Abstract:

This study is an attempt to examine the career barriers faced by female administrators and teachers. Having a qualitative research method, this study employed the phenomenological design. The working group consisted of 8 female administrators and 8 female teachers who worked in public kindergartens, primary schools, secondary schools and high schools in the central districts of Kahramanmaraş and who were chosen by the snowball sampling method. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect the data, audio recordings of the interviews were taken, and all of these recordings were deciphered and transferred to the electronic environment. Content analysis was used during data analysis. The researchers coded the data separately and thus, the consistency between intercoders was identified to be 94%. The results suggested that all of the female administrators and the majority of the teachers had the passion to make a career by emphasizing its necessity. While the majority of female administrators believed that they did not have the opportunity to make a career, female teachers thought vice versa. All of the female administrators mostly regarded the education administration of the Ministry of Education as the career field, and the female teachers considered the school administration as the field having a career opportunity. The most common barriers hindering career patterns were noted as having children, partners’ lack of support, role redundancy, transportation problems, financial problems, insufficient time for a career, society's negative views towards women, male-dominated social structure and long working hours. The participants offered some suggestions to increase their career opportunities as the regulation of working hours and the change in the patriarchal understanding of the society. Based on the results, this study provided various recommendations such as keeping the teachers’ professional excitement alive, improving the working conditions, making positive discrimination to facilitate the career-making processes of women, attaching importance to family education, making legal arrangements to solve the leave problem in career processes, increasing the opportunities for day care centres and extending the maternity leave periods.

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