MAKERS: Inspiring Women

Last Sunday afternoon, Holton-Arms staged our third annual Open Door Film Society event.  This year, we featured MAKERS and more specifically the new MAKERS film commemorating the 20^th anniversary of the Beijing World Conference on Women entitled Once and For All.  If you’re not familiar with MAKERS, here’s your opportunity.  Part of AOL, describing  itself as “a women's leadership platform that encompasses broadcast documentaries, web and mobile-first video content, and live events,” it’s a website that contains “the largest video collection of women’s stories.”  It has collected over 3,000 videos and chronicled more than 300 women’s stories.   That description alone should attract our attention.  The fact that Sammi Leibovitz, Holton class of 2006, as Vice-President and Creative Director at AOL, oversees MAKERS, guarantees we at Holton-Arms should be interested in this organization.  Sammi, a 2010 graduate of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University, joined us on Sunday to tell us a little about MAKERS and present the pre-release showing of the film.

I’ve known about MAKERS for a while and have kept meaning to explore it.  Sammi inspired me to dive in.  What a treasure trove it is!  I began with the Read tab, a collection of news pieces, not all from MAKERS.  The articles close to the top included one from xx about Bradley Cooper supporting equal pay for his female co-stars.  Another heartwarming story featured a firefighters who banded together to support a fellow firefighter in her fight against breast cancer.  Still another original piece offered advice for helping a friend in an abusive relationship.  If this variety hasn’t piqued your interest, perhaps an article entitled “6 ways women have broken the ice in professional hockey” or Vanity Fair’s recounting by Jane Fonda of Katherine Hepburn improbably mentoring a young Michael Jackson will.  Katherine Hepburn and Michael Jackson?  Really? My favorite, however, was a MAKERS list of quotes by famous men about feminism.  My two favorite quotations: "My advice to the women's clubs of America is to raise more hell and fewer dahlias," from the painter, James McNeill Whistler; and from Teddy Roosevelt:

Conservative friends tell me that woman’s duty is the home. Certainly. So is man's. The duty of a woman to the home isn’t any more than the man’s. If any married man doesn’t know that the woman pulls a little more than her share in the home he needs education. If the average man has more leisure to think of public matters than the average woman has, then it’s a frightful reflection on him. If the average man tells you the average woman hasn’t the time to think of these questions, tell him to go home and do his duty. The average woman needs fifteen minutes to vote, and I want to point out to the alarmist that she will have left 364 days, 23 hours and 45 minutes.

A man well ahead of his time.

Then I headed to the Watch section where are located the hundreds of videos of women pioneers, activists, and leaders.  I could spend days just watching these pithy, thought-provoking clips.  The women represent a huge range.  There are household names like Hillary Rodham Clinton, Condoleeza Rice and Madeleine Albright; Carol Burnett, Glenn Close, Misty Copeland, Katie Couric, Ellen DeGeneres, Lena Dunham, Ruth Bader Ginsberg & Sandra Day O’Connor, Nancy Pelosi, Michelle Rhee, Phyllis Schlafly, Martina Navratilova, Mia Hamm, Alice Waters, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, and Oprah, to name a few.  Then there are others who would be familiar to some but not others such as Shirley Tilghman, former President of Princeton, Ruth Simmons, President of Brown, Sheryl WuDunn, a journalist, Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out, Danica Patrick, the NASCAR driver, Catharine MacKinnon, a feminist legal scholar, Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, Carol Gilligan, pioneering psychologist studying girls development, Susan Cain, author of Quiet, Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx, and Marin Alsop, the first female conductor of a major American orchestra, the Balitimore Symphony.  And then there are numerous women I’ve never heard of, mostly activists and artists.

I started with Kelly Clark, an Olympic snowboarder.  I only recognized her name because my son worked for her brother this summer.  The beginning of her story is about triumphing in a male world,” a pack of guys,” and winning a gold medal at the 2002 Olympics.  However, she didn’t train well enough for her second Olympics, and she finished a disappointing fourth.  In the aftermath of defeat, she redoubled her efforts and won a bronze the next time around.  She says that the bronze means much more to her than the gold “because I know what it cost me.”  Her advice, “Bend your knees and go faster.” 

Marissa Mayer , the first female engineer at google who is now the CEO of Yahoo! shares her experience as a Stanford and silicon valley female computer scientist.  Mayer, who didn’t even know how to turn on the computer she bought at the Stanford bookstore as a freshman in 1993, probably succeeded because she seems to be, to use her words, “gender oblivious.“  She loved the problem solving in computer science, the fact that there is “no formula, no recipe, no memorization,” each problem offers a fresh start.  She urges girls and women to ignore the fact that boys have played video games and coded from a young age.  She believes that “If you can push through that feeling of being scared, that feeling of taking a risk, really amazing things can happen.”

I heard Kirsten Gillibrand, Senator from New York, speak several years ago and was very impressed, so I wanted to watch her clip.  As it turns out, Hillary Clinton’s 1995 speech in Beijing, the one featured in the film we saw on Sunday, proved a turning point in Gillibrand’s life.  She was working as a securities lawyer for a big New York law firm, but listening to Clinton made her think: “I’m not accomplishing anything here; I’m not making a difference; I’m not helping people.”  Clinton “inspired [her] to try to focus [her] career more on public service.”  Her first attempts to enter public life failed, but refusing to give up, she appealed to Andrew Cuomo, then HUD Secretary, for advice and he hired her.  Her experience in Washington convinced her to run for Congress and she moved back to Upstate New York where she had grown up.  Despite warnings that her opponent, the incumbent, was a “bit of a bully,” she persisted and as a Democrat won a seat in a heavily Republican district in 2006.  When Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State, the Governor of New York appointed Gillebrand to take her place.  She later won a special election with 63% of the vote.  Her advice:  “You can do anything you set your mind to as long as you work hard and stay focused.”  And from her grandmother, never give up; you should “keep fighting; . . . sometimes, even if you’re not successful you do great good by just fighting for what you believe in and trying to make a difference.”

Given that she graduated from Holton, I had to watch Julia Louis-Dreyfus.  She has much to say about working on “Saturday Night Live” (which she hated), “Seinfeld,” and the power of comedy bring about change.  She sounds most like a Holton girl in her praise of Kari Lizer, the Executive Producer and creator of the “The New Adventures of Old Christine.”  Louis-Dreyfus observes, “We were both highly organized, shows got done in the most organized fashion you can’t even imagine; scripts were ready well in advance; people got home in time to get dinner on the table; there was a great amount of calm and organization on the set and I definitely attribute that to a woman running the whole kit and caboodle.”  On the topic of women in Hollywood and her own career, she says, “I am certainly aware that women need to be better represented in Hollywood.  But I’ve never let it get in my way; I’ve gone for the jobs what I’ve wanted and I’ve stuck to my guns.”  Sounds like our motto, Find a Way or Make One” to me!

All these women epitomize what Joanna Barsh, Director Emeritus at McKinsey & Company, who spoke at the first MAKERS national conference in 2014 calls “triumphant outliers.”  They have achieved that status by pushing themselves, persisting even after defeat, and believing that if you just keep trying – moving past fear or discrimination, you can succeed.  In the meantime, "bend your knees and go faster."MAKERS

A Kenyan Success Story: Girls Education as the Key to Social Change and Economic Development

Today, we celebrate the fourth annual International Day of the Girl.  As the Head of School at an all-girls, grades 3-12 school enrolling 660 female students, I’m proud to say that every day is the day of the girl.  However, I can only describe my students as privileged.  Most of them live in one of the wealthiest and best educated counties in the U.S. with one of the finest school systems, and they attend a school long recognized for its commitment to academic excellence and for preparing leaders, women who, as our philosophy statement says, “will make a difference in a complex and changing world.”  Many, many girls around the world, especially in developing countries, can hardly imagine enjoying such good fortune.  As we turn our particular focus on girls around the world today, we should focus above all else on the importance of education.  Ensuring that girls receive an education, that they at least finish high school, leads to a number of important results, results that impact the girls individually, their communities and even their countries.  It is for this reason that United Nations has set forth as the fourth of the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals “Ensure Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education and Promote Lifelong Learning Opportunities for All.”

In many parts of the world, girls still receive less education than boys.  Indeed, of the 130 million children not in school globally, 70% are girls.  That amounts to 62 million girls worldwide.  The reasons girls don’t attend school are numerous.  In many countries, school costs money, or if it’s theoretically free, students still need to purchase books and other supplies.  In addition, when children are in school, they are not contributing, in the short term anyway, to family income.  When a family has very limited resources, school sits low in their priorities; if they have money to send some children to school, but not all, the boys will usually go. 

Child marriage also obstructs girls’ educational attainment.  Around the world, over 700 million women married before they were 18 and of those a third did so before they were 15.  When girls marry, they leave school.  Moreover, teenage mothers are more likely to die in childbirth and their children are also more likely to die than if they waited until their twenties to give birth.  As we’ll see shortly, child marriage also perpetuates poverty and lack of education in the succeeding generation.  According to the UN, when girls in developing countries attend school for just seven years (which doesn’t even include high school), they marry on average four years later and have two fewer children.

Reducing the size of families impacts poverty levels as more resources are available per child.  Ultimately, limiting population growth has the effect of raising national per capita income levels and promoting overall economic growth.   However, educating girls has even more impact than simply lowering the number of children born.  Again, according to the UN, every year a girl attends school, she increases her earning power by 10-20%; secondary schooling increases earning power even more: 15% to 25%.   Moreover, women invest their earnings back into their families at a rate of 90%.  Finally, women who receive an education are more likely to insist that their children do so as well.  The combination of marrying later and having fewer children, enjoying greater earning power, investing that money back into her family, and encouraging the next generation to go to school all point to female education as the key to overcoming poverty and promoting economic growth in the developing world.

We are all familiar with the powerful impact that Malala Yousafzai is having on the world.  She has come to world prominence thanks to an ironic combination of her father’s commitment to girls education, to the violence and misogyny of the Taliban, and her own extraordinary courage and commitment.  Malala, however, is not alone and if you read the twitter feed today for #dayofthegirl or #IDG, you will see examples of many women and girls making a difference around the world.  Several weeks ago, at Holton-Arms, my school, we had the opportunity to hear firsthand from one of those people, Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya.  Ntaiya, a Maasai who grew up in a village in South Kenya, was engaged to be married at 5.  As a young teenager, she was expected to undergo female circumcision and then get married.  However, Ntaiya successfully negotiated with her father, agreeing to the circumcision if he would allow her to finish high school.  She managed to receive a scholarship to what was then Randolph-Macon Women’s College.  She convinced the village elders to let her go, promising to return to her village to share the benefits of her education.  After college, during which she became the first youth advisor the UN Population Fund, she earned a doctorate in education from the University of Pittsburgh.  Training in hand, she fulfilled her promise to the elders by founding the Kenya’s first girls boarding primary school.  The Kakenya Center for Excellence, which opened in 2009, now enrolls 170 girls in grades 4-8 and Ntaiya plans to add a secondary school. 

The Kakenya Center for Excellence has already achieved success on several fronts.  The school gives preference to the most destitute students, many of whom are orphans, providing them with full scholarships.  Not surprisingly, these students came to school with weak academic backgrounds. The class of 2014, the first graduating class, entered reading on average at a second grade level and scored below the district average on national exams.  That class finished their Kakenya Center for Excellence careers testing second in five subjects out of the 133 schools in the district, and one of them achieved top ranking in the county.  All the graduates from 2014 and 2015 were admitted to secondary school, and 44% of them enrolled in Kenya’s most prestigious schools.  Parents of Kakenya Center for Excellence students must sign an agreement that prohibits female genital mutilation and child marriage; as a result all the Kakenya Center for Excellence girls have avoided these fates.  In addition, the school is having an impact on local mores.  The village chief who in 2006 proclaimed, “girls are for marriage, so there is no need to educate them,” now serves on the Board of the Center. In a statement indicative of the social change Ntaiya and her school are engendering, a Maasai father promised, “Culturally, girls aren’t supposed to inherit anything from the family. I want, while I am alive, for my daughter to inherit an education from me.”

Kakenya Ntaiya’s story demonstrates what a difference educating one girl can make.  The girls at her school aspire to be doctors, lawyers, and pilots; they also expect to make a difference in their communities.  There are many ways for us to promote girls education around the world, including donating to organizations such as Save the Children or the Kakenya Center for Excellence itself.  In supporting this effort, we would be joining Michelle Obama and the Peace Corps, who have launched a program called “Let Girls Learn,” in making girls education a priority. We currently have the largest generation of girls in history, and 600 million of them live in the developing world where opportunity is too often limited. These girls deserve – indeed, demand – our attention and support.

Summer Reading List

Greg Toppo, The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Your Kids Smarter

Daniel F. Chambliss, How College Works

David Brooks, The Road to Character

Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

James M. Kouzes, The Truth about Leadership: The No-fads, Heart-of-the-Matter Facts You Need to Know

 
Seth Godin, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

Joan Magretta, Understanding Michael Porter

Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry

Gail T. Fairhurst, The Power of Framing

Edward Hallowell, Shine

Kristine Barnett, The Spark

Daniel J. Siegel, Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain

Catherine Steiner-Adair, The Big Disconnect 

Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, The Art of Possibility

Dave Burgess, Teach Like a Pirate 

Simon Sinek, Start With Why

finish John Medina, Brain Rules

finish Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish

 

 

The Smartest Kids

Several weeks ago, I avowed that I rarely get mad reading books.  However, it has happened again.  I’ve just finished Amanda Ripley’s The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way. Ripley writes a very readable though perhaps not terribly scientific examination of different educational systems with the goal of identifying the reasons that some countries’ students score high on the international PISA test and, concurrently, why American students do so poorly.  She conducts this examination by following three American high school students who spend a year as American Field Service (AFS) exchange students South Korea, Finland, and Poland, three of the world’s top scoring countries.  She supplements the student experiences with her own visits and extensive research.  The characteristics that Ripley believes distinguish high performing countries are not particularly complicated or theoretically hard to achieve, and that’s what makes me mad.  We in the U.S. shortchange so many of our young people by failing to provide them with a good education, the kind Ripley and so many experts argue they need to succeed in today’s economy.

Many of you are probably at least aware of the PISA test, but let’s begin by explaining what it is, why we should care about it, and how students in various countries perform on it.  As an independent school educator, I take a skeptical view of virtually all standardized tests.  For example, we know that SAT’s predict no more than freshman year grades and students’ scores say more about racial and socio-economic background than actual aptitude.  Most other American tests, particularly the state tests implemented in response to No Child Left Behind, frequently fail to measure the knowledge and skills we should be measuring.  Generally, they are simply not good tests and yet they are driving public school curriculum.  While I don’t pretend to be an expert on PISA, I think it is a good test that in fact asks students to demonstrate mastery and skills that we should care about.

PISA stands for Program for International Student Assessment.  Andreas Schleicher, a German physicist, developed the examination for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international organization based in Paris which aims “to promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world.”[i]  As Schleicher explained in a December 2001 press conference announcing the results of the first administration of the test, PISA represents a different kind of assessment.  “We were not looking for answers to equations or to multiple choice questions.  We were looking for the ability to think creatively.”[ii] He wanted to devise a test that actually measures what students need for success in the 21^st century which is not necessarily – indeed probably not – just information that students can memorize and regurgitate. 

The OECD describes the 2012 test as taking two hours and including “a mixture of questions requiring students to construct their own responses and multiple choice items.”  The questions “were organised in groups based on a passage setting out a real life situation.” You can do sample questions on the website, if you like. PISA officially tests fifteen-year-olds, and in 2012, 510,000 students aged 15 years 3 months to 16 years 2 months took the exam in 65 countries and defined economies (the latter being Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Macao; Ripley does not use these economies in her calculations).[iii] 

Ripley actually took the test. She gives examples of questions that demand writing answers to questions in which you have to defend your position. Not all the questions even have right or wrong answers; how you score depends on your argument.  This is a long way from even the best multiple choice questions, and Ripley – who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell -- came away convinced that PISA does measure critical thinking.

Since that first 2000 administration, American students have performed pretty disappointingly, especially in math.  For example in 2009, out of 61 countries, the US ranked twenty-sixth on the math test, seventeenth on the science test, and twelfth on the reading test.  Our students scored about average on the science, above average on the reading and below average on the math.  Which countries scored higher than us may interest you even more.  Korea and Finland had the top reading scores, and we tied with Iceland and Poland.  Estonia, the Netherlands, Japan, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all scored higher.  In math, Singapore, then Korea and Finland had the highest scores; we tied with Ireland and Portugal while countries with higher scores included Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, France, the U.K. and all the countries already mentioned that outscored us in reading.  The 2012 results differed little (the test is given every three years).  We slipped to twenty-eighth in math; came in thirteenth in reading with our overall score dropping slightly; and fell to twenty-second in science.  In addition, because more countries had tie scores, more nations actually scored ahead of us than in 2009.  Our actual scores were about the same as previous years.  However, other countries have pulled ahead of us.  Professor Jan Rivkin, co-chair of the Harvard project on U.S. competitiveness, made this observation to NPR in December 2013:

While our scores in reading are the same as 2009, scores from Belgium, Estonia, Germany, Ireland, Poland and others have improved and now surpass ours. Other countries that were behind us, like Italy and Portugal, are now catching up. We are in a race in the global economy. The problem is not that we're slowing down. The problem is that the other runners are getting faster.[iv]

It’s notable that our relative decline occurred while others improved; twenty-five countries raised their math scores between 2009 and 2012.  In addition, Congress passed No Child Left Behind the year of the first PISA test.  Clearly, that educational reform has failed to improve our educational system, at least by the measure of an international standardized test despite the law’s emphasis on testing in reading and math. Education Secretary Arne Duncan termed the 2013 PISA results a "picture of educational stagnation."[v]

When I first learned about our mediocre scores several years ago – actually from Andreas Schleicher himself whom Global Education Director Melissa Brown and I met in China, I countered by arguing that the U.S. has a much more diverse population than the countries who score at the top.  I asked, too, who they were testing.  It turns out they test a cross section of students in every country and they can slice and dice the data by such characteristics as income, public and private schooling, and immigrant status.  Controlling for specific factors, such as income, U.S. students still perform at mediocre levels.  For example, using the 2009 results, as we’ve already noted, American students placed twenty-sixth in math; our wealthiest students, including those going to private schools, did score better than Americans in general, placing eighteenth when compared to the most economically privileged students in other countries.  Rich Slovenian and Hungarian students still tested higher than Americans whose scores were comparable to wealthy Portuguese.  Plus, our poorest students did even worse, ranking twenty-seventh when measured against the poorest youngsters in other countries.[vi]  As this difference might suggest, American students demonstrated an especially wide gap between the most advantaged and the least advantaged, more than 90 points in 2001 reading scores.  By contrast, South Korea’s rich and poor students’ scores only differed by 33 points.[vii]

Beyond national pride – the United States doesn’t usually think of itself as mediocre – should we care about our PISA performance?  The OECD now has mountains of data from PISA, and not just the exams themselves.  Many of the students also fill out questionnaires about their family background, their schooling, and their interests and aspirations and OECD’s statisticians can use this data to provide information about students who do well and who do not.  Ripley reports that we have learned that, in general, math scores carry more weight than reading scores (not a great fact for the U.S. with its subpar math performance).  Students who “mastered high level math” stood a greater chance of finishing college, irrespective of race and income, and enjoyed higher earnings as adults.[viii]   The reading scores do matter, however, and a student with poor reading was more likely to drop out of high school, and generally PISA scores predicted college success better than high school grades.  The PISA statistics also show that spending per pupil and small class sizes don’t positively correlate to higher scores.  For example, in 2009, the U.S. spent more per student, on average, than every other country except Luxembourg and had smaller average class sizes than many of the countries who scored better than we did.  Perhaps most significantly, “economists had found an almost one-to-one match between PISA scores and nation’s long term economic growth.” ^[ix]   

Ripley gives us some examples of the impact of a poor educational system.  She introduces us to the Bama Companies, an Oklahoma company that makes McDonald’s pies.  Paula Marshall, the CEO, opened a plant in Poland because, unlike Oklahoma, Poland offered an ample supply of educated workers.  In Oklahoma, the Bama Companies sometimes can’t find enough people to fill their lowest skilled jobs because even these require thinking and communications skills.  Marshall told Ripley she would underwrite technical training, but the people lacked the basic reading and math skills necessary to take advantage of the training.  She simply couldn’t find candidates for the more demanding maintenance tech jobs which require the ability to interpret technical blueprints, write a summary of a shift, and problem solve and fix sophisticated systems.  She was confident, though, that she would find such employees in Poland.  And perhaps the dearth of potential Bama employees shouldn’t surprise us since twenty-five percent of Oklahoma high school graduates hoping to enlist fail the military’s academic aptitude test.  Admittedly, Oklahoma has weak schools, but shouldn’t we be worried that, assuming that the Bama Companies aren’t unusual, our manufacturing companies have trouble hiring employees with basic skills and that a quarter of young people with high school diplomas (these aren’t drop outs) don’t qualify as enlisted men and women in the military?[x]  If for no other reason, these examples should compel us to care about our PISA performance.

The PISA results prove that countries, including democracies, can and do change their educational systems so their students perform better.  If the United States wanted to do something about this “picture of educational stagnation,” what should we do?  No simple answer presents itself.  However, Ripley does offer some possibilities.  She does so by looking at Finland and South Korea, two of the highest scoring countries, and Poland which has made significant progress.  I’ll explore these systems in more detail next week, but her high level takeaways are: quality of teachers matters; rigor and accountability matter; student drive matters.  Parent involvement also matters but not the way we might expect and diversity matters, particularly for lower performing students.  As I’ve already mentioned, up to a point, spending per student and class size don’t matter and neither does technology.  And we could learn a great deal about teaching math effectively from others.  We’ll look at these issues in the context of the U.S., then a few states, like Massachusetts, whose students perform significantly better than American students as a whole, and then think about the implications of Ripley’s conclusions for independent schools like Holton.

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[i] OECD website

[ii] Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 15.

[iii] “PISA 2012 Results in Focus: What 15-year-olds know and what they can do with what they know,” 3.

[iv] “U.S. Students Slide In Global Ranking On Math, Reading, Science,” NPR, December 3, 2013

[v] U.S. Students Slide In Global Ranking On Math, Reading, Science,” NPR, December 3, 2013

[vi] Ripley, 70-1.

[vii] Ripley, 17.

[viii] Ripley, 70.

[ix] Ripley, 24.

[x] Ripley, 182.

Women's Leadership

Last week, in honor of Women’s History Month, I looked at women in leadership roles and how we might encourage more women to take on such responsibilities. This week, I’d like to explore women’s leadership. Interestingly, unlike a few years ago, when scholars tended to draw a distinction between male and female leaders, today there seems to be more debate about whether men and women really do lead differently, and if so, why. This change reflects, I believe, the fact that more women hold leadership positions, providing us with more examples of women actually practicing leadership. Some scholars do continue to distinguish between male and female leadership and even to argue for the advantages of the female style. Others say that there may be differences, but those differences probably result not from genetics, but from any number of other circumstances, including how we are socialized. Some even suggest that continued gender-based expectations—even stereotypes—encourage women to exercise more feminine styles because they are more effective when they do.

Sally Helgesen, a pioneer in the field of women’s leadership, exemplifies a scholar who holds on to the distinctions between male and female leaders. Helgesen describes women’s characteristics in this way:

1) They place a high value on relationships and judge the success of their organizations based on the quality of relationships within them.
2) They prefer direct communication.
3) They are comfortable with diversity, having been outsiders themselves and knowing what kind of value fresh eyes could bring.
4) They are unwilling (and unable) to compartmentalize their lives and so draw upon personal experience to bring private sphere information and insights to their jobs.
5) They are skeptical of hierarchies and surprisingly disdainful of the perks and privileges that distinguish hierarchical leaders and establish their place in the pecking order.
6) They preferred leading from the center rather than the top and structure their organizations to reflect this.
7) They ask big-picture questions about the work they do and its value.[i]

Not only does she characterize women in these ways, but she argues that this style of leadership serves us well in today’s society and economy. Specifically, she cites three transformational trends that favor women’s leadership as she defines it:

·         The proliferation of diverse values

·         The demand for ever-more finely calibrated customization

·         The challenge of creating new structures of support

In the case of the first trend, the movements of peoples around the world—both within and between countries—continues apace, creating diverse communities in places heretofore quite homogenous. For example, immigrants used to settle primarily in cities, whereas now they spread out across the country, in rural areas and suburbs, dramatically changing the nature of those communities. They bring with them different customs, religions, and values. Moreover, in an economy where people change jobs more frequently and work is more often done in teams, people are more likely to work in much more diverse environments. Helgesen also points out that women themselves, as their participation in the workforce has increased significantly, have added to the diversity of the work experience. So, leaders of today’s organizations are characterized by a “diversity of values” and need to “harness diverse yet passionately asserted values,” a feat requiring “sensitivity, openness, and cultural flexibility.” Helgesen argues that women—who are “comfortable with diversity,” recognize the “value fresh eyes can bring,” and prioritize relationships and collaboration—are especially well-suited to lead under these circumstances.

Technology is driving the trend of ever-increasing demands for customization. Leaving behind the age of industrialization, when mass production produced large quantities of similar or identical items, we now live in a period when computer-aided design and manufacturing allows for singular or specialized items to be made cheaply (think about the Nike sneakers you can design for yourself). In addition, the availability of huge data troves permits increasingly targeted marketed. Finally, as consumers, we can benefit from the unfiltered views of other consumers; we judge companies and services in part on the basis of feedback from others like ourselves—think of the product reviews on virtually any website today or online forums where customers share experiences and advice. We enjoy a much more direct role in the design of products than we have since before industrialization. In the process, the line between the producer and the consumer has blurred. The altered relationship between producer and consumer also calls for a different approach on the part of companies. They now have to be much more responsive and connected to their customers. As Helgesen says, all organizations need “to operate as webs rather than hierarchies. In turn, web-like structures demand leaders who are skilled at inspiring people rather than directing them, and at securing buy-in rather than making top-down decisions”—leaders who are “more inclusive and intuitive.” These characteristics equate to the Helgesen’s definitions of successful female leaders.

As we all know, technology has significantly changed all of our lives. Devices that allow us to be connected 24/7 have meant that work invades home-life to a degree unknown during the industrial age. Industrialization divorced work from home-life, creating a domestic sphere that became the purview of women. Workplaces were generally divided by gender and age, while regimentation brought with it very hierarchical structures. By contrast, today, as we use methods and technologies from work in our home-lives, home looks and feels more like work. Men and women, contrary to any other period in history, use the same tools for work; likewise, children use those same tools for play and learning. The rapid pace of technological change means that we all need to be learning all the time, and often the children are teaching us. Plus, the speed and pervasiveness of technology have heightened expectations of what we can accomplish, as well as when and how quickly. Not only have mobile devices and the internet challenged distinctions between home and work, but women’s increasing presence in the workforce has made it “impossible to segregate domestic concerns from those of work.” Helgesen believes that these changes have undermined a healthy separation between work and home and she believes that women are uniquely positioned to address this problem—the challenge of support, as she calls it. Technology has amplified work-life balance issues that women had already identified, as more and more of them took on jobs outside the home. Having already wrestled with these issues, they are the natural leaders we need as we continue to press to find balance, even as men also increasingly make balance an important issue.

Because women have played such a critical role in each of these trends, they have an historic opportunity to affect the future. This opportunity places a premium on ensuring that girls understand the chance they, in turn, will have. As Helgeson explains, “As women continue to assume an ever more visible role in every sector of the public arena, this reciprocal influence will grow stronger. This, in turn, will provide girls with an unprecedented opportunity to play an active role in shaping the global environment in the years ahead.” Helgeson encourages us to make sure that girls fully understand the trends, as well as the characteristics, that serve leaders particularly well in this new context.[ii]

Whether these characteristics are peculiarly feminine or not is irrelevant, I would say, but we owe it to our girls to help them recognize their power potential and to ensure that they know how they are likely to be most effective in exercising that power. In this way, we realize our commitment not just to inspire them to lead lives of positive influence, but to prepare them to do so.

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[i] Sally Helgesen, “7 Characteristics of Women Leaders,” “Human Resources IQ,” 1/14/2011.

[ii] The remainder of this piece comes from: Sally Helgesen, “Shaping Our Common Future: Preparing Girls for Leadership in a Changing Environment,” Seminar Series 192, Centre for Strategic Education (February 2010).