Why Should Women Take a Back Seat?

What does gender have to do with leadership? To put it simply, when it comes to careers and leadership roles, there tends to be one gender favored for those roles. Men are often offered leadership positions far more often than women, but the question is: why? It’s far easier to climb the corporate ladder for males, even though many women have qualities that would arguably contribute to productivity and excellent management which are unique to them. Since long ago the most important traits that you could possess in the world were strength and physical attributes, it’s understandable that men took the lead more often. However, now that we live in a world where ingenuity, intellect, and creativity are favored in the workplace, all qualities that most women have an abundance of, why is it that we still take a backseat? To answer this, we should look closer at the differences between men and women’s management styles.

According to a Pew Research Study, “most (participates) do see a gender difference when it comes to being compassionate and empathetic, and about half make a distinction between men and women in their ability to work out compromises. In each case female leaders are viewed as having an advantage over their male counterparts.” Unfortunately, having this compassion can also be a downfall for female managers who lead with their heart. Statistically speaking, women tend to be more modest and give credit to others instead of taking all of it themselves, whereas many men in upper leadership positions prefer a more cutthroat style which tends to get them promotions. Naturally this is a generalization and doesn’t apply to all managers, but it’s important to look at a majority when gathering information. “Roughly six-in-ten adults (61%) say female political leaders do a better job at being compassionate and empathetic, and a similar share (59%) say the same about female business leaders. By contrast, only 5% say male political leaders are stronger on this dimension, and 4% say the same about men who lead in the corporate realm… Roughly three-in-ten adults say female leaders do a better job than men at being honest and ethical (31% in politics and 30% in business), while relatively few say men do a better job than women (4% in politics, 3% in business).”

From a historical standpoint, these figures shouldn’t be surprising. Since women have been pressured into pursuing careers (when they were allowed to get careers) that focus mainly on being a caretaker, teacher, nurse, or housewife, it becomes second nature to develop that empathy and need to care for others. Unfortunately it doesn’t help as much in getting to a leadership position. “Roughly four-in-ten adults say men are more willing to take risks (37% in politics, 41% in business), while about one-in-ten say women are better at this (9% in politics, 8% in business).” For almost all of the political questions regarding who is more ethical, compassionate, likely to compromise, productive under pressure, etc, women have a higher percentage of people who consider them to be better in these areas. And yet, there is still a staggeringly low number of female politicians compared to men. UNwomen.org states, “Women serve as Heads of State or Government in only 21 countries, and 119 countries have never had a woman leader. At the current rate, parity in the highest decisions of power will not be reached for another 130 years.

Just 10 countries have a woman Head of State, and 13 countries have a woman Head of Government. Only 21 percent of government ministers were women, with only 14 countries having achieved 50 per cent or more women in cabinets. With an annual increase of just 0.52 percentage points, gender parity in ministerial positions will not be achieved before 2077.”

In terms of how this inequality is important in journalism, I think that journalist Namgay Zam said it best when she said, “Firstly, gender roles in the media are always biased and stereotypical - sports stories are only covered by male reporters, resource person voices are dominantly male. Stories perpetuate gender stereotypes - that something is a male sport, that only women can be good mothers, etc. Very few women even aspire to management positions as they have no one to model themselves upon. The people who nominate or promote employees to managerial positions need to (be) sensitised to the importance of gender representation and that it is urgent. This can be done through meetings as well as workshops.” Having equal representation in the media, especially in journalism, is imperative to getting unbiased information that comes from numerous different sources. Otherwise, there would be no way to know what different people think about important issues. Being informed by numerous different sources is very important in creating an unbiased story shared with all different readers.