Purpose: Instructional leadership has assumed steadily increasing importance within the general role set of principals over the past 60 years. One persisting finding within this corpus of studies concerns the consistently higher ratings obtained by female principals on instructional leadership when compared with their male counterparts. This article employed meta-analysis first to test if there are significant differences in perceptions of the instructional leadership practices of male and female principals. Method: Then, the results were further analyzed to describe the nature of differences that were revealed in the first-stage analysis. The database for the meta-analysis consisted of 40 data sets drawn from 28 studies that had used the Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale (PIMRS) in studies of gender and instructional leadership. The data sets comprised perception data collected variously from principals and teachers on more than 2,000 principals between 1983 and 2014. The data were analyzed at three different construct levels measured by the PIMRS instrument: PIMRS Total Score, three dimensions, 10 functions. Results: The meta-analysis yielded statistically significant gender differences in instructional leadership (Cohen’s d = .288, p < .01) when the results of all studies were combined. The direction of the findings suggested that female principals engaged in more active instructional leadership than male counterparts. Implications: The gender differences in instructional leadership are consistent with the broader results of the meta-analytic literature on gender and leadership. Implications are discussed for both research and practice.

Keywords: instructional leadership, gender, principal, school leadership, meta-analysis, PIMRS