LEADERSHIP ISSUE

Leadership Issue

Leadership Issue

Leadership

Leadership is the task of motivating, guiding, directing and leading others in the right direction in order to fulfill certain mutual aims and objectives. A leader through leadership role shows the right and correct path to his or her subordinates. Leadership provides subordinates guidance with which they can bring improvement in their work. It is a reciprocal process within a group context that occurs when a leader influences group members to make intentional change towards a shared purpose and goal attainment.

Women Leadership

Women consistently emerge as leaders in social movement by organizing and consciousness-raising efforts directed at securing social change for various groups of women. Within these communities, women leaders exhibit many of the characteristics of effective transformational leaders including the ability to articulate a vision, empower others, and inspire followers to transcend self-interests as well as some characteristics of transactional leaders. In so doing, they purposefully confront gender stereotypes and the legal and socio structural obstacles that reinforce them about whether, how, and where they should lead. Leaders of identity communities also emerge from political experiences within women's identity communities when they feel the original movement leaders improperly cast themselves as representing all women when, in actuality, they prioritized the concerns of more affluent women. (Dahlerup, 2001)

On the one hand, the historical record shows that females who lead on “gendered issues” were “allowed” to enter public discussions traditionally closed off to them precisely because of their perceived moral standing on issues of family, morality, and well-being. So, by conforming to some gendered stereotypes, women could take public, political actions that contradicted these expectations about where and on what issues they could lead. On the other hand, this path toward public leadership came at the expense of reinforcing gendered expectations about “male versus female” concerns. It is noteworthy that even in these early days, women's leadership styles carefully negotiated gender stereotypes in ways decidedly more complicated than those that receive attention when the debate is between whether or not women conform to gender stereotypes as they lead.

Women as Political Leaders

Still, even in the 21st century, men of any class, caste, race, ethnicity, or nationality are more able to acquire leadership positions than are women from their respective categories. Leadership roles offer a person an opportunity for maximizing one's potential. These are the roles where a person can stretch oneself to perform at her or his best. Women constitute half of humankind. If they are not equally represented in leadership positions, it is unfair and unnatural. Women's equal representation at every level of decision making would make democracies more legitimate and fair. Although many countries have enacted or passed laws guaranteeing equal civil and political rights for women and men, most nations have patriarchal systems that do not allow women to exercise these rights. This is reflected in the relative absence of women from power structures and leadership positions. (Darcy, 2004)

Leadership opportunities available to women in the field of politics include heads of state or governments, ministers, presiding ...