Not just women, feminists.
Okay so I had my world rocked a while back and need to address it. As you know, I wrote this book about how women in leadership at parity could essentially save the world. I still believe that, by the way, but what I wasn’t as bold about in my writing before is that what we really need in leadership are feminists, be they of any gender.
A few weeks ago on a community call in a breakout room, someone just said it clear as day – it’s not just that we need women to lead, we need feminists to lead.
And by feminist, I simply mean those of us who believe in equality for all. For all. And let’s be honest, not all women leaders seem to be for that. So, it’s not enough for us to elect and promote more women, it also matters how those women lead.
The Venn diagram here is that there is a high proportion of women who are on the side of equality, who are leading for social justice, who take on issues of equality and equity as part of their leadership work. So, it still stands that if 50% of all the leaders and decision makers in our world were women, we would definitely have more feminist leadership. But that kind of leadership doesn’t only need to come from women.
Thinking this way opens up some new strategies and growth in our expectations for leadership. Getting to gender parity in leadership is going to take a long time. We need to keep our foot on the gas on that. And while we’re on that path, we also need to foster feminist leadership across all genders right now. When we elect or promote men, we need to understand and explore their values and ideas about equality and equity. We need to hear whether or not they are working on unlearning the gendered social norms and expectations we have all been raised with. Are they doing the work to understand intersectionality? To be a good ally? How equal are their own households and relationships?
The idea of feminist leadership is a framework for greater accountability for anyone in a leadership role. At WLI we always say that regardless of your functional role or what you technically lead, if you are in a leadership role of any kind there are two things you need to educate and develop your leadership in; one of those is diversity, equity and inclusion, because when you lead, you lead people, and the other is sustainability because we all share this planet.
Expecting our leaders of any gender to be feminists is not a leap, and it’s not radical. It’s simply saying if you want the position and privilege of leadership, then equality and equity are part of the job.
