WOMEN ARE POWER
Channel: Daniele Zordan
Date: 2022-05-08

Women, Power & Leadership.
Many more women provide visible leadership today than ever before. Opening up higher education for women and winning the battle for suffrage brought new opportunities, along with widespread availability of labor-saving devices and the discovery and legalization of reliable, safe methods of birth control. Despite these developments, women ambitious for leadership still face formidable obstacles: pri- mary if not sole responsibility for childcare and homemaking; the lack of family- friendly policies in most workplaces; gender stereotypes perpetuated in popular culture; and in some parts of the world, laws and practices that deny women education or opportunities outside the home. Some observers believe that only a few women want to hold significant, demanding leadership posts; but there is ample evidence on the other side of this debate, some of it documented in this volume. Historic tensions between feminism and power remain to be resolved by creative theorizing and shrewd, strategic activism. We cannot know whether women are “naturally” interested in top leadership posts until they can attain such positions without making personal and family sacrifices radically disproportionate to those faced by men.
One of the most dramatic changes in recent decades has been the increas- ing prominence of women in positions of leadership. Many more wom- en are providing leadership in government, business, higher education,
nonprofit ventures, and other areas of life, in many more countries of the world, than would ever have been true in the past. This essay addresses four aspects of this development.
I will note the kinds of leadership women have routinely provided, and list fac- tors that help explain why this pattern has changed dramatically in the past half century. I will mention some of the obstacles that still block the path for wom- en in leadership. Then I will ask how ambitious women generally are for leader- ship, and discuss the fraught relationship between feminism and power, before concluding with a brief look at the future that might lie ahead.
As we approach this subject, we need to understand what we mean by “leadership.” I use the following definition: “Leaders define or clarify goals for a group of individuals and bring together the energies of members of that group to pursue those goals.”1 This conception is deliberately broad, designed to capture various types of leadership, in various groups, not just the work of leaders who hold the most visible offices in a large society.
A leader can define or clarify goals by issuing a memo or an executive order, an edict or a fatwa or a tweet, by passing a law, barking a command, or presenting an interesting idea in a meeting of colleagues. Leaders can mobilize people’s energies in ways that range from subtle, quiet persuasion to the coercive threat or the use of deadly force. Sometimes a charismatic leader such as Martin Luther King Jr. can define goals and mobilize energies through rhetoric and the power of example.
It is also helpful to distinguish leadership from two closely related concepts: power and authority.
All leaders have some measure of power, in the sense of influencing or determin- ing priorities for other individuals. But leadership cannot be a synonym for hold- ing power. Power is often defined in the straightforward way suggested by politi- cal scientist Robert Dahl: “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.”2 A bully or an assailant with a gun wields power in this sense, but it would not be appropriate to call such a person a “leader.”
Leadership often involves exercising authority with the formal legitimacy of a position in a governmental structure or high office in a large organization. Holding authority in these ways provides clear opportunities for leadership. Yet many men and women we would want to call leaders are not in positions of authority, and not everyone in a formal office provides leadership. As John Gardner, author of sever- al valuable books on leadership, noted, “We have all occasionally encountered top persons who couldn’t lead a squad of seven-year-olds to the ice cream counter.”3
We can think of leadership as a spectrum, in terms of both visibility and the power the leader wields. On one end of the spectrum, we have the most visible: authoritative leaders like the president of the United States or the prime minister of the United Kingdom, or a dictator such as Hitler or Qaddafi. At the opposite end of the spectrum is casual, low-key leadership found in countless situations every day around the world, leadership that can make a significant difference to the individuals whose lives are touched by it.
Over the centuries, the first kind–the out-in-front, authoritative leadership– has generally been exhibited by men. Some men in positions of great authori- ty, including Nelson Mandela,...to be continued