A Woman in Leadership: An Inclusive Approach
If a story is written by those who win,
that means there’s another side to it:
the real story,
let it be heard by anyone who wants to hear it…
Litto Nebbia
I love my job, and I consider myself to be lucky in terms of the course my life took and the path I chose. As a UX Designer, I have always particularly enjoyed doing research and finding ways to improve people’s daily life and it has also allowed me to work with incredibly empathetic, curious and sensitive people (which is part of our profession’s DNA).
I have been working in usability and UX since 2005 from that little studio that belonged to my cousin and his friends. And ever since that moment, I have always liked my job… except when I have had to lead.
I started working in a team with 2 members to end up working in one with 20 members, and all along, I have been reluctant to occupy a leadership position. I felt uncomfortable with that role (despite playing it anyways to meet my team’s or the company’s needs). And even though I considered myself to have many leadership qualities (I still do), there was something that didn’t add up. I couldn’t bring myself to be comfortable with it, to enjoy it.
In 2022, at Flux IT (the tech consultancy company where I work), I had a chance to attend for the first time a gender-sensitive leadership training session that was delivered by the brilliant Laura and Maria from Plural. During this session, we were asked to consider the daily-life situations we have been through (both in our personal and professional lives) but from a gender-sensitive perspective. Then, we made those situations tangible and we evinced how gender inequality is systemic and structural, full of rules, responsibilities, and prejudices that affect us on a daily basis.
This can also be translated into and seen in the way in which organizations work; a way that sets different barriers to women’s professional development and sexist prejudices that have institutionalized inequality and that perpetuate their marginalization. But beware, this does not only apply to “dinosaur” companies, if there happened to be a woman in charge, this could take place even in young companies such as Flux IT because we are talking about concepts that are deeply rooted in our subconscious.
It was this training what made me realize how unaware I was of how entrenched and institutionalized sexist prejudices were in our daily lives; and, more deeply, that this could be my own barrier to becoming a leader.
Leadership Values
We, women, were not born knowing how to take care of someone or how to be mothers; but society and culture have driven us there since from a very young age, we have been educated and trained to naturally fulfill that role today.
We were not born knowing how to be leaders either; but society (and organizations) are uncertain of how well we can perform that role. There are invisible barriers that limit our professional development, and that lead us to work harder than men and to develop certain techniques so as to be accepted within mostly male power groups.
If we delve into the leadership topic, there is a type of leadership that is more valued in organizations and that possesses features that, traditionally and socially, are associated with “being a man”: rationality, coldness, analytical capacity, self-confidence; being competent, convincing, and decisive, efficiency, thinking ahead, being independent; knowing how to work under pressure, being straightforward, etc. Features that are opposite to those associated with “being a woman”: being emotional, weakness, submission, impulsivity, and non-rationality.
What we learn from early stages (the fact that boys should not cry and that they should be strong, and that girls should be delicate and caring), also ends up showing in the different ways to lead, in which men do so in an “agency-like” way (strong, assertive, decisive, with greater capacity to impose and control) whereas women are associated with a more “communal” way to lead (warm, pleasant, kind).
We do not need to put much thought into it to identify which of the two modalities is the most valued one…
When we lead in a communal, caring, cordial, understanding and sensitive way, our way to lead is questioned due to not leading in an enough “agency-like” way. So, to be recognized as leaders, we seek to do “equally or better” than men by emulating their agency-like way to lead (we even copy their outfits with suits that give “an air of authority”), thus portraying confidence and security.
We must adapt to the “agency-like” way to lead if we want to occupy leadership roles, even if that means hiding our vulnerabilities, re-assigning personal spaces, working as if we did not take care of others, and taking care of others as if we did not work. And on top of this, we are also judged because we are not considered to be authentic.
Placing the focus back on myself, I believe that (at an unconscious level) I did not identify myself with a leader’s “valuable features,” and for me, those features were necessary to become a leader. This is where my problem lies: I used to see leadership as hard work, in which it was key to impose oneself upon the others and to establish vertical hierarchical relationships. To me, leading had to do with the feeling of needing to have and to show superpowers, with having an ability to control everything and to know everything; it had to do with portraying oneself as someone who had no vulnerabilities in front of others.
With the training session, I discovered that maybe the problem was not that I did not want to become a leader, but instead that I did not want to be that kind of leader.
The Price of Being a Woman
Thanks to the training session, I was also able to identify the price women must pay to grow professionally in the corporate world. And what is worse, I identified how I had naturalized the fatigue that comes with it.
Ever since I started working, I have strived to develop my career, giving my best at work and, at the same time, giving my best at home, trying not to neglect my family, and friends. So, I was searching for balance, for the idea of being able to do everything on my own.
At some point, I was even questioned by other mothers, who did not understand how I could work so much, travel and leave my kids at home, or how I could let other people take care of them for me.
Somehow, I always felt empowered. I just had to be able to do everything, and I indeed was, and I would come through with it all. What I can notice today is that it cost me more simply because I was a woman. Empowering ourselves, for women, ends up being just another responsibility and it is paid with fatigue.
“The responsibilities of an ‘empowered’ woman have not freed us from the other traditional responsibilities that are based on the cultural education that we get from an early age: being beautiful, pleasant, supportive, patient, understanding, forgiving. We do not free ourselves from the weight of the other responsibilities: that of taking care of others.”
Poorly educated, María Florencia Freijo
The great mental workload that women possess on a daily basis, a workload of which we sometimes boast about (a multi-tasking woman who can do everything), is an invisible workload that builds up logistics, coordination and task anticipation demands, which drain us.
So, I also understood that, in addition to not getting along with the “valued models of leadership”, I was too tired to put on the gloves and to go to the mattresses against what I did not like. Deep down, I knew the huge physical and emotional price I would have to pay, so I tried to stay out of it.
Inclusive Leadership
My challenge, then, is to stop rejecting what I do not want to become and to embrace the idea that there are other ways to lead. It lies in putting an end to gender prejudices and expectations regarding the ways in which to lead and in coming up with new ways that promote inclusion and make inequities visible.
It lies in promoting a gender-sensitive leadership approach that does not just include women in hierarchical positions who lead in “our own way”. Instead, the challenge resides in thinking about the way in which women and men can lead an organization to guarantee equality, integration and diversity.
Mollie Painter-Morland, in her article “Gender, Leadership and Organization”, mentions the adoption of a systemic leadership model as a potential path to change. This type of leadership deals with “understanding leadership as an emergent, interactive and dynamic property that allows one to distribute leadership responsibilities and privileges throughout an organization’s workforce.” (Edgeman and Scherer, 1999).
It inhabits 3 types of leadership: the administrative type (focused on the planning and coordination of organizational activities), the adaptive type (non-linear model, any member can take the lead in something and assume responsibilities by taking advantage of their own strengths, sensitivities and perspectives, in addition to adopting their own style when doing so and taking the plunge when playing leadership roles) and the enabling type. The latter makes it easier to implement adaptive leadership in an organization since it makes it possible to commit to collaborative strategies, it encourages interaction, supports and improves interdependence, and stimulates adaptive tensions that enable the creation of new patterns.
This means that it is necessary to start taking into account the forms of distributive and collaborative leadership. Will this be the alternative leadership path that allows me to reconcile with becoming a leader? Or will it be a new one?
Whatever the path, it is clear that both organizations and individuals must change the way in which we see and move across the world today, and that we must project new leadership paradigms that blur the relationship between role and gender.
New challenges await me; await us.
