Researchers found that in a lot of industries, fewer than 50% of leaders are represented by women such as energy, mining and manufacturing. With less than 20% of leadership positions were held by women, the representation of men is far higher than women (Duke, 2017). Why does this inequality problem occur around the whole world? This essay aims to investigate the reasons why women are underrepresented and determine the causes of this issue.
Women in positions of power are women who hold authority, influence, and responsibility (Wikipedia, n.d). In the past, gender disparity has distributed power. Mostly, powerful positions have been held by men but not women. However, as policy and social has changed a lot, gender equality increases, more powerful positions were held by females. “While these gains are promising, they appear to be slowing” (Whitler, 2018). So what is the problem?
According to Caprino (2013), it is a fact that male and female are different in many ways. These differences come from distinctions in biology, psychology, and cultural training. Men and women’s behavior is programmed and is done by habit. Females are seen as nurturant and expressive while men act independently by hand. Caprino also claimed that the differences in women’s style, communication, decision making, leadership skills are not 100% understood or valued. Furthermore, many women leaders put their focus on “connection, empathy, emotional cue taking, consensus building, risk taking, mutuality, and questioning” which are not highly accpected to be leadership and it causes miss leading.
Life, family and work priorities have a big impact on women development (Slaughter, 2012). Even if parents do full-time working, the one who have to perform domestic and child care in the family are still females. It is clearly known that men can not take care of children and prioritize the work the same way as women. Slaughter also stated as a woman, it is challenging to be a professional while perform child care well in the same time. Women have to balance between business, political leaders and as a role of a mother and care-givers, and work out their work plan to allow these dual priorities to be met.
For example, Betsy Myers, President Clinton's senior said that some women view their work as only a part of their life experience. 'If women were forced to focus 24/7 on work for a majority of their professional lives, most women will choose not to pay that price' (Caprino, 2013).
It is an offensive truth that women are still being 'diminished, sidelined, suppressed' because some women differ from the leadership feature or factor (Gayton, 2014). Furthermore, women are often being noticed less when their family is prioritized by absent from work. In terms of leadership, females are considering not capable enough.
In 50 or 100 years time, things might change, but not fast enough in India. Women are still insufficient at senior level. Take India as an example, there are a lot of evidence on the influence of political quotas, specifically because of Indian reservation system which allows for causal analysis (Pande & Ford, 2011). A changed in policy in 1993 has made it so India people have to “decentralize a three-tier system of local governance”. The lowest tier is the village council where the villagers select and vote for its leader. The policy claimed that one third of leader positions should be held by females, and this happened in every elections. This means that the impact of female leadership can be shown by the difference in average outcomes between reserved and unreserved people. This design of the legislation allows a natural experiment for measuring the causal impact of compulsory voting a women leader.
According to Pande and Ford (2011), quotas increase female leadership in politics and the corporate sphere. This proofs that the theory about uninterested in leadership positions by women is not the case. Female leadership affects policy outcomes as gender differences in economic status and work responsibilities can be showed. In politics, efficiency is not measureable by representation. Moreover, citizens do not seem to heavily react about the gender quotas. It is suggested that voters should apply new information about how female leaders perform to update their beliefs about women. There should be more different training women and men to acknowledge their differences, and understand that diversity makes us stronger and more competitive.
In conclusion, females should be noticed more in political presence as women have potential or ability to be but family and culture make it hard for them to fully develop.
