Story of the Month: October
Speak the Unspeakable
Swanee Hunt, the former ambassador to Austria, heiress to the Hunt oil fortune, and founder of the Initiative for Inclusive Security, which includes the Women Waging Peace network, teaches courses on women and public policy at the Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. A highly respected woman, she feels comfortable in the public arena, and often uses the podium to shed light on the roles women play in peacekeeping processes. She recalls a meeting where the dean of the Kennedy School called the faculty together to talk about leadership.
“The first thing I do is check out the male/female ratio in the audience. I thought this wasn’t bad because it was half men and half women, and the faculty is mostly men. The Dean stood up and said he asked Joe and Bill to say something about leadership. Joe and Bill talked, and passed out three descriptions of students whom each had taught and who had shown real leadership. All men. So we have the dean who is a guy who calls on Joe and Bill who pass out six examples of men, and so far only one women has spoken.
“Five minutes before the meeting was to end, I stood up and said, ‘I have to go on record because you brought me to this campus to address women in public policy and to change the culture of the Kennedy School. So I’m going to do it. The leadership issue is not just about how we encourage leadership among the students. It’s also how we encourage leadership at the faculty level. The way this meeting was constructed, I am standing here as the second woman to speak in an hour.’ My heart was pounding. I could feel that my cheeks were red. I said, ‘I have decades of experience in public speaking, and it’s taking all the nerve I have to confront this. Now why is that? How was this meeting set up?” The meeting went on for another 15 minutes, and now the women started to speak up a lot.
“My point was that there are so many subtle clues about what leadership is, and who leaders are, and even accomplished faculty members are unconscious of it. Even people with my background have a hard time confronting it. Before I stood up, I was thinking that they would think, ‘There she goes again. Completely predictable.’ I wanted these people to respect me, but every time I stand up for this, I risked them respecting me less. That’s why I began as I did, that I was brought to this campus to do this. I have so much experience. But think about other people. I mean, I was hired to stand up! That is why we need to bring women together in a setting that feels safe to them, to let them get their confidence up.
Bringing up the gender card is never easy and there’s a good reason for that. If Swanee, a woman of power, prestige, and experience, hired to address the role of women, found her wings clipped, any woman can. “There she goes again” so often betrays a male bias toward leadership, and women can feel shy about standing up and speaking their minds.
A book by Virginia Valian called "Why so Slow?: The advancement of women," gives us a way of understanding what exactly is going on here, a situation women run up against in business and other professions as well academia. Valian conducted a vast number of studies that explored why women’s advancement was going at a snail’s pace, and uncovered the world of gender schemas. Gender schemas affect our expectations of men and women, and affect how we evaluate their work and their performance as professionals. That in turn affects pay, promotions, and prestige. It’s no surprise that in a male-dominated culture, gender schemas are to men’s advantage and to women’s disadvantage.
An unconscious assumption about men is that they are capable of independent and autonomous behavior, in other words, men act. These are the attributes that are also traditionally associated with leadership. On the other hand, women are associated with nurturing, emotional expression, and concern for others, qualities that are not associated with leadership. So women have to deal with the initial impression that they are not leaders.
According to gender schemas, women are first assumed incompetent until proven otherwise. This is a belief held by both men and women. Consequently, men are consistently overrated and women are underrated. Everything a man does that reinforces his masculinity, reinforces the perception that he’s competent. Everything that a woman does that reinforces her femininity takes away from any perception that she’s competent. It’s a nice little feedback loop. Marginalize and objectify women because they are perceived as incompetent, and because they are perceived as incompetent justifies marginalizing and objectifying them. We saw in the 80’s an 90’s women de-feminizing themselves and trying to look and act like men as a way of counteracting this perception of incompetence. Margaret Thatcher took training in lowering her voice when she was Prime Minister of Britain.
Assumed incompetence puts women on the defensive and in need of having to prove themselves. For instance, when a woman is competent, it’s often attributed to either luck or, more patronizingly, “she’s a hard worker.” When she fails, it’s attributed to her lack of competence. It’s the inverse for men. When a man is successful, it’s attributed to competence and when he fails, it’s usually attributed to bad luck.
Looking through this lens, we can see the unconscious assumptions taking place in this leadership meeting. And we also see how difficult it is to bring this topic up. But if women don’t, who will? Iron Butterflies dispel distortions about women and leadership by speaking the unspeakable, that is by making visible the unconscious forces at work. It is the first step towards fully realizing the feminine power in leadership.