Engagement at a cost: rethinking gendered leadership and emotional labour in contemporary schooling

This study reframes parent engagement as a gendered governance practice through which emotional and relational labour is organised, normalised, and unevenly imposed in contemporary schooling. Using a feminist hermeneutic phenomenological approach, it explores how women school leaders experience and navigate parent engagement within policy and accountability-driven contexts. Interviews with six Australian primary school leaders reveal that parent engagement, often idealised as collaborative, is experienced as emotionally intensive, transactional, and professionally depleting. Emotional labour emerges as a condition of leadership legitimacy rather than an individual coping strategy, yet remains largely unrecognised within leadership frameworks and engagement policy. Participants described strategic boundary-setting as a necessary response to unsustainable expectations, highlighting how endurance is often mistaken for sustainability. The findings contribute to feminist leadership scholarship by reconceptualising parent engagement as a site where care, authority, and accountability are governed, and by foregrounding leadership sustainability rather than resilience.