The superintendency remains predominantly male, according to a recent report, though some states show greater gender diversity than others.
Women and people of color are still underrepresented in the role, an annual salary and benefits survey from AASA, The School Superintendents Association, found.
For the 2024-25 school year, the survey showed little change from the previous year. Male superintendents held steady at 73% nationwide. Out of the total male superintendents, 67% worked in rural school districts, compared to 64% of total female superintendents.
AASA’s public report provides a national snapshot but does not capture state-level demographics.
That’s where The Superintendent Lab, a data hub launched in 2022 by Rachel White, an associate professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin, comes in.
White began the project after serving on her local school board in Van Wert, Ohio.
“That I think stamped in me the importance of superintendents, not just for students’ learning—of course, that’s the most important—but for their well-being, their safety, and for developing thriving communities,” White said.
With the help of student researchers, White manually collects data from state directories and independently researches individual superintendents when states don’t publish directories by going to district websites.
The Superintendent Lab’s data visualizations begin with the 2019-20 school year and, in most cases, extend to 2024-25. Student research assistants from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville—and now at UT Austin—assist in compiling and cleaning up the data. White said she often spends months refining datasets, depending on the complexity.
Developing the database is not an easy task. Emily Bengyak, a 2024 graduate of UT Knoxville, joined The Superintendent Lab in May 2023 as a research assistant. Bengyak said her fellow research assistants followed the lab manual for data collection. The guidance included information on how to find reliable sources and school board minutes when determining whether a superintendent left and their reasons for departure.
“It definitely sent you down some rabbit holes,” Bengyak said. “Of course, if we couldn’t find it, with just the breadth of how much data we were looking at, you didn’t want to spend hours looking for one superintendent, but it was definitely a deep dive in some places. Especially if you knew something happened, you could tell that this person left very abruptly, you tried to find it.”
Tracking race and ethnicity remains a challenge
As White and student research assistants try to assemble nationwide statistics on the gender and racial makeup of school superintendents, they face an evergreen challenge: not everyone reports it.
“I’m not going to ascribe race to someone based on a photo, or a name, or anything like that,” White said.
To fill the gaps, White collaborates with state associations and hopes to build strong relationships with affinity groups for educators of color—such as the Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents—to gather better demographic information.
The lab leans on AASA for advice on trends in the superintendency to inform further research, White said, as both organizations aim to have similar results.
Over the past six years, Idaho saw the biggest change in the percentage of superintendents who were female, with females’ share rising by 14.5 percentage points in that time. Nevada saw the steepest decline in that time, with the share of female superintendents declining by 11.8 percentage points.
The lab also tracks reasons for superintendent departures or attrition events, such as resignations tied to politicized or contentious circumstances. Researchers gather this data through secondary sources like news articles.
The state with the highest proportion of districts that experienced at least one superintendent attrition event over the past six years was Alaska at 77.36%. North Dakota had the lowest, with only 45.91% of districts experiencing at least one attrition event.
White said she is encouraged by the growing number of scholars examining superintendents.
“There’s so much work that can be done in this space,” she said. “I bring one perspective, and one dataset, but I am really hopeful that this can continue.”
