What is women's leadership?

Just by reading this heading — A VP or C-suite executive - envisioning the future of her company comes to mind.

This is how media and the flagbearers of women’s empowerment have trained our minds.

They have already laid out for women how their empowered life should look like and in that process, they have taken away the many options women had to show their leadership. For example — A woman can very well take responsibility for her home and still be a leader. Unlike men, there are multiple dimensions to a women's leadership, and all these dimensions deserve to be respected and accepted as work.

A woman should be able to choose to concentrate on her child without any fear of being labeled as incapable, inferior, useless, and unemployable. “motivating a child’, instilling values” is no less than entrepreneurship. It requires all 4 “P’s” of entrepreneurship — “Passion”, “Patience”, “Positivity” and “Perseverance”.

The same applies to other responsibilities of a homemaker. For an Indian household, a woman leads her husband, inlaws, children, parents, and her home. Keeping everyone together not only requires emotional IQ but a lot of resilience and intelligence too. Agreed that this does not generate revenue or profit but, does require leadership and should be admissible as work.

We talk about the representation of women in tech, business, etc.. but, why are we never talking about the representation of men in the household? Everything that men have done traditionally is thought of as something to aspire to but nothing that women did traditionally is thought of as aspirational. Are all the jobs that women did inferior, uninspiring, and unintelligent?

How can equality come if the traditional roles themselves are not respected.?

Just as women are encouraged to do all the work that was male-dominated, men should also be encouraged to do the work that was female-dominated.

Companies should start talking about fatherhood and work-life balance too. Else it is discriminatory towards men.

It is a very long road for the corporate world before it reaches the state of equality towards women and an even longer road for society before it changes its mindset, from a single-dimensional view of women’s leadership to a multidimensional view where they can see the real powerful women which are found not in the corporates but, in the small homes.