Oml 499 - Leadership in a Global Society - the Leadership Lid

OML 499 Leadership in a Global Society

November 9, 2008

The Leadership Lid

In the November 2008 edition of Oprah the question of "What do you know for sure?" One of the respondents is Rachel Maddow the host of The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC. Her response is decisive. Maddow says, "Leadership. Humans are ambitious and rational and proud. And we don't fall in line with people who don't respect us and who we don't believe have our best interests at heart. We are willing to follow leaders, but only to the extent that we believe they call on our best, not our worst" (Winfrey 2008). Maddow is a leader in her industry. In America most people are open to the idea of women leading, in nearly all areas and professions. With many women now entering professional fields at the bottom, there are still naïve beliefs that women have been on the rise and they will continue to rise to the tops of their professions.

In an upcoming report from The White House Project's Corporate Council a graph of women in top positions clearly indicates this is not true. The organization aims to advance women' leadership and completed a review of that topic from recent years. The report clearly indicates that there is a leadership lid. It is set around 20% in corporate culture and by comparison is much lower than the military and the Fortune 500; and is much higher in nonprofits, but the salaries are lower (Quindlen 2008).

Women are half of the population but comprise on average only 20% of the nation's leaders in business, journalism and politics. Prior to the election, the number of women in the United States House of Representatives placed the US in 69th place for female political representation, behind luminaries such as Iraq and North Korea (Quindlen 2008).

Quindlen (2008) questions "What if we had an oil shortage but were using only 20% of the oil at our disposal?" That would not be an intelligent and rational decision. Marie Wilson who runs The White House Project states "Focusing on brining women into leadership in this critical time is not a distraction from solving our problems, it is solving our problems" (Quindlen 2008).

Apply the numbers to the current financial crisis. Quindlen (2008) wonders if women made up half of the leadership of the troubled industries, half of the members of Congress and half of the overseas government agencies, might it have ended differently? If women led in proportion to their numbers, would things be better (Quindlen 2008)?

When the Pew Research Center recently asked about the signal traits for leadership, including integrity and intelligence, respondents ranked women superior to men in almost every way (Quindlen 2008). Yet when the same respondents were asked about leadership in general, the