This essay addresses four aspects of this development. I will note the kinds of leadership women have routinely provided, and list factors that help explain why this pattern has changed dramatically in the past half century. I will mention some of the obstacles that still block the path for women in leadership Sep 15, · 30 March Thesis: The Odyssey was one of the earliest forms of writing that suggested that there should be women in power in association with men even though some societies in the past have tried to give power to women, the power given to them in the modern era is incomparable to those of centuries past + Words Essay on Women Empowerment. Women empowerment refers to making women powerful to make them capable of deciding for themselves. Women have suffered a lot through the years at the hands of men. In earlier centuries, they were treated as almost non-existent. As if all the rights belonged to men even something as basic as blogger.comted Reading Time: 3 mins
Women, Power & Leadership | American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Many more women provide visible leadership today than ever before. Opening up higher education for women and winning the battle for suffrage brought new opportunities, along with widespread availability of labor-saving devices and the discovery and legalization of reliable, women power essay, safe methods of birth control. Despite these developments, women ambitious for leadership still face formidable obstacles: primary if not sole responsibility for childcare and homemaking; the lack of family-friendly policies in most workplaces; gender stereotypes perpetuated in popular culture; and women power essay some parts of the world, women power essay, laws and practices that deny women education or opportunities outside the home.
Some observers believe that only a few women want to hold significant, women power essay, demanding leadership posts; but there is ample evidence on the other side of this debate, some of it documented in this volume. Historic tensions between feminism and power remain to be resolved by creative theorizing and shrewd, strategic activism.
Nannerl O. Keohanea Fellow of the American Academy sincewomen power essay, is a political philosopher and university administrator who served as President of Wellesley College and Duke University. She is currently affiliated with the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University and is a Visiting Scholar at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University.
Her books include Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the EnlightenmentHigher Ground: Ethics and Leadership in the Modern Universityand Thinking about Leadership She is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Academy. One of the most dramatic changes in recent decades has been the increasing prominence of women in positions of leadership.
Many more women are providing leadership in government, business, higher education, nonprofit ventures, and other areas women power essay life, in many more countries of the world, than would ever have been true in the past. This essay addresses four aspects of this development. I will note the kinds of leadership women have routinely provided, and list factors that help explain why this pattern has changed dramatically in the past half century.
I will mention some of the obstacles that still block the path for women in leadership, women power essay. Then I will ask how ambitious women generally are for leadership, and discuss the fraught relationship between feminism and power, before concluding with a brief look at the future that might lie ahead.
A leader can define or clarify goals by issuing a memo or an executive order, an edict or a fatwa or a tweet, by passing a law, barking a command, or presenting an interesting idea in a meeting of colleagues, women power essay. Sometimes a charismatic leader such as Martin Luther King Jr. can define goals and mobilize energies through rhetoric and the power of example. It is also helpful to distinguish leadership from two closely related concepts: power and authority.
All leaders have some measure of power, in the sense of influencing or determining priorities for other individuals. But leadership cannot be a synonym for holding power.
Leadership often involves exercising authority with the formal legitimacy of a position in a governmental structure or high office in a large organization. Holding authority in these ways provides clear opportunities for leadership.
Yet many men and women we would want to call leaders are not in positions of authority, women power essay, and not everyone in a formal office provides leadership. We can think of leadership as a spectrum, in terms of both visibility and the power the leader wields.
On one end of the spectrum, we have the most visible: authoritative leaders like the president of the United States or the prime minister of the United Kingdom, or a dictator such as Hitler or Qaddafi. At the opposite end of the spectrum is casual, low-key leadership found in countless situations every day around the world, leadership that women power essay make a significant difference to the individuals whose lives are touched by it.
Over the centuries, the first kind—the out-in-front, authoritative leadership—has generally been exhibited by men. Women as well as some men have provided casual, low-key leadership behind the scenes. But this pattern has been changing, as more women have taken up opportunities for visible, authoritative leadership. Across all the centuries of which we have any record, women have been largely absent from positions of formal authority. Such posts, with a few exceptions, were routinely held by men.
Women have therefore lacked opportunities to exercise leadership in the most visible public settings. And as both cause and consequence of this fact, leadership has been closely associated with masculinity.
Yet despite this stubborn linkage between leadership and maleness, some women in almost every society have proved themselves capable of providing strong, visible leadership. Women exercised formal public authority when dynasty or marriage-lines trumped gender, so that Elizabeth I of England or Catherine the Great of Russia could rule as monarch, women power essay. There are cultures in which wise women are regularly consulted, either as individuals or as members of the council of the tribe.
Women have led in situations where men are temporarily absent: in wartime when the men are away fighting, or in a community like Nantucket in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, where most of the men were whaling in distant seas for years at a time, women power essay.
The women power essay accomplishments of Jane Addams and Eleanor Roosevelt stand as prime examples of female leadership, women power essay. Women have been leaders in family businesses in many different settings. And countless women across history have provided leadership in education, religious activities, care for the sick and wounded, cultural affairs, women power essay, and charity for the poor.
This picture has changed dramatically in the past half-century. Many more women today hold authoritative posts, women power essay prime ministers, heads of universities, CEOs of corporations, presidents of nonprofit organizations, and bishops in Protestant denominations. Why has this happened in the past few decades, rather than sooner, or later, or never? As we ponder this question, we must also note that the changes have proceeded unevenly, women power essay.
It is still unusual for a woman to be CEO of a major public corporation or the president of women power essay country with direct elections women power essay the head of government, as distinct from parliamentary systems. We will look at some of the barriers blocking change in these and other areas. And finally, are women as ambitious for leadership as men, or are there systematic differences between the two sexes in the appetite for gaining and using power?
Can tensions between the core concepts of feminism and the wielding of power help us understand these issues? In the past half-century, fifty-six women have served as president or prime minister of their countries. Women have been the CEOs of GM, IBM, Yahoo, and Pepsi-Cola. There are women judges sitting at all levels of the court system, women power essay women leaders in several prominent international organizations. In the United States, the unprecedented numbers of women candidates in the midterm elections and the Democratic presidential primaries are striking examples of women tackling the long-standing identification of leadership with masculinity.
One hundred and seventeen women won office inincluding ninety-six members of the House of Representatives, twelve senators, and nine governors. Each of these was a record number, compared with any year in the past. We can multiply instances from many different fields, from many different contexts: women today are much more likely to provide visible leadership in major institutions than they have been at any time in history.
Yet why have these changes occurred precisely at this time? First is the establishment of institutions of higher education for women to-ward the end of the nineteenth century. Both men and women worked to open women power essay institutions to women and to build schools and colleges specifically for women students.
Careers and activities that had been beyond the reach of all women now for the first time became a plausible ambition. Higher education provided a new platform for leadership by women in many fields, women power essay. College degrees allowed women to enter professions previously barred to them and, as a result, become financially independent of their fathers women power essay husbands and gain a measure of control over their own lives.
The second crucial development, beginning in the late nineteenth century, was the invention of labor-saving devices such as washing machines and dryers, dishwashers and vacuum cleaners, followed in the second half of the twentieth century by computers and, later still, electronic assistants capable of ordering goods online to be delivered to your door.
The women or men in charge of running a household today have far more mechanical and electronic support than ever before. Yet one women power essay hope that these patterns could be more malleable than the punishing work required of our great-grandmothers to maintain a household. Even more than the efforts that opened colleges and universities for women, the suffrage movements were deliberate, well-organized campaigns in which women leaders used their sources of influence strategically to obtain their goals.
Enfranchised women could vote for candidates who advocated policies with particular resonance for them, including family- and child-oriented regulations and laws that tackled discriminatory practices in the labor market. Many female citizens voted as their fathers and husbands did; but the possibility of using the ballot box to pursue their priority interests was for the first time available to them, women power essay.
Women could also stand for election and be appointed to government offices. It is important to note, however, that in the United States, the success of the movement was tarnished by the denial of the vote to many Black persons in the South until the Voting Rights Act of Fourth factor: the easy availability of reliable methods of birth control.
In the early twentieth century, there was for the first time widespread public discussion of the methods and moral dimensions of birth control. The opportunity to engage in family planning by controlling the number and timing of births gave women more freedom to engage in other tasks without worrying about unwanted pregnancies.
This multifaceted movement encouraged countless women to reenvision their options and led to important changes in attitudes, behavior, and legal systems, women power essay. The ideas of the movement were originally developed by women in Western Europe and the United States, but the implications were felt worldwide, and women in many other countries provided examples of feminist ideas and activities. Among the most important by-products of the feminist movement in the United States was Title IX, passed as part of the Education Amendments Act in New opportunities for women in athletics and in combatting job discrimination followed the passage of this bill.
This puts more women in the workforce and thus on a potential ladder to leadership, despite remaining biases against women in jobs as varied women power essay construction, teaching economics in a university, representing clients in major trials, and fighting forest fires. The more often it happens, women power essay, the more likely it is that others will be inspired to follow that example, whereas in the past, it would never have occurred to a young girl that she might someday be CEO of a company, head of a major NGO, member of Congress, dean of a cathedral, or president of a university.
If you simply project forward the trajectory we have seen since the s, you might assume that the future will be one in which all top leadership posts finally become gender-neutral, as often held by women as by men.
The last bastions will fall, and it will be just as likely that the CEO of a company or the president of the country will be a woman as a man; the same will be true of other forms of leadership. Sometimes we act as though this is the obvious path ahead, and the only question is how long it will take. On this point, the evidence is discouraging.
This is the scenario that appears to underlie much of our current thinking, even if we have not articulated it as such. This scenario, however, ignores some formidable barriers that women ambitious for formal leadership still face.
The first and most fundamental obstacle to achieving top leadership in any field is that women in almost all societies women power essay have primary if not sole responsibility for childcare and homemaking. Few organizations or nation-states have workplace policies that support family-friendly lifestyles, including high-quality, reliable, affordable childcare; flexible work schedules while children are young; and support for anyone caring for a women power essay child or aging parent.
This makes things very hard for working parents, women power essay, and especially for working mothers. Although hours worked are correlated with productivity in some jobs and professions, the situation is far more complicated than women power essay a simple metric would indicate. Nonetheless, this measure is often used for promotion and job opportunities, explicitly or in a more subtle fashion.
This expectation cuts heavily against a working mother, or a father who might want to spend significant time with his young children, women power essay.
We need more flexible pathways through the labyrinth so that women or men can—if they wish—spend more time with their kids in their earliest women power essay and still get back on the fast track and catch up. We need to work toward a world in which marriage with children more often involves parenting and homemaking by both partners, so that all the burden does not fall on the mother.
We urgently need more easily available high-quality childcare outside the home so that working parents can be assured that their kids are well cared for while they both work full time. Reaching this goal will require more deliberate action on the part of governments, businesses, and policy-makers to create family-friendly workplaces. Such policies are in place in several European countries but have not so far been implemented in the United States.
Other labyrinthine obstacles include gender stereotypes that keep getting in the way of women being judged simply on their own accomplishment. Women also have fewer opportunities to be mentored.
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Dec 18, · Women power essay Genna December 18, Women's history. 4 pages posted equality is freely. Why would tlp have long been done. Start studying english comp. Figure out from gloria steinem what is found all women must the battle cry This essay addresses four aspects of this development. I will note the kinds of leadership women have routinely provided, and list factors that help explain why this pattern has changed dramatically in the past half century. I will mention some of the obstacles that still block the path for women in leadership Sep 15, · 30 March Thesis: The Odyssey was one of the earliest forms of writing that suggested that there should be women in power in association with men even though some societies in the past have tried to give power to women, the power given to them in the modern era is incomparable to those of centuries past
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