Gender Differences in Leadership
By BARBARAB. MORA
Review
Leadership has been part and partial of the human experience since the
early ages when people formed groups and communities to survive within that
hard environment, surviving, especially, from the wild animals. Those people
get together and work collaboratively to reach the targeted goals that are
beyond the capability of an individual, and even make families to feel the
group’s spirit. The very broad idea that one can have
about leadership is that, it is he process of one person leading a group of
people or a president who is leading a nation, but, leadership is a more
detailed process than just leading people.
Leadership is about having a vision to be
share with certain followers who believe in that chosen leader. In more
details, leadership is all about inspiring others to be their best versions of
their selves, capturing others with energy, words, voice and rallying them
around that certain vision or ideology, it is also about taking responsibility
for our actions, owning our successes and failures alike, and reminding other
people (followers) to do the same. Leadership is about seeing things from other peoples’ perspectives and
remembering that we’re all humans and we’re all in this together, regardless of
our status, position or rank in life. Northouse (2010) defines leadership as “a
process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a
common goal” (p. 3).
However, since its early existence, leadership has always been discussed
with a focalization on men as leaders with a minimal discussion of gender and
leadership (females as leaders). Nonetheless, the societal or social, cultural,
political and economic improvements in the recent decades have made it clear
that also women can be effective or ineffective but leaders. Today it is
believed that women can be great leaders as we are going to see in the
following lines.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO): “‘Sex’ refers to the
biological and physiological characteristics that
define men and women. ‘Gender’ refers to the socially constructed roles,
behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers
appropriate for men and women”.
Moreover, the problem that was always facing women and depriving them from
having positions where they can leaders in a certain society is “Gender
Stereotypes”. It is all about describing stereotypical beliefs about how men
and women should behave. It is stereotypically believed that men are associated
with confidence, assertiveness, independence, rationality, and decisiveness;
while women with sensitivity, warmth, helpfulness and nurturance.
Alongside with above, those stereotypical beliefs about women are
believed by many peoples to work for them not against them, I mean, holding
those characteristics would make them more effective leaders than men are. Simon
Sinek said that “It’s not that we need more female leaders, it’s that we need more
leaders who act like females”, in other words we need more androgynous leaders
(leaders with both masculine and feminine traits, are the ones who best succeed
at creating a good climate for innovation). Traditionally, as we mentioned
before, men are more likely to be decisive, aggressive while females are more
likely to be empathic, patient, and have the caring instinct, and so good
leadership is a balance from all the mentioned characteristics. In the
beginning when women start to enter the competition of leadership with men,
they were more likely to address and cut their hair like men, and more than
that they even try to be associated with the characteristics that men maintain.
While nowadays, women are more likely to be themselves, and get use of their
empathy and patience (emotional intelligence) since that all what leadership is
about.
Furthermore, if we got to make a comparison between men leadership and
women leadership we would fine that women are better being energetic and
enthusiastic and so they are can motivate and be motivated so easily, have
great ability to communicate with their followers, they give and try to receive
effective feedbacks and they are so inspiring. While in contrast, men are
better at building knowledge on the basis of the previous experiences, they are
more likely to be open to new ideas, they see the big picture and they are more
delegating. This comparison would reinforce the idea of the need for
androgynous leaders (a mixture of men and women characteristics hold by one person,
he could be a man or she could be a woman) that our world is in need.
The topic of gender and leadership deserves more researches and
investigations because of our reality and the dominance that men practice in
the social, political and cultural fields, more than that, women and men cannot
simply be classified and distinguished based on biological sex. But gender is a
more effective and useful way to discover the individuals’ competences to
include them in an androgynous leader.
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