Why Women Matter, Part 2

Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World
by Marie C. Wilson

(Page 2 of 5)

Until there are enough diverse females in authority so that a chosen few are not expected to speak for an entire race or gender, those few will continue to carry the burden for us all. It is a fact that the more people like you in a working group, the more likely you are to be yourself. In a 2003 interview with Judy Woodruff of CNN, Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, described how she felt when Ruth Bader Ginsberg joined her on the bench: "The minute Justice Ginsberg came to the court, we were nine justices. It wasn't seven and then 'the women.' We became nine. And it was a great relief to me..."

But it is not just numbers. We also need strong civic and cultural organizations filled with women who will support their leaders and hold them accountable. If ever we doubted that critical mass plus strong civic engagement equal lasting change, the women of South Africa put it to rest. They fought side by side with men to defeat apartheid, yet found themselves denied power once it was obtained in 1994. The women were simply not going to stand for it. They banded together their women's organizations and demanded a share of the leadership. Result: The African National Congress guaranteed women 30 percent of party seats. South Africa has moved from 141st to 15th in the world in women's political representation, with excellent legislation to show for it.

Negotiating a new deal enabling women to lead outside the home will require a new political will. We will have to reshape our country's institutions, making the environment hospitable both to women's leadership and men's blossoming domestic involvement. Imagine if America copied Norway and demanded that 40 percent of board seats in publicly funded companies be filled by women. Would we be struggling with the issues of child care or paid family medical leave? Not likely. We need to move our circles of life, public and private, into greater overlap to create one continuous community, allowing work and family to intersect the way they naturally would if our society hadn't forced them apart.

Cultural shifts require an organized effort and a woman-by-woman guerrilla campaign if we are to see change, especially as it relates to how women are represented in the media. The media provide what they think we want, which then translates to advertising and subscription dollars for their corporations. Through our buying power and our voices, we must demonstrate what we will and will not accept. We'll also occasionally need to go where no woman has gone before. For instance, I nearly lost my feminist credentials when I joined with Mattel to create a new Barbie doll. It was a case of invading the culture rather than fighting it, and using the tools of the culture to teach valuable lessons about democracy. Mattel eventually manufactured President Barbie in 2000 in several ethnicities. (But I couldn't convince them to make her shoes flat so she could stand on her own two feet.)

Culture is crucial to change because it provides role models (fictitious though some might be) for the world's power structure. We must work our way inside, even if it seems impossible, and demand that women be shown in top leadership positions. A good start would be a woman successor to Martin Sheen after he serves two terms as the president on The West Wing.

How quickly we get to critical mass also depends on changing the perception of women as leaders, and on starting to value female qualities rather than using them as an excuse to marginalize us as "work moms." In each of the following chapters, you will learn how, through guts and gumption, women have managed to outsmart the limits of our prescribed roles, providing a template for change. If enough of us follow their examples (and create our own methods of resistance), we will accelerate the movement of women into top positions.

Whenever the idea of women in leadership surfaces, one question is always asked: Will women change power or will power change women? Will women act just like men when they finally get the same opportunities? The answers are complicated. Yes, we will learn to lead like men if we are surrounded only by men; with little chance of speaking in a different and authentic voice, we will tend to join the pack. But we can and will become leaders honest to our values if we have enough support from other women and from like-minded men. Ultimately we will stand up and stand out.

Others already have. Great women, amazing women sit at the top of industry and politics, fighting the good fight. It is not as if we are starting from scratch, but as we will see from the statistics, these dynamic women are largely alone, functioning in an alien system. We must increase their numbers, give them sisters who can speak with voices aligned with their values, voices that are never lowered as they challenge the status quo and put forward unique ideas. Maybe these sisters are your sisters, or your daughters, or your best friends and mothers or you.

But what if you don't want to be the president of the United States, or even the president of the PTA? You don't have to have a formal title to be a leader. You can stand up for yourself at work, or at the dinner table. You can volunteer for civic duty without running the show. You can write a letter to a network or to Congress, you can refuse to watch certain movies, and you can urge others to do the same. If you lead in your own life, you'll become a wave in the sea change.

Over and over, as I wondered why I felt so driven to write this book, I found myself asking, What does it mean to trust women in a country that doesn't? I revisited hundreds of polls and press clips and studies and interviews; I rehashed the points of strength and weakness in my activism; I talked to friends and family, colleagues and leaders. The deeper my research, the clearer the answer: To trust women is to trust in a different future awash with ideas and lit by the energy of all people. It means more options. It means a fairer equation. It means the work of running the planet will be easier and better for all. If we don't do it for ourselves, we should certainly do it for our daughters, who have been led to believe by us that there are no limits. We should also do it for our sons, whose lives are severely limited by the accepted image of what it means to be boys and men.

We are at a tipping point as the world spins in complexity searching for solutions. John Naisbitt, author of Megatrends, tells the story of the American railroads, which faded because they did not ask, "What business are we in?" They failed to see they were no longer in the railroad business but, instead, in the transportation business. If we ask a similar question, we would answer that our business is no longer just gender equity, but the more sweeping industry of societal transformation. We can change old habits; we can find new ways of doing business. We can and must mobilize to do so, each in his or her own way.

I became a leader through creativity, energy, and a little craziness. I certainly could never have imagined, from the viewpoint of that beauty queen in the fifties, that I would be where I am today. Nothing in the movies I loved or the women I admired showed me this was possible.

One old English expression describes courage as speaking your mind by telling all your heart. In the end, that is the other purpose of this book: not only to speak my heart, but also to suggest a world in which women and men are allowed to speak theirs. In that way, the cycle of change will be complete. Or, in the words of my colleague Laura Liswood of Harvard University's Council of Women World Leaders and a founder of the White House Project, it will move from "the unthinkable to the impossible to the inevitable."

© 2006 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Marie C. Wilson is cofounder and president of the White House Project, which she launched to advance women's leadership in all sectors. She was president of the Ms. Foundation for Women for more than twenty years, through which she cocreated Take Our Daughters to Work Day. A frequent guest speaker, she has been quoted in numerous national news outlets.