‘We can’t find good women leaders’

Is there really a lack of good women leaders? Then why is it that women are saying they do not have opportunities to use their leadership gifts and skills?

It seems there is a problem. Working in the NGO sector, I am perplexed by this refrain that there are not women leaders coming through who our male colleagues can bring into leadership (although that statement in itself is problematic, because women should not be dependent on men bringing them into leadership). At the same time I hear gifted women struggling with the barriers to their appointment into leadership roles.

To be fair, there have been some changes. We can find, in a range of different places, women leading in creative and innovative ways. Here’s one of the questions I have: do we still too often ‘think leadership and think male’? The attributes associated with leadership, our vision of what leadership looks like and what is needed to do it well has an (often profound) androcentric bias. This bias makes it difficult to imagine female colleagues in leadership. 

This runs with the assumption that men are the standard in leadership, creating invisible biases in organisations as they look at developing leaders. One of the barriers that women confront when they seek to take on leadership roles is that they must behave like a man in order to be heard or accepted. The double bind is that when they do they are too often judged negatively for this behaviour: bossy rather than assertive; strident rather than commanding; meddling rather than managing; stubborn rather than sure; weak rather than caring.

Cultural and religious beliefs about gender inform workplace attitudes. These become embedded in workplace structures, practices and patterns of interaction. Gendered cultural assumptions have created workplaces that too often deny women’s abilities and the space for them to lead as who they are.

Women have lacked mentors and models in leadership. While today there are women leading in a range of sectors, and so providing models, too often they are considered the exception rather than the rule. This means other women, too often, don’t see them as models. Despite our own battles when we are in leadership, we need to take on mentorship for at least 2 other women so that we multiply the pool of women leaders.

Another issue, identified regularly in the research on women in leadership, is the lack of people who will promote women, advocate for them and put their names forward for leadership. Male managers promote male colleagues first. Women need those who will advocate for them, who will put their name forward for leadership.

There are good women who are ready and skilled to take on leadership. Recognising the biases, often hidden, is one step toward understanding these contradictory statements from men and women.  

When there is insecurity…

Islamisation of the law and society in Pakistan, under the rule of General Zia ul Haq, initially created new opportunities for women to negotiate change. Opponents of the General’s Islamisation of his rule and civil society actors were harassed, imprisoned or chose to leave the country. Civil space was empty in the face of the insecurity unleashed by the processes of Islamisation.

Enter women activists. For a significant period of time the insecurity created by the rapidly changing political, social and religious conditions gave women open doors to pursue change. Women demonstrated publicly, confronted the General’s rule, and challenged religious leaders. They were vociferous in their demands for equality for women under the law and in the constitution.

Scholarship in the Western academia has laregely focussed on how insecurity threatens men and their masculinity, arguing that this leads to exaggerated displays of masculinity. Those who do not display this sort of masculinity are then mistreated as part of this hyper-masculine behaviour.

But, is this always true? In the case of Pakistan insecurity saw space for women open up in new ways, opportunities created and grasped, and gender norms renegotiated. Women’s activism in Pakistan has continued as public advocacy with the government, society and religious authorities. Patriarchal norms were reinforced through the religious framing of the laws, but at the same time women reimagined the challenge to those norms. ‘… [R]esearch on masculinity in various parts of the world suggests that during times of social, political, and economic instability, women may be treated more equally or gain opportunities they did not have during more stable times.’ (Kucinskas and van der Dos, Gender Ideals in Turbulent Times: An Examination of Insecurity, Islam, and Muslim Men’s Gender Attitudes during the Arab Spring, Comparative Sociology 16, 2017.)

There is significant evidence that demonstrates how when men feel threatened they can resort to hyper-masculine behaviour which often involves violence against women. The increased rates of violence experienced by women during Covid bear witness to this. UN Women presented data that described violence against women as the unseen pandemic during that time. (https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/in-focus-gender-equality-in-covid-19-response/violence-against-women-during-covid-19) France was just one country where there was a reported 32% increase in reports of domestic violence.

I am not wanting to deny this reality, that insecurity often sees increased violence against women. There is, however, another side to the story.

Research into several MENA region countries concluded that men who live with economic and political insecurity are often more open to gender egalitarianism, suggesting that this is because these men are dependent on women when under such pressure. Their research went on to indicate there is a strong relationship between political Islam and patriarchal gender attitudes. (Kucinskas and van der Dos, Gender Ideals in Turbulent Times: An Examination of Insecurity, Islam, and Muslim Men’s Gender Attitudes during the Arab Spring, Comparative Sociology 16, 2017.)

What happens when there is insecurity? Much greater attention must be given to context in examining and extrapolating outcomes. Complex dynamics at play between politics, religion, social organisation and patriarchy means the results vary significantly.

It’s not quite so simple

Problematising the challenges for gender equality is fraught because too much research takes a unidimensional approach to the issues. Some state ‘the problem is religion’, with both Christianity and Islam labelled as patriarchal constructs that hinder women’s development and equality. Of course if you belong to one of those religions you may argue otherwise. There are women within both of these faith traditions who argue cogently for the emancipatory nature of their faith. So yes, the problem is complex.

Too often simplistic articulation of the problem denies the agentic nature of women’s engagement with and through their faith tradition. Everything about women and how they negotiate their everyday is subsumed under a rubric of their passive socialisation within religion to oppose gender equality.

However, the question that is not answered is how do men and women live their faith differently? What are the negotiations they engage in everyday that enable them to navigate the complexities of the religious and social dynamics that mediate their lives? How do they bargain with their faith, its institutions and traditions, its beliefs and practices, to challenge the barriers they face?

Working in a women’s college in South Asia, I was struck by the different ways women’s education enabled them to negotiate with socially and religiously embedded structures. As an outsider looking in I could only see structures that appeared antithetical to gender equality. As I spent time living in the community, and in some small way began to see how women lived intentionally and purposefully rewriting the rules of those structures, their agency became evident.

I had heard outsiders describe education for these women as simply a ticket to a better marriage, dismissing the education they engaged in as largely meaningless. What I began to see, however, was the ability education gave these women to negotiate who they married, what they brought to the marriage and how the marriage was navigated. Yes, education enabled them to negotiate in their marriage and that was a meaningful was of challenging old norms that would otherwise dominate their lives.

It is too easy for us to disregard the acts of agency of other women because they are not as we imagine their world should be. The path of change can only be defined by those who must pioneer it. Simplistic articulations of problems can blind us to the change that is happening in women’s everyday negotiations and navigations.

Gender Stereotyping

I once heard from a colleague who had someone attack her stating that her only problem was that she was a woman and she was Asian. Collapsed into those categories, it seems, were a whole host of negative characteristics, behaviours, ways of being. The person making this unbelievable statement felt it unnecessary to speak to the things that upset him. He simply caught up his problems or frustrations, or whatever it was, and threw muck widely, indiscriminately and in broad generalisations.

The blatant racism in his labelling her according to her ethnicity shut her down on the basis of however he stereotyped Asians. Neither she nor I had the answers to what that was. What was clear is that he had a negative stereotype and threw it with full force at her. She was a leader in his community, and I can make a guess he did not like her leadership style. Rather than talk about the specific issues, he made a broad sweeping stereotypical statement that said nothing.

Being a woman was another problem. The label itself was, it seems in his view, more than enough to define the problem. To be a woman, was a category of denigration. What it was we don’t know, simply being a woman was enough.

Stereotyping is an easy way to dismiss not just an individual, but a whole category of people. Which woman was this person speaking of? Women are not a homogeneous group. There are multiple diversities, and no one single description encapsulates all women. And yet, when we stereotype we usually focus on branding with a set of negatives, catching a whole group up in our own frustration and negativity.

Gender stereotyping defines women based on generalisations about who they are, how they behave, what roles they should have and how to manage them. While stereotypes have an adaptive function that enables easy categorisation, they are so often full of faulty assessments. Gender stereotyping limits agency, often denying, or seeking to deny, women’s creative agentic engagement with their world.

Some typical stereotypes around women include
• Victims of intimate partner violence are weak because they stay in the relationship
• There is something wrong with a woman who doesn’t want children
• Assertive women are unfeminine and are “bossy,” “bitches” or “whores”
• Women are natural nurturers; men are natural leaders
• Women don’t need equal pay because they are supported by their husbands
• Women who appear less feminine or reject advances from men are lesbians
• Women with children are less devoted to their jobs
(https://www.genderequalitylaw.org/examples-of-gender-stereotypes)

Gender stereotyping is a barrier to gender justice and equality. They result from and are the cause of deeply held negative attitudes, values, norms and prejudices about women. They are fed by perceptions rather than actual realities and facts, and so often they are self-perpetuating.

As part of the work needed for gender justice and equality we must counter gender stereotypes with narratives of truth, offered without judgment and calling out labelling that diminish in its broad generalisations.

Using social customs and religion to perpetuate injustice against women

Sustainable development goal V aims at “achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls”. (https://www.ohchr.org/en/faith-for-rights/faith4rights-toolkit/module-5-women-girls-and-gender-equality).

Two recommendations from CEDAW address some of the areas of concern with respect to this:

Recommendation No 35: “One of the primary challenges in the elimination of harmful practices relates to the lack of awareness or capacity of relevant professionals, including front-line professionals, to adequately understand, identify and respond to incidents or the risks of harmful practices. A comprehensive, holistic and effective approach to capacity-building should aim to engage influential leaders, such as traditional and religious leaders”.

Recommendation No 36 acknowledges that “the discriminatory and harmful practices of child and/or forced marriage, associated with religious or cultural practices in some societies, negatively impacts the right to education.” 

Women’s oppression is often justified on the basis of cultural norms and/or religious beliefs, even though at times these two are at odds with each other. Religious ideologies about creation, religiously sanctioned practices like polygamy, cultural beliefs around education, violence, forced marriages, women and property ownership, as well as cultural practices such as circumcision have informed cultural and religious decisions to justify the oppressive injustices experienced by women in many places. 

In a story attributed to Joan Chittister, we see how such injustice and inequality has many faces. ‘A merchant in the Middle East went from bazaar to bazaar buying rugs to export. One day he passed a stall where an elderly woman sat on a tiny rug before a very large hand-woven rug. He asked the old lady whether the rug behind her was for sale. Without looking up she answered that it is for sale. He asked her how much she wanted for the rug on which she replied: ‘One hundred rupees, sir. One hundred rupees’. Again he asked her to confirm the price on which she replied: ‘One hundred rupees. Not a single rupee less’. He looked at her and said: ‘Old lady, I have never seen a rug that beautiful’. She nodded and said: ‘I know that, sir. That’s why I’m selling it for One hundred rupees and not a single rupee less’. The merchant then said: ‘In the name of Allah, old lady, if you realize how beautiful your rug is, why would you ever sell it for only one hundred rupees?’ Shocked at this question the old lady looked up for the first time, and after a moment of silence she answered: ‘Because, sir, until this very moment, I never knew that there were any numbers above 100’.’ (http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0259-94222019000100009)

Where governments, religious institutions or civil society organisations seek to address social reforms that impact people’s private lives they face immediate backlash. To challenge traditions like polygamy, genital mutilation, inheritance rules or males’ authority over women requires a deep commitment to justice. I recall so many of the women activists in Pakistan who paid a heavy price in seeking to address the injustices perpetrated by these practices.

Where institutions and individuals seek to address the injustices written in religious laws, they face an even greater backlash. Governments fall, organisations and individuals are slandered, attacked and threatened, some even killed for seeking to ‘break the code of God’. That which is considered sacred is immutable. That God who is just could perpetuate injustice seems lost on those who feel they must protect God.

While we may want to think religion addresses issues of justice, religious laws and social norms make a lethal cocktail used to deny justice and equality to many women. Not only do women need those who will fight on their behalf, they need those who will enable women to raise their voices. But it will come at a cost.

Am I being set up to fail?

Finally, a moment of opportunity was opening up as I was being invited to take on a new leadership role in the organisation I was working in. There was not great clarity about it. The Executive Director did not want to make major changes to the leadership structure but was seeking to slide a new role into the existing one. I should have known. I should have seen what lay ahead.

Without clarity about how relationships in the leadership structure would work, without the work of thinking through and seeking to embed new ways of functioning, it failed.

I don’t think my colleagues were deliberate with bypassing the new structure. The new structure was not clear. I don’t think the Executive Director wanted it to fail, though maybe his motives were not as pure as I imagined them to be. He could say he tried to include more women in leadership but she left.

We had struggled as an organisation to get women into leadership. I was at that time, and continue to be, a voice for greater inclusion of women in leadership. This seemed like a way of creating some momentum for change. I bought into the narrative new things were happening and as I had been pushing for change it seemed I should accept the invitation.

I was set up to fail. I don’t know if it was a traditional glass cliff, but I certainly took on a new role that had no way of succeeding. There was an underlying antagonism among some colleagues that there was a hierarchy being formed in leadership. The changes had not been widely discussed in the leadership team. The Executive Director didn’t change his way of relating to any of the team, even though he had created a new structure, so I found male colleagues preferred to work with him because he ‘understood them and how they worked’. My line management responsibilities were compromised. When they disagreed with a discussion with me they simply went to the Executive Director who made no attempt to talk to me about what had been discussed.

I failed. I learned a lot, but it was a painful failing. We never did name the issues, I simply left quietly, naming some other reasons for moving on.

I failed my female colleagues because what I agreed and took on, with its subsequent failure, probably set back growth in women in leadership by some years. It clearly didn’t work. After I left the role was redefined. A male colleague took on a very different role under the same name and was given great freedom to run in a very different direction. The Executive Director backed away from a remodelled structures that created task distinctions in leadership and management. For the next several years there were few women on the leadership team.

What questions should I have ask that would have uncovered the weaknesses in what was being offered and uncovered how I was set up to fail? What does it mean to advocate for change and then face something that will lead to failure and not to change?

These invisible barriers challenge the narrative that there are no women for roles in leadership, that they always say no. They expose the blindness in organisations that hinders practices of equality. Glass cliffs and glass ceilings need to be shattered, but women will need to do it together.

Featured Image: With thanks Pixabay

Education, an essential for change

Recent events on Afghanistan have highlighted the challenges and fears that exist around women’s education. Despite many promises, the Taliban did a huge U-turn on March 23rd when it told girls who arrived for school that they had to go home. Girls over 11 years of age appear to have been refused the option of returning to school after the Taliban took over government.

The narrative is confused. Uniform debates and lack of teachers were among the issues that the Taliban said had forced this closure of schools. Not everyone agrees. Some suggest the issue is about internal divisions within the Taliban, while others make a nonsense of the issue of uniforms, stating uniforms for girls are already very conservative.

The higher education of girls is seen as a pointer to development. Many point to the increase in girls education after the earlier fall of the Taliban. UNESCO reported an increase in the number of girls in higher education from 5,000 in 2001 to 90,000 in 2018.

While access to education is one issue highlighted by these recent events, is it the only challenge for women and girls with respect to education? Education is more than completing a course, although enabling girls to complete education cycles remains a challenge in many contexts. Poverty, early marriage, gendered roles, lack of female teachers are just some of the issues that challenge inclusion of girls in education.

Another challenge is that girls are often not equally empowered through education. When I worked in a large South Asian educational institution for girls, many were allowed to complete their education in order to ensure they would get a better class of marriage. This demeaning of education and its outcomes haunts some girls whose education has a purpose other than empowering and enabling her.

Education needs to be part of coherent strategies that address social inequalities in order for girls to really enjoy its benefits.  Education also needs to give attention to the challenges girls face and include strategies that not only enable participation but also promote gender equal opportunities in the classroom.

That education of girls has wide-ranging benefits for societies is well documented, however the barriers to achieving equality in education remain high.

Social status and identity construction

Shaheen Sardar Ali describes the inter-relationship of religion, class, law and society as forming multiple layers of identity for a Muslim woman within an Islamic framework (Sardar Ali, 2000:89). Culture, customs, religion and law define the space available for self-definition and are strands woven into the formation of identity. Within this framework there are two levels at which gender identity is experienced and defined – the public arena of political discourse and the personal everyday existence. Gender and the position of women become politicised where religious, cultural, ethnic and national identity are under pressure. A woman’s actions, her self-affirmation and desire for change must be negotiated within these boundaries.

When General Zia introduced a process of Islamisation in Pakistan, gender relations and the position of women became highly politicised. A key platform of these reforms affecting women became the oft repeated slogan ‘chadar aur chardiwari’, (the veil and the home – literally four walls) emphasising the veiling of women and their confinement within the home. Ideal woman and ideal society go hand in hand. Women’s personal lives were immediately impacted. Their identity as ‘good Muslim women’ was under threat if they failed to live within these boundary markers. Because these definitions were linked with religion, women who dared to articulate their gender identity differently were at once cast into conflict with state, society, religion and family.

The women most affected by this challenge to self-articulations of gender were those who came from the urban upper and upper middle classes. Through their involvement with the independence movement, and therefore political powerbrokers, they had been able to reconstruct aspects of their identity and their role in society. The State, seeking legitimisation through religion, was now marginalising and silencing their voice.

The self-definition of gender for a majority of other women has been described differently. Mukhtar Mai, a poor woman who was raped to settle male disputes, said it constructed in the way women belonged to the men of their families, objects whom men have the right to do with whatever they want (Mai, 2006:68).

The extent of this disconnect between women from different classes cannot be underestimated when considering the struggle for change in gender relations. Women from different backgrounds have had different issues of concern that have not been addressed and, it could be argued, activists have been unable to connect with them. Farida Shaheed, in an enlightening self-criticism of activists and their strategies in Paksitan contends that “women’s activism came to resemble a negative mirror image of the discourse it opposed” (Shaheed, 1998). Hina Jilani argues that the focus on legislative change was a necessary one in order to provide tools for fighting the injustices of gender inequality, often expressed in violence against women, in the courts (Jilani, 2006). This concentration on strategies and structures for public political intervention has resulted in a de-linking of the political and the personal.

Maybe it is time to include women’s personal stories more fully if we want to negotiate change in gender relations.

My body is not your battleground

Sexual violence against women has long been identified as one of the battle grounds in war. Amnesty International stated in 1995: “The use of rape in conflict reflects the inequalities women face in their everyday lives in peacetime. Until governments live up to their obligations to ensure equality, and end discrimination against women, rape will continue to be a favourite weapon of the aggressor.” From the Democratic Republic of The Congo, to ISIS forces in Syria and the Yazidi region of Iraq; from Uganda to Sudan, women’s bodies have been used as one of the fields of aggression.

But there are other ways in which women’s bodies are used as battlegrounds. In countries like Iran and Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, women’s bodies have been intimately linked to male honour and national purity. Women’s bodies become the battle ground on which the battles of resistance to outside pressures for change are fought. The rather crude Arab proverb says the honour of the man lies between the legs of the woman. Pakistan claims to be the bastion of women’s protection and honour places the burden on women: hum maaen, hum behnain, hum betiyaan, qaumon ki izzat hum se hai: We mothers, sisters and daughters, the honour of nations lies in us.

Iranian artist Shirin Neshat has demonstrated in her work the challenge for women. She described in 2004: “The female body has been politicised and has functioned in a way as a type of battleground for ideological, philosophical and religious debates and agendas. Muslim women have been made to embody and practise the value systems of their societies through their bodies and social behaviour.” (https://www.ft.com/content/2aaba124-7b24-11e6-ae24-f193b105145e).

From another perspective, women’s bodies are the battleground on which sales of expensive male toys are played out. They are used to sell everything from cars to alcohol, from male perfumes to chocolates. The exposure and use of women’s bodies to attract the attention of male buyers is but another form of exploitation and war. Women’s bodies are titillated for the consumption of men.

Exploring this the lens of power, the Women in Power conference noted: “The female body has been – and continues to be – politicized, and to function as a type of battleground for ideological, philosophical, and religious agendas. The female body remains at the center (sic) of cultural and political debates about who deserves to take up space and how”. (https://www.womeninpowerconference.org/2020) The question remains, how can women resist the use of their bodies as a battleground, in its many different guises?

The circle keeps coming back to issues such as patriarchy, toxicity, masculinities, sexual violence, power. And when you add religion and politics into this mix, the statement ‘my body is not your battleground’ is tested.

Is violence against women now an accepted norm?

“A man with the help of his grandfather axed to death his mother, sister and their lover in Kot Mangu, some 50kms from [Gujrat], on Thursday evening … with repeated blows of axes.”  (Dawn, 22nd October 2004) The murder of Saima Sarwar, daughter of a prominent industrialist in the North-West Frontier Province, in her lawyer’s Lahore office “passed like a swift wind, leaving the perpetrators untouched and guiltless of a grisly crime.  A precedent had been set by the state, judiciary and civil society that ‘honour killings’ would continue to remain above the law, human rights and religion.”  (Newsline, June 2003, p 83) Saima’s family felt her disobedience in seeking to divorce her abusive husband was a threat to their honour. 

Violence perpetrated against a woman in Pakistan begins from her birth where in some tribal areas it is received with greetings such as “‘Khuday day sharam parda o satee’ (May God preserve your honour), ‘Sart toray mashay’ (May you never lose your veil or purdah) and ‘Naik bukhta day shee’ (May she grow up to be pious).” (Newsline, June 2003, p78) The slapping of a woman is not considered to be an act of violence, and many women are themselves groomed to believe they deserve violence inflicted on them.

Domestic violence is largely hidden and deemed to be a private matter that does not belong in the courts. Many women do not understand that violence is a crime and are often subject to brutalisation not only by their husbands but also in-laws in the extended family. In a 1998 study on violence against women aimed at understanding the magnitude of violence against women and its dynamics “thirty percent of rural women and 17 percent of urban women, i.e. one fifth of the respondents, reported physical abuse by their husbands.” (Rashida Patel, Woman versus Man, p 115) The counter argument is often that Islam allows a husband to beat his wife.

Cases of women being burnt by stoves or acid are regularly reported in the press. Victims are left grotesquely disfigured with injuries covering more than 30 percent of their bodies and often as much as 60, 70 and 90 percent. “The nature of [stove burn] injuries, the position of the victim in the family (she is usually a daughter-in-law, or a daughter to be married), and the frequency with which these ‘accidents’ occur provide circumstantial evidence of a grim pattern; that these women are burnt not by accident, but are victims of deliberate murder.” (Madadgaar’s Press Release, 24 January 2002 ‘223 women died due to burn injuries during the year 2001)

Many victims of rape cannot find redress for their grievance through the judicial system.  In fact, the victim becomes the criminal under the Zina Ordinance. Failure to produce 4 male witnesses to the criminal act of rape the woman finds herself charge with adultery and imprisoned. Her admission of rape constitutes an admission of adultery. Women who seek the help of the law often find themselves victims of violence perpetrated by the custodians of the law. Reported cases of custodial rape have led the Government to issue a number of directives regarding the arrest of women, but practically little seems to have changed.

The eleven years between 1977 and 1988 are considered some of darkest for women in Pakistan’s history. Under the rule of General Zia-ul-Haq “women were systematically attacked through discriminatory legislation, an unsympathetic judiciary and a brutally prejudiced executive.” (Herald, January 2002, p 130 ‘In their own right’) The women’s movement in Pakistan rallied, agitating openly against the state-sponsored brutalisation of women under this regime. They took to the streets, vigorously opposing the legalisation of violence against women. The core issues that sparked the rebellion against General Zia and led to mass agitation remain very much the same today, however it appears the struggle for women’s rights has been diluted and lost its focus.

Violent acts being perpetrated against women in Pakistan have roots in cultural norms, extreme patriarchal formations in society, socio-economic strictures, religious ideologies, laws that allow such violence to be perpetuated, and a state that is hostage to fundamentalist philosophies and ideologies. Violence has been increasing, despite a growth in the number of women’s NGOs seeking to work at a grassroots level to instigate real change.