Anushreeya G.C.
What is leadership?
The ability to lead any organization for its effective functioning is commonly known as leadership. It is the most important factor to achieve any goal in the best ways possible because, throughout history, leaders have inspired, motivated, taken action, and been visionary.
Leadership plays an important role in initiating any action and providing guidance.
We can look at history as well as the present and compare the number of men and women in the leading role. Women make up half of our population and half of the population can not ignore if we want to achieve the goal. So, the participation of women in leadership is equally important as men.
Let us discuss the need for women's leadership in creating a better world.
Women leadership can in the simplest way be understood as women leading a group of people or an organization.
We, both men and women need to understand and believe that women are capable of managing the works that are outside the four walls too. They have the potential of not just producing the future generations but to manage society, an organization, or a country contributing to the promotion of better generations.
Why women leadership?
The world is experiencing fast-paced transitions that require effective leadership. Women's leadership is very important for the effective functioning of any institution in the present day. This is because women leaders can bring a diversity of perspectives, values, and opinions. This diversity results in better decision making.
No one can understand a woman better than another woman. With the involvement of one woman in any organization, she can advocate for important issues affecting other women.
The number of women in leadership is fewer than men. By being a part of it, one woman can set an example and be a source of motivation for the other women . This can bring a lot of differences in the gap of leadership.
We can not disagree about how good women are in negotiation and bargaining, can we? Women tend to have a better quality of making decisions and deals.
Women in leadership teams add a diversity of attitudes, outlooks, and experiences. Greater diversity leads to new ideas and opinions, better visions, creative approaches, and ultimately better decisions. Only inclusive leadership can lead to effective decisions resulting in better results.
Inclusive leadership is not possible without female leadership. True progress is only possible with the diversity of perspectives which is only possible if women are involved in the leadership.
Most importantly, greater gender diversity in any organization leads to greater results.
The situation of women leadership.
We all are well known about riddles. Here, I would like to start with one of the very famous riddles that I heard a few months back. Some of you might have heard this one before, if not here it goes.
'' A father and a son get in an accident and are taken to the hospital. The father dies. The boy is taken to the operating room and the surgeon says, “I cannot operate on this boy, because he is my son.” How is this possible?
The answer to the riddle is that the surgeon is the boy’s mother.
This riddle raised a lot of questions in many minds because the first thought most of the minds think of is a male figure to be a surgeon. Since the father is dead, many minds do not think that the mother would be the surgeon.
We tend to think of those things which are related to the situation we encounter or used to encounter in our daily lives. We have been seeing more men in those leading jobs that we tend to forget about the woman who can be in the same position too.
Even with all the voices we have raised and the progress we have made for equality in so many ways, women are still extremely underrepresented in leadership positions.
The reasons behind that are gender discrimination, inappropriate family obligations, and lack of educational opportunities and awareness. Our stereotype society divided the roles of the gender that men are supposed to work outside and women are supposed to work inside the four walls. Because of this reason women comparatively have low self-confidence, self-esteem, and awareness to go out that led to a situation where they are far from leadership.
There is still inequality may be because not everyone is on the same page when it comes to understanding the necessity of women's leadership. From corporate rooms to the parliament, from schools to the universities, from religious institutions to the courts, men are found to be more likely than women to be leaders. No need to think more, let us have a look in our own families where still a male member is considered as the "head of the family."
Women are found to be facing a labyrinth in their way of leadership because despite, slow improvements, women continue to face the challenges that men do not face. One of the major reasons for women's departure from their career is found to be family responsibility; the most critical turn in a labyrinth. We can take the example of worker women's pregnancy here.
In the context of Nepal, according to the Labor Act 2017, the law mandates a total of 98 days of maternity leave, with 60 days fully paid which they can avail of before or after childbirth. Most of the private institutions do not provide this service to women according to the Forum for Women, Law, and Development (FWLD). And most of the women are not even aware of this provision they are provided with because of which they tend to go toward the departure.
Their pregnancy and family responsibility becomes a reason behind them withdrawing their career. In the pathway through the labyrinth, they have to go through a very careful analysis of the hindrances and puzzles that lie ahead. However, they should never forget that despite many twists and turns, the goals are achievable.
What can be done for the change?
Change can be possible if we start thinking from today, from this very moment about the problems following the solutions.
Firstly, change starts with oneself. We women should trust ourselves. All of us are the role models for the upcoming generations and thus it becomes our responsibility for changing our corner of the world. So, this is for all the women out there reading this, "believe in yourself because YOU CAN."
" One voice can change a room, and if one voice can change a room, then it can change a city, a state and a nation, and if it can change a nation, it can gradually change the world. Your voice can change the world. " - Barack Obama
From the very famous above statement what we can understand is that our voice can bring a huge difference in the situation. The more we raise the voice about how important it is for women to get involved in leadership, the more will the waves of awareness spread and more differences can be seen in the future.
Changing our culture when it comes to the negative stereotypes that prevent women from becoming effective leaders in the conservative society would be another great place to start. We all need to make sure that the next generation will not be raised with the outdated ideas of gender differences.
The strength and contribution of women in leadership should be acknowledged. Women should be provided with better educational opportunities and leadership skills development training from the grass-root level of society.
From school levels, several educational programs that explain gender bias and equality and the necessity of self- confidence should be conducted that will in the future help them to change the typical mindsets and have the self-assurance in what their goals are and how they want to achieve them. Women should be able to go beyond their insecurities and uncertainties by building confidence in themselves. They must be able to tackle the persistent discrimination and obstacles they face in their way instead of giving up.
It is not time that will solve the problem of gender inequality and leadership gap but it is an action that will do so. Women's representation in leadership will not increase significantly without major changes in the culture, beliefs as well as policies.
Proper leadership is even more important during the time of change and disasters like the global pandemic of Covid-19. We have seen around the world, women leaders' response to COVID-19 being some of the best in the world. One recent analysis that we found is that countries with female heads of the state suffered six times fewer coronavirus deaths than countries led by men. In Iceland, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, in Germany, Angela Merkel has been praised for their great responses to Covid-19. And in New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern has been praised for consistent advice, open communication, and early action that lead the country to be the first one to be successful for making zero Covid-19 cases.
This can be taken as the recent best examples of proper leadership under women . This happened to be possible because of good vision and discipline leading to good leadership. There is no second thought about how good women are in maintaining discipline that is a very essential element of good leadership.
To sum up, we can say that women's leadership is an important factor to build a sustainable, inclusive, and better future. Most importantly, women leadership is important today to build the future where we will not again be consistently raising our voices and fighting against gender inequality but we will raise our voices for the effective development of our country through our capabilities instead.
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