Picture a Leader
Do you see a woman? / An excerpt from my new book
Picture a leader and who do you see? A simple exercise adapted for a workshop for executives by Tina Kiefer, Professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, has one answer to that question.
The exercise revealed that both men and women almost always draw a picture of a man. The same question has been used worldwide by psychologists with similar results.
A study conducted by the Academy of Management Journal confirms this bias by stating that mere recognition as a leader in the workplace is more difficult for women than for men. The study also attested that “Even when a man and a woman were reading the same words off a script, only the man’s leadership potential was recognized.”
In an installment of the former Shields and Brooks segment of the PBS News Hour, Mark Shields discussed the view of women in political office. He believes there is a presumption (and prejudice) that voters think of women as more honest and more compassionate than men. But, he added, that people question a woman’s toughness in the political realm.
There’s no question that in the 2018 election year, women did very well at the polls. A survey taken at that time asked both parties if the country would be better off with more women in office. According to Shields, 36% of Republicans said yes, the country would be better off, in contrast to 83% of Democrats who did.
Behind every great man is a great woman, is an old adage that is said to have originated in the early 1900s. As the story goes, Clementine Hozier, Sir Winston Churchill’s wife, was talking to a street sweeper for a while as they set off on a walk across town.
“What did you talk about for so long?” Sir Winston inquired.
His wife smiled, “Many years ago he was madly in love with me.”
Churchill smiled ironically.
“So, you could have been the wife of a street sweeper today?” he asked.
“Oh no, my love,” Clementine replied, “If I had married him, he would have been the Prime Minister today.”
In the book, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, Claire L. Evans, a reporter for VICE, details a glossing over of important women innovators whose names we have never heard in the lexicon of technology.
The review cites major groundbreakers, from largely unknown Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first computer program during the Victorian Age to cyberpunk web designers of the 1990s. In fact, it goes on to state unequivocally that female visionaries have always been at the vanguard of technology and innovation, yet we envision in our mind’s eye the tech industry as a room filled with brogrammers in a boy’s club.
How many of us have ever heard of Grace Hopper, the mathematician who democratized computing by leading the charge for machine-independent programming languages after World War II? Are your children reading about her in any history books in school?
And meet Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler, known as “the one-woman google” who kept the earliest version of the Internet online. And Stacy Horn, who ran one of the first social networks on a shoestring out of her New York City apartment in the 1980s.
Names. Women’s names. We’ve never heard. It seems there are many more hidden figures than the three women profiled in the film of the same name.
“I always say, be careful who you meet along the way because you never know, the person who was dumping your trash could become your manager,” said Gail Evans.
Evans began her career in a part-time job as a janitor at Eastman Kodak. She is now the global chief digital officer at Mercer, an international consulting firm. Evans says she lives her life by respecting everyone regardless of the role they play in the structure of a company.
She also advocates for being yourself, a lesson hard-learned after years of seeking acceptance as a strong African American woman in the tech industry. Having worked through myriad obstacles to make it to a position of respected leadership, her core philosophy has not changed.
Women are leaders in every industry whether we see them in our mind’s eye or not. It’s time to open the lens wider on that image; encourage and promote and mentor more women into leadership roles.
The time has come to make that shift.
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Read the rest of this chapter and much more in my new book, Shift: A New Paradigm for Women in the Workplace — Stories and Strategies. Available for purchase onAmazon.com.
