Masculinity and Leadership: a bias that is embedded deep and early in our formal education setting
This essay will have a lot of direct quotations since I think that the original thinkers’ choice of words is way too effective to be replaced by paraphrased sentences from a first-year undergraduate student like me.
Personally, those words have a massive impact on me, so brace yourself before scrolling further downwards. Last but not least, enjoy the bumpy ride!
My December 2020’s response for Barnard College, a private women’s liberal arts college in New York City, admission.
“Women shouldn’t be the leader,” I frowned, “a Hadith says so,” he continued. Instantly, the excitement of imagining how far my student representative committee could go led by three well-qualified, dedicated girls vanished into thin air.
For such a long time, women with great leadership potential in my community experienced the discouragement of taking the role because of that one argument. Even after careful research of it and finding out that the Hadith was largely misinterpreted as if it directly prohibits women’s rule, the belief is still firmly rooted within my religious surroundings; thus, it will take a lot of courage to stand alone and change it. But, I believe the courage could be nurtured in an environment that encourages women’s leadership. With that in mind, Barnard College’s commitment to creating future women leaders attracts me, and I trust in its power to provide me a sophisticated liberal arts education with the flexibility to explore my intellectual curiosity.
The Athena Center for Leadership answers my goals precisely. It’ll allow me to pursue my interest in politics and public policy outside the classroom through the Williams Program for Women in Politics. Moreover, the chance to take the Athena Challenges excites me as I’ve always held my mission dearly for social innovation.
Personally, I believe that education should prepare us not only for our career but also for our personal lives. Hence, Barnard’s strong initiative in promoting well-being for its community fits perfectly with my aspiration. Besides maximising the resources that I could get from Barnard, I would be glad to offer and extend my experience as a peer supporter for the student’s body.
Feeling empowered as a Muslim woman is essential to me, and it starts by being one of the Bold & Brilliant.
March 2022 Response
The first paragraph of the above essay was a bit too simplistic to depict what happened in the community we called the school, which implicitly and instead frequently imposed the belief that feminine qualities are not suited for a leadership role.
Well, I do acknowledge that it could have been the personal view of the person uttering that statement after seeing the personality of these three girls, potentially messing up the throne if they were to collaborate. Meanwhile, other qualified male candidates have the charismatic authority to win over the votes at the time.
But, still, I don’t think it is appropriate for the person to assume that the whole population identifies as girls and women to be perceived as inadequate for the role, and utilised faith as a reinforcement of the notion.
Reflecting on my leadership journey, I remembered there had been quite some moments where my surroundings forced me to accept leadership with masculine features. Well, you might argue how do we know what is supposed to be categorized as masculine features? what distinguished masculine and feminine? But, let’s save that discussion for another time, shall we? And I believe once you read the features below, you would agree that those are very much common to be enforced towards men than women in our society.
A few of those features are 1) be strong and do not cry in front of the public or else it will be called as being too emotional, and that’s not cool, 2) don’t appear to be empathetic, or else people will perceive you as a non-rational leader, and 3) defend yourself to the very last second when receiving criticism because leadership is all about pride.
The above qualities stick to my mind for the first few months of leading the student representative committee. Moreover, those things were familiar narratives that I repeatedly heard throughout primary and secondary schools, and I accepted it as what it is because I was convinced that it was some objective trait. Not until I am now in university as a political science student that I appropriately discovered the perspective of feminism, which gives me the chance to view this issue from another lens and largely influenced the outcome of this writing.
Back to what happened in high school, it was not until we faced our most significant conflict as an organization that I started to question those qualities. At the time, the members felt that I and two other leaders, who are men, were being too authoritarian, as we decided on things within ourselves without consulting the members’ at all.
When the conflict happened, as the person in charge of the internal affairs, I tried my best to find ways to resolve the conflict. It was not until I read the concept of vulnerability in leadership by Dr Brené Brown in her book titled Dare to Lead, that I found a strategy to make things better.
Her basic idea was that,
“the dominant culture that we’ve come to accept is based around the shame of failure, and this leads to very poor decision-making and performance. When it comes to leadership, this can manifest itself as the need to appear dominant and not admit to failure, or to avoid hurting people’s feelings by holding back criticism.”
Hence, she recommended that being vulnerable is key to breaking that toxic culture, and fostering trust and empathy within the organization itself⸺something that contrasts with the common leadership traits we knew, isn’t it?
Upon reading that for the first time, it seemed not convincing enough and too theoretical, so I eventually tried to test it out myself.
You see, as an organization, we had this routine called “share front” where we sat out in a circle and shared our honest opinion. Usually, we did it when we knew there was a big elephant in the room. Hence, one night, we finally decided to do it. I planned to be the last person to speak, to genuinely feel my emotions and be vulnerable without feeling bad about taking too much time. I began with, “I’m doing this because I am the last person to speak today,” and could not continue my words because I started sobbing. Long story short, I managed to express my hardship of being perceived as an “authoritative” leader and how I expected my members to understand where the leaders were coming from or why we made those decisions.
The short term effect was that I felt A LOT of the burdens in my chest have been taken off⸺proving the first half of Dr Brené Browns’ vulnerability concept to be accurate. But little did I know, it was just a ripple in the pond that created big waves in strengthening our bond as a team. After I ended my teary speech, surprisingly, another round had started and almost everyone, finally, was expressing their honest feelings, sharing the hardships they went through that the leaders were not able to noticed, while occasionally shedding tears here and there⸺proving the latter half of the vulnerability concept to be true as well.
This little experiment of mine had changed my attitude towards how I should act as a female leader. From that point onward, I no longer hold myself to the traditional standards of leadership that have been imposed on me since God knows when.
It turns out this whole thing of masculinized leadership qualities are much more common than what I am consciously aware of. We can start by looking at female figures like Elizabeth Holmes and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who purposely lower the pitch of their voice to assert dominance⸺just like a man.
“Research on perceptions of pitch in women’s voices shows higher ones are associated with physical attractiveness, while lower voices are associated with dominance.”
(What’s behind the obsession over whether Elizabeth Holmes intentionally lowered her voice?)
Relating it to familiar context, now I understood the reason why this one senior, who is a female with a rather lower pitch voice than typical women, stood out so much in terms of leadership and making people surrender to her command.
“Our perceptions of a leader’s voice are unlikely to override our opinions on policy, partisanship, and all the other influences on electoral outcomes.
The crucial point, however, is that nowadays, when many elections are won by the narrowest of margins, it is conceivable that these thin, impressionistic judgments can and do affect how we choose our leaders, and so we would do well to be aware of them.”
Or perhaps a similar case applies with my mom, who holds a leadership position in her office, telling me that her male colleagues ‘compliment’ her for being able to think like a man. Yet, this deep-rooted association of leaders with masculine qualities actually makes it harder for women to be perceived as well-performing leaders. Even though they may accomplish more than their male counterparts, just because they do not exhibit enough masculine characteristics⸺and, this is something that we need to work on if we want to see more talented women in a leadership position.
In his article, As Long as We Associate Leadership with Masculinity, Women Will Be Overlooked, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic elaborated:
“Even if we were using a data-driven system that objectively selected leaders based on their actual potential — paying attention to competence, humility, and integrity rather than confidence, charisma, and narcissism — it wouldn’t do much good if we proceeded to judge the performance of those same leaders via subjective, prejudiced, or biased human opinions. In other words, removing bias at the selection point will fix nothing if there’s still plenty of bias contaminating our performance management systems.
And yet, if our solution is to train women to emulate the behavior of men, by asking them to promote themselves more, take credit for other people’s achievements, blame others for their own mistakes, and focus on their own personal career interests, as opposed to the welfare of their teams or organization, we may end up increasing the representation of women in leadership without increasing the quality of our leaders. In this scenario, women will have to out-male males in order to advance in an inherently flawed system where bad guys (and gals) win. Unless our goal is to make it easier for incompetent women to succeed — much as it is for men — there is little to gain from this approach.
This would also end up harming the career prospects of men who lack “traditional” masculine leadership traits but possess the qualities that could potentially make them into great leaders:being less bold, less reckless, and less self-centered, and more altruistic, ethical, and self-aware.
In sum, the main reason why competent women are less able to emerge as leaders than they ought to be is that our preference for incompetent men is far more acute than it should be: too many leadership roles are given to incompetent men when there are better women — as well as men — who continue to be overlooked.”
Another interesting point of view uttered by the same author is related to how we perceive women’s natural ‘fate’ of pregnancy and childbearing as the main reason they cannot advance into management roles and break the glass ceiling. In reality, it could have been the audiences’ failure to distinguish between confidence and competence when one’s aspiring to be a leader.
“…we (people in general) commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence, we are fooled into believing that men are better leaders than women. In other words, when it comes to leadership, the only advantage that men have over women (e.g., from Argentina to Norway and the USA to Japan) is the fact that manifestations of hubris — often masked as charisma or charm — are commonly mistaken for leadership potential, and that these occur much more frequently in men than in women.
This is consistent with the finding that leaderless groups have a natural tendency to elect self-centred, overconfident and narcissistic individuals as leaders, and that these personality characteristics are not equally common in men and women.”
While the above may seem wordy and not much about real-life evidence, I suggest we take a deeper look at an example of COVID-19 handling based on styles of leadership. The worldwide success of keeping the spread of COVID-19 in control has been down to the “the compassionate, decisive and community-focused leadership style demonstrated by leaders like New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-Wen and Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg.”
However, it is important to understand that it is misleading to assume that better leadership under crisis was down to purely gender criteria. As Blair Williams, a Research Fellow at the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, Australia National University, conveyed on the article Covid has shown we need to do away with hyper-masculine styles of leadership:
“These differences are less about gender and more about socialization — in other words, the style of leadership that women tend to adopt. Women have been socialized, and are expected, to be nurturing, caring and compassionate. They therefore tend to display a more empathetic and “interpersonally oriented” style of leadership.
In normal times, leadership traits have been heavily associated, if not defined, by stereotypically “masculine” ideals: “rational, management-oriented, male, technocratic, quantitative, cost-driven, hierarchical, short-term, pragmatic and materialistic”. Yet in times of crisis — and especially crises of public health — stereotypically “feminine” leadership qualities are preferred.
It remains to be seen whether this appreciation will continue after the immediate health crisis and into the recovery stages, when attention will turn towards the economy, a highly masculinized arena. It is therefore imperative that we continue to value these more compassionate leadership styles in the Covid-19 recovery, rather than throwing them off the proverbial “glass cliff” and restoring traditional gender norms.”
Moving forward into the future, I hope this piece of writing will encourage other people, boys and girls, men and women, or anyone identifying themselves in between or prefer not to at all, to rethink and redefine what ought to be qualified as great qualities of a leader.
Most importantly, believe and have courage in your own unique, authentic way of leading instead of trying to fit yourself into the stereotype characteristics of masculinized leadership. I think this is one of the giant leaps we need to ensure the establishment of a gender-equal society.
Cheers!
Happy International Women’s Day 2022
#BreakTheBias
