In light of a recent poll, we have quite a distance to go in erasing sexist attitudes about women in leadership. In an August 2008 survey by the Pew Research Center, fully 21 percent of the U.S. public said that men make better leaders than women. Another 69 percent said that men and women make equally good leaders, and only 6 percent said that women make better leaders.
Those findings are particularly surprising given recent episodes in our political and corporate cultures. In 2002 at Enron, it was a woman accountant, Sherron Watkins, who stood up to the company’s male leadership to point out that the company’s accounts were fraudulent. In the late 1990s, the female head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born, tried unsuccessfully to warn Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Arthur Levitt that the government’s failure to regulate the trading of collateralized debt obligations was a ticking bomb that could bring down the financial system. (The run on derivatives and resulting financial collapse of 2008 showed that she was right.) And last week, the Washington Post reported that a female lawyer at the SEC, Genevievette Walker-Lightfoot, repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to warn her male superiors that Bernard Madoff’s accounts did not make sense and that the agency should investigate.
We also now know that at least four of our male political leaders (Presidential candidate John Edwards, governors Elliott Spitzer and Mark Sanford, and Senator John Ensign) allowed their pursuit of extramarital liaisons to put their leadership responsibilities and the interests of their constituents at risk.
Keep those episodes in mind next time that you hear (as I have) suggestions that men are better natural leaders than women, that women who disagree with the conclusions of their male colleagues are just “having a bad day” (and cruder suggestions), that men should not be supervised by women, and other such remarks.
In light of recent events, the idea that men are better leaders than women turns out to be not just untrue, but dangerous to our nation’s economic well-being and governance. There are many ways to support our country, and it’s not a stretch to say that challenging remarks that deride women’s leadership and decisionmaking abilities is a small act of patriotism. The nation is well served when we stand up and confront misguided notions about women’s capacity to lead.
Because if our country is to get back on course, we need fewer yes-men and more talented leaders—women and men—whose decisions are based on reality and not on ideology, personal interest, or short-term gain.
Steve
