The Good News About Women And Leadership

They’re Finally Ready For Us!

What if you asked 2,250 adults across the U.S. who makes a better political leader, a man or a woman? And what if you divided leadership into 8 character traits?

Luckily for us, the Pew Research Center found the money and the people to fund a well-run survey asking these exact questions. What did they find? They found a paradox in our society.

They identified these 8 political leadership traits:

1. Honest
2. Intelligent
3. Hardworking
4. Decisive
5. Ambitious
6. Compassionate
7. Outgoing
8. Creative

And they got these results:

1. Honest                           Women             50% vs  20%
2. Intelligent                       Women             38% vs 14%
3. Hardworking                   Men and Women
4. Decisive                          Men                  44% vs  33%    
5. Ambitious                       Men and Women
6. Compassionate              Women             80% vs   5%     
7. Outgoing                        Women             47% vs  28%
8. Creative                         Women             62% vs  11%

The survey showed that people rated women as better leaders in 5 out of 8 categories, men in one category (decisive), and men and women equally in 2 categories (hardworking and ambitious).

This certainly is not the result the Pew Research Center would have found in the 1980’s. Times have changed.

Here’s the paradox:

Women have made great strides in educational attainment (6 out of 10 college degrees go to women) and women have achieved near equal participation in the U.S. workforce (46.5%), very few have made the jump to the highest levels of political leadership (17% in the Senate and a mysteriously equal 17% in the House) or corporate leadership (less than 3% of the Fortune 500 companies in 2008 had female CEO’s).

Is this the truth?

Are people fibbing when they take this survey, and they really don’t think women are good leaders, but it wouldn’t be politically correct to say this? Luckily again for us, the Pew Research Center wondered the same thing, so they conducted a second survey. They were given profiles of 2 candidates, Ann Clark and Andrew Clark who had similar characteristics, except for gender. How did each rank on their  “likeliness to vote scale?”  They came out the same! Gender no longer mattered. In fact, when it comes to assessments about character, the public’s gender stereotypes are actually pro-female.

Getting back to sports—

Women come out of this survey like a sports team that racks up better statistics but still loses the game. The 8-traits survey stats are women over men by 5 to 1, with 2 ties. Nearly all these gender evaluations are shared by men as well as women. Interesting.

Gender no longer matters (yea), so why do we have this shortfall (boo)?

A number of recent studies have shown that women do about as well as men once they actually run for office, but that many fewer women choose to run in the first place. Some people think this is because party leaders are reluctant to seek out women candidates, especially for highly competitive races. (This may be rapidly changing!)

A recent Brookings Institution study gives another explanation. It suggests that women may be constrained by their own shortfall in political ambition—which, the study theorizes, is the sum of several factors:

1. They have more negative attitudes than men about campaigning for office,
2. They under-value their own qualifications for office; and
3. They are more likely than men to be held back by family responsibilities.

My Tip of the Week involves some missionary work you can do, all for the benefit of women.


Tip:

Think hard about the 3 reasons women may not be stepping up for a political office. Could one of these be holding you back? Should it be holding you back? For instance, # 3, family responsibilities, look at the U.S. Senate and House right now. Quite a few of these women have raised families. You could start thinking about local positions you could hold now and ramp up later.

Perhaps there’s a woman you know who you’d like to see making responsible decisions in our government. Talk to other women and form a posse to convince her to run for office. I personally know of one woman, who had only held PTA positions, who said this happened to her. She said she was stunned, but the momentum kept building, and her confidence built right along with it. Today she’s a respected politician making careful decisions which help mold our society.

Think it over. Take a step. Or help another woman realize her potential. There’s something you can do!

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Meeting Facilitation: Tips From Women Leaders

Written by Dianne Schilling

Tuesday, 09 March 2010 00:02

Three decades ago, author Jilly Cooper observed that “Meetings are like cocktail parties. You don’t want to go, but you’re cross not to be asked.” Today, at conference tables lined with laptops and glitzed with multimedia, those sentiments still prevail. The list of ills associated with meetings is long and legendary: Rote weekly meetings characterized by apathy and aggravation, Poorly planned meetings with no clear purpose, Meetings without agendas, Meetings that depart from their agendas, meander wildly, and never course correct, Meetings that are billed as one thing and turn out to be something quite different, destroying expectations Gripe sessions where everyone vents but nothing is accomplished, and (key to all the rest) Weak leadership and/or poor meeting facilitation I recently attended what was supposed to be the kickoff session of an intense three-month project planning period. There was no agenda, no opportunity to prepare in advance, and no attempt to create continuity between the current meeting and an earlier goal-setting session. Rather than facilitate a group planning session, the leader turned the entire meeting over to a single member of the team—two hours later, only one person’s ideas had been presented and discussed. And without even a skeleton of a plan those ideas were floating around devoid of context. What was billed as a planning, decision-making meeting turned out to be an informational meeting characterized by mostly one-way communication and no planning! Two Sets of Meeting Competencies Every meeting has two parts: preparation and participation. That’s true whether it’s your meeting or someone else’s. Preparation is everything you do before the meeting. If you are in charge of the meeting, it means defining the purpose and objectives, drawing up a participant list, developing an agenda, sending out an announcement and making facility and equipment arrangements. If you are a participant, it means doing your homework. Participation is everything you do during the meeting — presiding, meeting facilitation, recording, controlling, time-keeping and/or contributing. Skillful Facilitator —Responsible Participant A skillful meeting chair encourages people to contribute and recognizes them when they do, capturing useful ideas for immediate or future consideration. At the same time, she keeps a watchful eye on the clock and the agenda, always ready to tighten the reigns and move the discussion forward. It’s a continuous balancing act — facilitating and controlling, opening up and tightening down, with a series of decision points along the way. A responsible participant appreciates that the chair invited her to the meeting for a reason — she is expected to contribute. Former CNN executive Gail Evans established a private ground rule to motivate reticent women at informal lunch meetings with celebrity guests: If a woman didn’t ask a question she didn’t get invited to the next meeting! The secret of asking questions and making useful contributions is doing your homework. That’s why an able meeting chair sends out agendas in advance. To give you a chance to bone up on agenda items — background, related issues, stake-holder interests, your own observations and opinions. Advice for Women from Women Here are some insights you probably won’t get in “Meetings 101.” Each of these experts has a special interest in helping other women get ahead in the workplace. From author D. A. Benton: Top executives in business learn to display emotional drama to appear confident, positive, and upbeat, even when they aren’t. I flatly recommend that you act happy, act calm, act confident, act enthusiastic, act energetic, act in control, act adequate, act pleasant, act, period! Remain standing in the reception room so when you meet whoever’s coming to get you, you are eye-to-eye (figuratively and literally). From linguistics professor and author Deborah Tannen: Avoid prefacing your comments with disclaimers like, “I don’t know if this will work, but…” and “This may be a silly question, but…” Just jump in and state an idea without worrying about how important it is or whether anyone else has thought of it before. Women tend to speak at a lower volume than men, and they try not to take up too much time. Men talk louder and longer. In addition, the comments of women are often less forceful and assertive. Practice speaking louder and at greater length, resisting the impulse to let your intonation rise at the end. (That half-note jump can sap a statement of conviction or make it sound like a question.) Research shows that women speak less in unstructured meetings, so one way to encourage female participation (including your own) is to build a solid framework for the meeting. From former CNN executive and author Gail Evans: Speaking forcefully isn’t really about speaking loudly or softly. It’s about learning how to use your voice effectively. Even if you have a small voice you can sound powerful — as long as you believe you have a right to speak. Oversized office chairs are built for a man’s body. It’s hard to be fully present at a meeting if the chair is too low, the table too high, and your feet barely touch the floor. Don’t shift and fidget trying to get comfortable. Lean forward, sit the edge of your chair if necessary, find a place of comfort and stay there. From international protocol expert Susan Witt: The savvy meeting chair always conducts and controls the meeting, regardless of the level of seniority of the participants, she manages the meeting with tact, diplomacy, and strength. If you are from out of the company. wait until someone tells you to “sit anywhere” or to “sit next to Jane Doe.” The customary hierarchy of seating goes from the left of the Chair to the right, so you can avoid embarrassment by making sure that you sit in an appropriate location. Send a note of thanks to the person who invited you to the meeting, to the chair, and to any persons with whom you hope to work in the future. careers, Jobs Indonesia, Indonesia Vacancy

Women and Leadership: Delicate Balancing Act

Written by Hilary Lips

Thursday, 02 April 2009 20:16

There are several key ways in which people respond differently to women and men who are leaders.  I’ll outline these differences, identify the ways in which such responses affect women’s leadership, and propose some solutions to smooth the way for women leaders. The United States recently traveled quite a way down the road toward electing its first woman president. Yet, incongruously, as the Hillary Clinton campaign picked up speed, an inordinate amount of attention was paid to a frivolous observation about the “low-cut” neckline of an outfit worn during a speech she gave on the Senate floor.As the first primaries approached, her campaign scrambled to embark on a blitz to present her as “likable and heartwarming,” to balance the “strength and experience” theme that had seemed especially necessary for a female candidate. It appears that the acceptable scripts for women in powerful public political roles are still rigidly defined and easy to violate—by being too “pushy” or too “soft,” too “strident” or too accommodating, too sexless or too sexual. It seems all too easy for women leaders to run afoul of their constituents or their colleagues by deviating from the narrowly-defined set of behaviors in which cultural femininity overlaps with leadership. With the necessity to conform to two, often conflicting, sets of expectations, high-profile women leaders in the United States are relentlessly held to a higher standard than their male counterparts. If women are to claim their share of leadership positions, and to operate effectively within such positions, women and men must be aware of these differential expectations, know how they affect both leaders and constituents, and understand what responses may be useful. Women in leadership roles elicit different responses than do men. Power operates as a social structure, made up of numerous practices that maintain a cultural system of dominance. The practices that maintain a power system include patterns of discourse, shared understandings about and participation in a set of values, expectations, norms and roles. This social structure transcends, in some respects, the wishes or behavior of any particular individual and has a tendency to shape decisions, interactions, and social relations to fit it. Responses to women and men in leadership roles are conditioned by a social structure traditionally dominated by men. Researchers have identified four key ways in which female and male leaders elicit different responses from those around them.  These different responses appear to be due, not so much to different leadership behaviors by women and men, as to the stimulus value of women or men in these roles. A woman leader stimulates a different reaction than a male leader because of learned expectations, shaped and supported by the surrounding social structure, that invalidate and undercut women’s attempts to be effective, influential, powerful. Women are expected to combine leadership with compassion. Researchers have long found that people think “male” when they think “leader,” and that this result transcends many cultural differences. Because of perceived incompatibility between the requirements of femininity and those of leadership, women are often required to “soften” their leadership styles to gain the approval of their constituents. Women who do not temper their agency and competence with warmth and friendliness risk being disliked and less influential; men face no such necessity to be agreeable while exercising power. Women who lead with an autocratic style are the targets of more disapproval than those who enact a more democratic style; men may choose the autocratic style with relative impunity, if they are effective leaders. When women demonstrate competent leadership within an explicitly masculine arena—something that often requires the application of a “harder” leadership style, they are disliked and disparaged. People do not listen to or take direction from women as comfortably as from men. The stereotype that women are more talkative than men is unsupported by evidence. Yet it often appears that people use women’s supposed loquaciousness as a justification for “tuning out” much of what women say. Women report that they do not feel listened to, that when they speak in meetings their comments and suggestions are ignored or belittled—and that the same comments or suggestions from men have more impact.  They are not imagining this reaction.  One pair of researchers trained women and men to try to take leadership of mixed-sex groups by making the same suggestions, using the same words.  Group members responded to the male would-be leaders’ comments with attention, nods, and smiles; they responded to the women by looking away and frowning.  Furthermore, these group members were not aware that they were treating would-be female and male leaders differently. This pattern occurs not only in the lab, but in the real world:  Field studies of small group meetings in organizations show that women leaders are targets of more displays of negative emotion than men leaders, even when both sets of leaders are viewed as equally competent. Women who promote themselves and their abilities reap disapproval. Because they are stereotyped as less competent than men, women would-be leaders are sometimes advised to eschew feminine modesty and promote their own abilities, strengths and accomplishments.  However, self-promotion can be dangerous for women.  As noted above, women who act more confident and assertive than is normative for women run the risk of disapproval.  Research demonstrates that when women promote their own accomplishments it can cause their audience to view them as more competent—but at the cost of viewing them as less likeable.  Men who promote their own accomplishments do not reap the same mixed outcomes:  as long as they do not overdo it, self-promotion brings them both higher evaluations of competence and likeability. Women require more external validation than do men in some contexts. Given the issues raised so far, it is not surprising to learn that, in order for women to be accepted in leadership roles, they must often have external endorsements.  Particularly in competitive, highly-masculinized contexts, simply having leadership training or task-related expertise does not guarantee a woman’s success unless accompanied by legitimation by another established leader.Gender stereotypes interfere with observers’ ability to see women’s competence; it is sometimes necessary to for a high-status other to provide them with credibility. Reacting to the reactions:  How does leadership feel to women? There is evidence that women may be more aware than men of the potential costs of leadership.Women do worry about the contradictions between acceptable feminine behavior and the requirements of powerful positions.  Young women asked to imagine themselves in powerful positions rate such positions as be less positive than young men do.  Furthermore, the women betray awareness of the possibility that relationship problems could ensue if they were to hold such positions. Some describe themselves as potentially very unlikable in such roles, using words such as “dominating, aggressive,” “opinionated,” “power hungry, ... mean,” “bossy, direct and aggressive.”Clearly, they recognize the near-impossibility of “softening” one’s image while yet maintaining the air of authority, determination and competence necessary to convince others that one can exercise strong leadership. Women already in leadership positions—even those in male-dominated contexts—while acutely aware of the narrow path they must tread, find rewards in these roles:  a sense of competence and of positive impactand the opportunity to empower others.These rewards, they say, help compensate for the heavy demands and the caution demanded by the contradictory expectations associated with their leadership roles.  However, there is no telling how many women never get to this point—turned away from aspirations to leadership because of the difficulties and costs they anticipate. A changed social structure changes the reactions. An interview study of women leaders in France and Norway illustrated years ago that context could make all the difference to these leaders’ experience. The Norwegian women expressed joy and a sense of efficacy in their leadership roles; the French women, on the other hand, spoke of difficulties, conflicts, loneliness, and marginality.These differing experiences appeared linked to sharp contrasts in these women’s perceptions of their acceptance as leaders.  In Norway, with its long and deeply-rooted history of women’s involvement in political leadership, women in such positions felt a strong sense of legitimacy in their leadership roles.  In France, where women’s leadership was relatively new and rare, that sense of legitimacy was absent, and women were called upon to prove themselves repeatedly. Research has since made it abundantly clear that context makes a critical difference in the ease with which women can access leadership positions, their perceived effectiveness in these positions, and the difficulties they encounter.  Women face the most resistance to their leadership and influence in roles that are male-dominated and characterized as masculine.As social attitudes have shifted to define fewer arenas as masculine, acceptance of women as leaders in the other arenas has grown. Conclusions. In the United States, it is no longer surprising or incongruous to see a woman as principal of a public high school, manager of a corporate department, dean of a university college, or anchor on a local newscast.  Women have breeched the barriers to such positions in concert with a general relaxation in traditional gender-role attitudes as well as changes in public perceptions of what leadership entails. Yet in contexts (such as military command, high corporate office, the presidency) still defined in the public mind as requiring masculine qualities, women face tough barriers stemming from the difficulty of simultaneously transcending and accommodating to gender stereotypes.  Our intellectual understanding of these barriers notwithstanding, the only way to break them down is for the first few clever, determined and thick-skinned women to dance, tip-toe, and kick their way through them. There are ways for both organizations and individuals to support these women, and thus support progress toward a social structure in which women’s leadership is commonplace even in contexts currently defined as masculine.  Organizations can strive to avoid isolating women as tokens in male-dominated departments, where their gender becomes the defacto explanation for any perceived misstep.  Established leaders can endorse and legitimate women who seek or attain leadership roles. Opinion leaders such as journalists can cultivate sensitivity to the possibility that they are setting different standards of likeability and other interpersonal qualities when they publicly critique male and female leaders.  As individuals, we can examine our own criticisms of women leaders for telltale signs that we are expecting the impossible—imposing the double-bind of contradictory expectations. As first one, then a trickle of women overcome the barriers, it should finally become normal to see women holding leadership roles in contexts currently considered masculine.  That very “normalcy” will moderate public perceptions of gender and of leadership, gently re-shaping the social structure that has conditioned these perceptions.  The significant changes in women’s access to leadership roles over the past few decades are a necessary, but still insufficient, prelude to a society in which women and men can claim a fair share of the challenges and opportunities associated with leadership.  careers, Jobs Indonesia, Indonesia Vacancy