Women and Leadership, Part Two

As 2024 winds down, another female presidential candidate's defeat brings reflection and even some hope!

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Some Reflections and Some Hope

Women and Leadership as 2024 Comes to an End

For the second part of the Women and Leadership series, I had another topic entirely about what I refer to as “the authority effect” - the very real and underutilized impact of a leader’s authority when used to promote predictability, clarity and boundaries and the specific ways this manifests for women leaders because I think it is a foundational. However, given the result of the 2024 election and how for many women, it was demoralizing to see a male candidate weighed down by so much baggage definitively defeat a qualified woman, this deserves some analysis and although there is a lot of hard truth to be swallowed as to our culture and society and the headwinds against women wielding national power, it is far from all grim out there.

I mostly worry that people take away the wrong message from the candidates in this election. It was incredibly close, even if ended in a definitive defeat for VP Harris. This was an election where, yet again, as we proceed through another time of uncertainty, a majority of the electorate wanted change with a familiar face. In 2020, they chose Biden. In 2024, they chose Trump, remembering a time not that long ago when groceries were 20% less. Months ago, I read a piece saying that Trump and Biden were the last two internationally known American leaders as they came from the “three global TV networks” era. This strikes me as correct.

For this article, I’m going to dispense with any throat clearing in terms of gender stereotypes, man bashing etc but I encourage you to read either for the first time or as a refresher, part one

First, the bad news.

1. “Strong and Wrong”

Twenty two years ago, referring to Democrats’ losses in the 2002 election, Bill Clinton remarked that Americans prefer “strong and wrong to weak and right.” This fall, I saw a sequence on CNN where a group of male undecided voters told the correspondent they wouldn’t vote for a woman because a woman, any woman, is “too emotional” to be president. So can a woman be seen as “strong”?

People have to take an extra step, and it’s a pretty big one, and reconfigure their basic conception of a leader, to see if a woman can fit within the frame of the default picture they have of a male leader. While that step is possible, it’s also an effort and there are plenty of circumstances where a person can get knocked off course, mid-step, and retreat to their original conception. It’s not an advantage to a woman leader, that’s for sure. The bar is higher and it’s inflexible.

If the picture of a leader is default male and a person’s concept of “charisma” is default male as well, then that’s two very big steps. Charisma can take many forms. We’ve all been in the presence of women who possess it. It can include warmth. It can be a contagious sense of possibility, positive energy, fun. Often it entails demonstrating a sense of humor and although we have come very far as women to not be considered a borderline freak for making a funny remark (in graduate school, I was part of a satiric surprise takeover of our student reading series and at the after party, one dude could not stop saying to me, with obnoxious wonder, “You were actually funny. Like, I really laughed.”). Historically, our female politicians were not generally known for their quips.

This concept of charisma posits an extroverted personality, verbal dexterity and a way of sometimes surfing the edge between funny and pointed that is much more dangerous for women and can easily get labelled “nasty.” And there seems to be a certain connection where “strong” women for some are “off-putting” for others. And I do think it’s harder for women than men, because of how we’re socialized, to accept that a large group of people may find them off-putting, no matter what they do, and go about their business. I would hazard a guess from recent studies around teenage girls and social media, this concern and dismay over being disliked is not going to go away anytime soon.

So projecting strength may be necessary but for women to get this right at the top of the presidential ticket, is it likely going to take the right woman with the right temperament. And developing that temperament may well be a personal sacrifice fewer women than men are willing to make.

2. The False Promise of Perfectionism

The other night I watched the Martha Stewart documentary on Netflix and if you’re reading this article, I would suggest giving it a watch. At the time of her rise, fall and subsequent reinvention, she was pretty much background noise to me and a symbol of the sanctification of the stereotypical womanly arts that felt retrograde, establishing goals for women’s roles that were damaging and unattainable at worst and ridiculous at best.