field influences are particularly evident, as economic and managerial logics increasingly shape educational practices and challenge the field’s autonomy (Lindgaard & Rawolle, 2008). How such field logics are interpreted and handled depends on school leaders’ positions within the educational field and on the volume and composition of capital available to them. Capital refers to the resources school leaders can mobilize in order to act, be recognized, and exert authority within and across fields (Bourdieu, 1986). Previous research suggests that school leaders’ responses to political and administrative logics are closely tied to the forms of capital they possess—such as professional credibility, institutional authority, and relational resources—and to their capacity to leverage these as legitimate leadership (Bourdieu, 1996; Emirbayer & Johnson, 2008; Hardy, 2015; Rowlands, 2018).

Against this theoretical backdrop, the paper explores how the well-being of school leaders in Denmark and Sweden is shaped by cross-field pressures from administrators, teachers, and parents. These actor positions represent different, and at times competing, logics that place distinct and often conflicting demands on school leaders’ work and authority. While the Danish and Swedish education systems slightly differ in terms of governance structures and policy traditions, school leaders in both contexts are subject to comparable forms of pressure from administrators, teachers, and parents. This similarity provides a productive basis for examining both commonalities and differences in how school leaders experience these pressures and how they are navigating them.

Based on seven in-depth interviews with school leaders from Denmark and nine from Sweden, this paper addresses the following research question:

How do a selected group of school leaders in Denmark and Sweden experience and navigate cross-field pressures from administrators, teachers, and parents, and how do these pressures shape their well-being?

By addressing this question, the paper contributes empirically by illustrating how school leaders engage with and respond to cross-field pressures in their everyday work, and analytically by providing a theoretically informed explanation of how such pressures shape leaders’ well-being. In doing so, the paper adds to a growing body of educational research that engages with Bourdieu’s concepts to analyse leadership, governance, and practice (Courtney & Gunter, 2015; Hardy, 2015; Hardy & Lewis, 2017; Thomson, 2010; Rawolle & Lingard, 2008).

State Public Universities (SPU) in Mexico constitute one of the main mechanisms for public investment in human capital. However, international evidence shows that employability is not a spontaneous consequence of graduation but rather the result of the institutional articulation between education, the labor market, productive structures, and public policies. In this sense, effective labor market integration, measured in terms of employment, job stability, and productivity, constitutes the main empirical indicator of the efficiency of public spending on higher education, reflecting the degree to which educational investment translates into economic activity, a tax base, and fiscal sustainability (OECD, 2025; World Bank, 2017).
Comparative analysis reveals structural differences between Mexico and the European Union (EU). In European systems, the labor market integration of graduates is a central axis of university accountability, regional competitiveness, and the allocation of public resources, while in Mexico, the focus has been on reducing inequalities and promoting social mobility (Pimienta et al., 2022). In the EU, the use of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models directly links funding to job quality and tax returns, integrating university policy with market demands (Cordero-Ferrera et al., 2025). Conversely, in Mexico, there is a positive correlation between spending and access to early job placement programs through banks, related to the increase in STEM fields (Jiménez-León and Magaña-Medina, 2021). Consequently, university quality transcends the classroom to be measured in real-world career paths (Cauich-Uicab et al., 2024). Under this paradigm, the university president ceases to be a purely academic authority and becomes the strategic hub that translates the public budget into productive capacity (Sánchez-Taberner, 2023). Effective university leadership requires understanding the systematic articulation between employment, productivity, tax revenue, and social stability. Thus, the university operates as an economic infrastructure that enables capacity-building policies through early integration models, where professional practice is integrated into the real economic dynamic and not just into academic records (Lakhno et al., 2026; Suriñach et al., 2025; Murgatroyd, 2025). Based on this approach focused on actors and meanings, we pose the following research question: How do university presidents, faculty, business leaders, and students interpret and contest the role of the public university as an economic and cultural infrastructure for employability, and how do these interpretations influence investment decisions, prestige, and institutional identity for regional development? This question allows us to identify decisions, discourses, and leadership strategies, as well as the tensions among actors regarding the concepts of employability, prestige, and institutional identity. These findings contribute to the advancement of research on the fundamental principles of work in higher education and underline university leadership styles (transformational, digital, anticipatory, and sustainable) for high-level governance, combining the framework of Niklas Luhmann's systems theory (2013: 1984) with the sustainable careers model (De Vos, 2020), alignment between individual needs and institutional conditions based on the historical-cultural activity theory (CHAT) of Vygotsky (1978), Leontiev (1978/2009), and Engeström (1987/2015) as an essential lever for institutional justice and social welfare.