Goodbye Charm School: The Case for More Women Leaders

By Madeleine M. Kunin, Chelsea Green Publishing. Posted April 16, 2008.

The following excerpt is from the chapter Women & Leadership in Pearls, Politics, and Power by Madeleine M. Kunin (Chelsea Green, 2008), and is reprinted here with permission from the publisher.

Leadership cookbooks that list the ingredients for effective leadership are more popular than ever. Almost every successful CEO has been impelled to divulge his secret formula. Most have bemoaned the lack of leadership "in our time," exemplified by Lee Iacocca's latest book, Where Have All the Leaders Gone?:

Had enough? Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff.

Men throughout history have struggled to define leadership, benign and not benign, from Jesus to Hitler, from Aristotle to Machiavelli. Leadership meant male leadership. There was no other, unless we count Joan of Arc and Queen Elizabeth I.

The omission of women from leadership books was not due to oversight or prejudice. It was understood that males "are superior, more powerful, and that they represent the 'norm.' ... In fact, sexist, patriarchal values are so deeply engrained in society's consciousness that they are largely invisible."

Today, women have assumed new leadership roles in politics, business, higher education, and other venues where they had never before appeared. "Firsts," such as the first woman president of Harvard University, Drew Gilpin Faust, continue to make headlines. The seconds and thirds take longer. Surprisingly the figure is the same -- 16 percent -- for the number of women in the U.S. Congress and the number of women in top corporate positions. Why has progress been so slow? Do women have a different leadership style, and if so, does that help or hinder their advancement? Or are their leadership skills not sufficiently recognized by a business and political culture that remains predominantly male?

James MacGregor Burns, who has made a lifelong study of leadership, divides leadership into two types: transactional, which "depends on hierarchy ... it requires the ability to obtain results, to control through structures and processes"; and transformational leadership, "which occurs when a leader engages with a follower in such a way that both parties are raised to higher levels of motivation and morality with a common purpose." Transactional leadership is considered more masculine and transformational is considered more feminine. Some studies give women an advantage, others do not. Manning observes, "If transformational leadership is more androgynous, women managers may not have to cope with a perceived contradiction between being women and being effective leaders." If she is correct, women political leaders would be free to be themselves without feeling pressured to lead in the more traditional male style. A challenge for women in leadership is to develop a comfortable, loosely fitting leadership style that works, regardless of the culture.

Judith Rosener was one of the first to identify a distinctive female leadership style in a 1990 Harvard Business Review article, "Ways Women Lead." More than 170 scientific studies of gender and leadership style followed.

Sally Helgesen, in The Female Advantage: Women's Ways of Leadership, applauds women's leadership style as the panacea for the new, more complex economy. Peter Drucker noted that "Over time women have evolved a successful leadership style that rejects the military model in favor of supporting and empowering people." Patricia Aburdene and John Naisbitt, authors of Megatrends for Women, write that future management styles "uncannily match those of female leadership. Consultants tried to teach male managers to relinquish command-and-control mode. For women it was different, it just came naturally.'" If women are so good at relinquishing command and control, why aren't more of them in control?

One answer is that most institutions remain male dominated, and discrimination still exists. "Discriminatory attitudes are often veiled in inaccurate 'facts' about women's capacity for leadership. Women are presented as not aggressive enough, lacking the self-confidence required for the job, and not being serious enough about their careers to climb the corporate ladder."

Are women more likely to succeed when they portray aggression, confidence, and seriousness? Not necessarily. In the 1982 court case Hopkins v. Price Waterhouse, Ann Hopkins "had more billable hours than any other person proposed for partner that year, she had brought in business worth $25 million, her clients praised her, and her supporters recommended her as driven, hardworking and exacting." She was denied partnership because "she had interpersonal skills problems, overcompensated for being a woman," and needed a "course at charm school." The good news was that she won her case and that this happened twenty-five years ago. The story remains illustrative today because women leaders in business, politics, and elsewhere often face a no-win situation, damned if you do, and damned if you don't; they are either too tough or too soft. Kathleen Hall Jamieson identified this as the double bind in 1995.

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Madeleine M. Kunin was Vermont's first and, to date, only female governor as well as the first Jewish woman to be elected governor of a U.S. state.

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