Feature

WANTED Women Leadership

Lady in White

LEADERSHIP, being one of the most rudimentary concepts of the organizational context, is generically considered to be 'the process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task'.

Now one might question the importance of analyzing this activity within a gender-based context, since that is exactly what I am going to do now. Is it necessary? I most definitely think so.

It is the global riddle that, for women, there needs to be a compromise in characteristics attributing to good leadership. Experiments, conducted by New York University Organizational Psychologist Madeleine Heilman, the Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center Department of Psychology and others, have shown that women can be considered either likeable or competent, but not both, whereas both these qualities are instrumental in good leadership. No one accepts an unaccomplished woman leader. However, we just don't like it when women emphasize their achievements in life.

A woman's probability of being embraced in a leadership role is strongly attenuated. As postulated by an experiment called the Goldberg Paradigm, a woman is inherently at the disadvantage of being either underrated or simply disliked compared to a man of the same qualifications and demeanor, because of a somewhat genetically sustained prejudice harbored by both genders of the population. This prejudice is of many forms and levels, swaying from perceptional to expectational, conscious to subconscious.

The Goldberg Paradigm is a study where one group of men and women is asked to evaluate a speech given by a man, and another group is asked to evaluate the same speech given by a woman. It has been seen enough times to be taken as empirical evidence of a deep rooted prejudice, that the speech by the woman always received much poorer assessment than its male counterpart.

Where does this hapless prejudice come from? Well, in every species there is an innate sense of rivalry among different groups. Each group always strives to be 'better' than the other. It's nature and it's how the world works. And it seems like it has shown the strength of its effects over our human population very clearly.

So does this mean that the female population is doomed to be condescended forever? I don't think so.

Despite all these insipid, and sometimes even unrealized, preconceptions, women leaders all over the world have almost always shown better skills at leadership, than male leaders- be it the United States Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton serving the administration of President Barrack Obama, Ina Ray Hutton at leading an all-male orchestra or Sofia Coppola at directing her magical Lost in Translation.

What about our own country? The prime ministers of the two leading political parties of Bangladesh are women, and have been in politics for many years. They have both exhibited the leadership traits necessary to have reached and maintained the loyalty they have achieved so far. On the other hand, there were the revolutionaries like Begum Rokeya Sakhawat and Begum Sufia Kamal, who are exemplary of the highest levels of leadership that can be achieved. Their social work, especially on gender equality, was so powerful that it actually shook the norms of society at its core.

Sadly, society now needs yet another shaking. Our country has evolved in its own unique way over the years; it involves changes in traditional culture, fashion, lifestyle, social environment and pop culture. People, in general, have become more open-minded, inter-culturalism has taken on a new, exciting level and women, especially of the relatively lower social classes, have become more confident and have started empowering themselves.

Beauty is an art form, and there is nothing wrong with appreciating art. However, there are ways of doing everything and that is what defines its standard. Large-scale beauty contests, such as the Miss World, are on one level, a host for sexual selection. They serve to give pleasure from exposure of the female human form. The only difference, other than being artless, is that the latter is more honest in its objective. Male beauty contests of such sort, although present, were never anywhere near as popular as female beauty contests. This is because there are elements such as intelligence and skillfulness which are strongly associated with the masculine idea, whereas beauty is supposed to be the primary feminine trait.

These contests promote only a certain, very limited range of 'beauty'. Well, it is more of a two way process really. We feed the media what we love, and the media in turn feeds that to the entire community in a greater proportion. The contests treat feminine beauty as a consumer product.

What is even more itchy to the conscience, than the sheer ridiculousness of the principle of these contests is the hypocrisy involved with most of them. It is amusing how these contests claim to promote 'female empowerment'.

One point to be noted is that, it's not only the demand, but also the supply of these wannabe contestants that is so very high. It is depressing how consumed so many from the female population of Bangladesh are by short-sightedness. Many of them, specially from the lower middle class, prioritize on their appearance over their education, relying on such contests (or just an arranged marriage), instead of finding a career and financially securing themselves, or doing anything helpful for society for that matter. It is time that they came forth and became true leaders of the nation and made people forget that social gender issues ever existed.