by Suzanne Price
"HOPE
will not make change happen, but without hope change is impossible. Without a sense that ordinary people working together are potentially limitless, the journey toward justice cannot even begin. . . . Leaders learning hope and, in turn, learning to bring hopefulness to others create a climate of possibility, an atmosphere that anything can happen.”
This quotation from the book Learning as a Way of Leading is an apt one for these times. It’s unlikely that Julie Owen knew just how appropriate it would be back when she chose to use it near the end of her new book, but it fits like a glove within her context as well. With We Are the Leaders We’ve Been Waiting For: Women and Leadership Development in College (Stylus Publishing), Owen, an associate professor of leadership studies in the School of Integrative Studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, has crafted a thorough examination of leadership, gender, and culture that blends theory, history, and personal narratives. As coordinator for the leadership studies major and minor at her institution, who has spent a decade and a half teaching the subject, has authored more than 30 publications on leadership, and has served as coeditor of two editions of The Handbook for Student Leadership Development, it is a subject she knows well. In the following interview, Owen shares additional thoughts on why this book was needed, how campus housing can be a valuable tool in supporting such efforts, and why hope matters.
As a leadership educator and university administrator, let me first say thank you for this comprehensive, theoretically grounded, and action-oriented book. It critically addresses what many of us have had to piece together for years in leadership learning. What led you to write this text, and why now?
I have been teaching curricular and cocurricular courses and seminars on women and leadership for 15 years. Initially, I relied on texts like Alice Eagly and Linda Carli’s Through the Labyrinth and Barbara Kellerman and Deborah Rhode’s Women and Leadership. While these texts are seminal and empirically grounded, they focus primarily on women’s achievement in corporate America and do not explicitly address the wide variety of aspirations and career goals of today’s undergraduates, which may include social innovation and entrepreneurial goals, policy and politics, and social activism.
Also, as we can see from the activism of the past year, it is increasingly heretical to address dimensions of identity without including issues of intersectionality. I wanted to address recent scholarship about the effects of intersectional identities on women in leadership. Rather than focusing only on the structural under-representation of women in leadership, I sought to dive in to how women are embedded in larger patriarchal systems of oppression and the role of power and privilege in leadership. I also wanted to produce something that would be compelling to today’s college students. It was important to take a developmental approach and to address recent research about the intertwining nature of leadership efficacy, motivation, capacity, and enactment (Dugan, 2017).
Anyway, these texts weren’t working for my students, so I had resorted to a syllabus of dozens of PDFs when one of my students asked why I didn’t write a book for the class. A bell went off in my head, and I knew it was something I had to try to do.
You intentionally subtitle the text “Women and Leadership Development in College” as opposed to “Women’s Leadership Development in College.” Can you explain the purpose and meaning behind your choice of language?
There is a long and fraught history of people studying and writing about women’s leadership. The typical narrative in this research is that women lead in relational and collaborative ways that “emphasize mutual power and influence processes, attend to relationships and tasks, and encourage democratic and participatory forms of decision-making” (Kezar & Wheaton, 2017, p. 20). Meanwhile, men’s leadership is characterized as assertive, charismatic, and commanding. In actuality, empirical research on gender differences often reveals very small actual differences between men's and women’s leadership styles, yet these differences are often exaggerated. Binary views of gender are often extremely resistant to change. In some ways, it feels empowering to say that women’s leadership is the antidote to all the evils in the world, yet we know the truth is far more complex. We need all people – men, women, and those who identify beyond binary gender labels – to work in more inclusive and egalitarian ways.
One of the best deconstructions of the danger of labeling any set of characteristics as women’s ways of leadership is Todd Pittinsky, Laura Bacon, and Brian Welle’s “The Great Women Theory of Leadership? Perils of Positive Stereotypes and Precarious Pedestals.” They ask the question “does a gendered perspective advance our understanding of leadership?” What are the unintended results of holding gendered notions of leadership? How might expectations shape behavior? Do stereotypes about women diminish our expectation that men will engage in collaboration, cooperation, personal contacts, encouragement, and participation? My book seeks to shift the conversation from women’s ways of leading to supporting women engaged in the process of leadership.
Research on leadership efficacy is highlighted in the chapter “Who Am I To Lead?” Studies indicate that college women score higher than college men in their capacity for socially responsible leadership, but the inverse is true for college women and men when it comes to leadership efficacy (Dugan & Komives, 2010). What can housing and residence life professionals do to better align action and efficacy in college women – whether women identify as residents or student staff?
I think the story here is twofold. We need to enhance women’s self-efficacy for leadership while simultaneously working to increase men’s capacity for socially responsible leadership. [Psychologist Albert] Bandura (1997) suggests four ways that people can enhance their self-efficacy: enactive mastery experiences (meaningful practical experiences), vicarious experiences (learning through observing those around us), verbal persuasion (feedback and social support), and physiological and affective states (your socio-emotional health and sense of well-being).
In housing and residence life contexts, this might involve something as simple as naming the act of leadership when we see women exhibiting it. I spoke with a group of RAs last night and some of them mentioned that they did not identify as leaders, rather they were just good at organizing and motivating people, connecting them to networks and resources, and helping them work towards shared goals. My response was “friends, this is leadership.” We need to encourage people to not shy away from the idea that they have power and influence. Another efficacy-enhancing approach is to ensure that women are equitably represented in leadership positions throughout the department and that newer students and staff have access to learning from their predecessors in this work. I also see a need for teaching staff to invite and learn from feedback opportunities. Many people naturally approach feedback with trepidation and fear. Instead, we should talk about the gifts inherent in receiving critical feedback and asking “what do I have to learn here?” I invite people to practice having hard conversations with each other. Finally, we need to pay special attention to the mental health and well-being of women-identified students and staff. Women suffer from perfectionism at a much greater rate than do men (American Association of University Women, 2014) and are nearly twice as likely as men to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder in their lifetime (National Institute of Mental Health, 2018), which can also hinder their engagement in leadership.
With the concurrent pandemics of COVID-19 and racial injustices, we are finding both student staff and full-time employees appreciating the work of predecessors, recognizing their potential benefit as inheritors, and activating to serve as instigators for social justice. How do we balance the bureaucratic mandates and political realities of the institution with student and staff activism through a leadership lens?
I love this question, as it builds on the ground-breaking work of Helen Astin and Carole Leland’s Women of Influence, Women of Vision. There is profound value in reflecting on the people who come before and after you in the fight for gender justice. It is important to acknowledge that, though it may have changed forms or contexts, there are many who have shared experiences of discrimination, harassment, and rejection and have risen to challenge systems of oppression. We need to acknowledge that we are part of a multigenerational system of people working to create change.
"There is profound value in reflecting on the people who come before and after you in the fight for gender justice. . . . We need to acknowledge that we are part of a multigenerational system of people working to create change."
As far as balancing politics, bureaucracy, and activism, we need to teach people to go beyond what I call the template activism promoted in many digital spaces, where legitimacy is conferred on whoever performs the most outrage. Rather, we need to teach Activism 2.0, where we acknowledge that it is not enough to be angry – we also must do the work. Next-level activism would include learning to anchor arguments in evidence and how to evaluate various sources of evidence. This involves acknowledging when steps have been taken to address issues or move entrenched positions closer together and clearly defining what solution-finding would look like. It also includes mutual commitments to increased transparency, trust-building, and ongoing communication strategies.
You explore the issue of gendered leadership in Chapter 4, asserting that gendered views of dominant or authoritative masculine leadership and caring or nurturing feminine leadership are problematic on many levels, but especially for young women growing and learning in their own leadership development. How can housing professionals work to undo and minimize this flawed paradigm of leadership, especially in a time of crisis?
Equating leadership with masculinity is dangerous. As previously stated, we need to trouble the notion that women tend to lead in more participatory or democratic styles, whereas men tend toward autocratic or directive styles. Leadership needs to be de-gendered because gendered approaches exclude those whose approaches to leadership do not match stereotypes. Gendered approaches also typically ignore transgender, non-binary, and intersex leaders. Gendered approaches may also lead to women internalizing negative beliefs about their capability for leadership (Hoyt & Murphy, 2016).
Instead, I suggest that housing professionals learn about and focus on intersectionality. Because intersectionality reveals the connections among multiple social identities, it invites us not to reduce individuals to single categories or stereotypes. Instead, we should acknowledge the multiple compounding effects of these interactions on how people understand and navigate their own leadership identity, behavior, and effectiveness. This requires doing our own self-work to understand our own privileged and oppressed identities and how they may show up in leadership. It means refusing to essentialize others and seeking to understand leadership from the lens of multiple social identities, communities, and contexts. It means guarding against burnout and the physical and psychological toll it takes to navigate unwelcoming or even hostile spaces. It means going beyond gendered conversations about women’s ways of leading or feminine leadership styles to instead de-gender leadership.
We should also embrace culturally relevant leadership learning. The Culturally Relevant Leadership Learning Model (CRLL) was developed in response to the proliferation of leadership theories and approaches that do not take identity into account (Bertrand Jones et al., 2016). At the center of this model are three dimensions of development that inform the leadership learning process: identity, capacity, and efficacy. Campus climate also has an important moderating effect on student growth, development, and learning. As such, the CRLL model involves addressing five domains of culture that affect leadership learning.
Taken together, the component parts of the CRLL represent a myriad of strategies for both individuals and organizations to assess and enhance equity and inclusion. Leadership that only focuses on individual identities, efficacy, and capacity-building is insufficient. Leaders must also learn to grapple with larger systemic forces, maintained by power and dominant narratives of exclusion, and their effects on individual agency and action. Culturally relevant leadership learning requires going beyond individual learning to also question and disrupt organizational, institutional, and systemic dynamics (Owen et al., 2017).
Let’s talk about single-sex housing. While a relic on many campuses, some single-sex buildings remain, but for what purpose? I ask because I have heard the argument from some that it is needed for safety, security, and peace of mind (perhaps more for parents than students), but in reading your text, I have started to think about single-sex housing as a place of refuge with the potential for intentional leadership development and support for young women during what can be a very challenging time of their lives. What do you think about this idea? Does it have merit, or do you believe that the negatives outweigh the positives in single-sex (particularly for women-identifying students) space allocation?
Yes, I concur that students should have the option for single-sex housing, for all the reasons you state and more. All-women environments allow women’s voices to be heard and respected, promote positive peer influences, invite women to access leadership experiences they might otherwise opt out of, and can offer a wide variety of women-centric services and programs. I also encourage single-sex housing to adopt more gender-inclusive practices by intentionally welcoming people who identify as trans, gender queer, and non-binary to participate in these spaces.
The Queen Bee . . . This phenomenon is in fact alive and well in many fields, including higher education. How can women-identifying professionals challenge potential queen bees in what can be a very traditional system of hierarchy and governance on a campus?
Queen bees exist everywhere and should be handled carefully. On one hand, they are often barrier-breakers who worked tirelessly to achieve status within an organization or system. On the other hand, they may be less likely to sponsor or promote other women or, at worst, may actively work to derail other women and view them as possible competitors. Sadly, the high school mean girls might show up in the workplace as well.
"Rather than focusing only on the structural under-representation of women in leadership, I sought to dive in to how women are embedded in larger patriarchal systems of oppression and the role of power and privilege in leadership."
There are a host of reasons why someone might become a queen bee, including that the patriarchal culture of work may encourage those who managed to rise to the top to become obsessed with maintaining their authority, even at the expense of other women. A survey by the Workplace Bullying Institute (2010) found that female bullies directed their hostilities towards other women 80% of the time, while men were equal-opportunity offenders. One strategy for addressing queen bees at the systems level is to do a critical examination of one’s workplace. If the climate or culture of an organization is replete with verbal abuse, job sabotage, misuse of authority, or outright verbal or sexual harassment, it is no wonder that women may have trouble navigating the leadership labyrinth.
You talk about empowerment and how it can be both positive and negative for women. You use the term false empowerment, “where people are invited to exercise agency and independent authority on a decision or program only to find that the decision was made elsewhere, or to be countered when you make a decision contrary to what those with positional power had in mind.” How can women challenge or address false empowerment without losing credibility with the organizational hierarchy?
Empowerment, the practice of sharing power and enabling others to exercise their own authority and influence, is frequently cited as a benefit of women in leadership. Empowerment is typically considered a good thing, but it also merits a critical analysis. Can power ever really be given away? What types of exploitation may be carried out under the guise of empowerment? Many of us have been victims of what I have termed as false empowerment, where people are invited to exercise agency and independent authority on a decision or program only to find that the decision was made elsewhere or are countered when they make a decision contrary to what those with positional power had in mind.
Like any ideology, power reflects the larger milieu in which it operates. When empowerment is reduced to a management buzzword or a motivational poster on the wall, this may actually be perpetuating powerlessness. This is not to say that you should not seek to be empowered or to empower others. I am merely suggesting that we think more critically about who is served by the concept of empowerment and whether power can ever be given away. One way to challenge the disenfranchisement of false empowerment is to ask questions about what justice, equity, and empowerment should look like in the organizations of which you are a member and to examine differences between espoused and enacted values.
You close the text with a conversation about hope. Even in normal times, having hope may be difficult for some, but with the addition of current social, global, and political crises, it may seem unattainable. What do you offer for maintaining hope, especially for women and others with marginalized identities?
People who learn to sustain hope in the face of struggle have discovered the importance of critical hope to leadership. This does not refer to naïve hope or to people who negate the difficulties of sustaining the work necessary to overcome injustice. Rather, learning to sustain hope in the face of struggle is perhaps one of the most essential skills of leadership.
To maintain hope, I suggest that people learn more about the idea of a liberatory consciousness (Love, 2013). Love states that anyone who is committed to changing systems and institutions to create great equity and social justice must develop a liberatory consciousness. This kind of thinking enables people to live their lives in oppressive systems and institutions with intentionality and awareness, rather than submit to the forces of socialization. A liberatory consciousness enables people to maintain an awareness of the dynamics of oppression without giving in to despair and hopelessness. It allows us to maintain an awareness of roles played by those in the system without blaming them for the roles they play, while also intentionally challenging systems of oppression. I invite people to work towards this kind of consciousness – after all, as Martin Luther King, Jr., reminds us, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Suzanne Price, Ph.D., is the director of residential learning at Clemson University. She also served as editor for ACUHO-I’s The Journal of College and University Student Housing from 2016 to 2019. An additional resource, Women and Leadership Development in College: A Facilitation Resource, is scheduled to be available in April 2021. More information is available online.
Read More
