BW Women: Need Thought Disruption

With increased participation of women in work and society, India is witnessing significant social transitions. However, due to the perceived inability of women to deal with real world problems, we are far from optimising their contribution to leadership. Our social contexts judge capabilities of women with extreme harshness and they have to struggle to express their capabilities.

Women do not have enough opportunity to either experience life or solve problems, leading to paucity of women leaders. If people dealing and problem solving are the most sought after leadership capabilities, our women have not been trained to be leaders!

As a lawyer, I studied words like ‘life’, ‘liberty’, ‘freedom’, ‘equality’, ‘dignity’ and ‘expression’ that did not find true import in many women’s lives. Interestingly, these words can only be expressed through experience and mean nothing theoretically, unless we understand how to live their most legitimate, meaningful and powerful versions. Guaranteeing the right and freedom to live such words, our founding parents likely imagined optimised growth of human potential. Society was supposed to enlarge the liberality that these words offer through understanding and experience, irrespective of gender.

Reading these words in the context of women showed that their experience was clouded and shrunk in most social contexts. Obsolete definitions prevailed of what a woman is supposed to be. Women’s responsibilities have changed over the last two decades and we need to redefine and reorchestrate women’s strengths, individuality and capabilities, to lead themselves and others. That was not done and we lost out on their contributions, as we did not challenge the status quo. Trained in the mind to aspire for leadership and owning their learning experience, is the ultimate leadership methodology and social leverage for women.

Seven mindset leverages

1. Leadership is about experience and thought. We need to create and support empowering experiences for women;
2. Women need drastically different mental training to capitalise on their strengths and be able to conduct themselves differently. Their strengths are deemed weaknesses;
3. It is imperative that women’s consciousness is raised enough to raise their standards of thought, action and consequential experience. Women need to tap into their natural potential.
4. Women’s finer sides are underutilised and must be fully utilised. Their biology gives them bigger communication centers, nurturing instincts, cooperative behaviours, intuition and emotional intelligence that are essential skills for leadership. Gender is a biological fact, not a competitive ground.
5. Problem solving is a learnable skill that can be mastered through experience and practice. It is directly dependent on how much we have grown individually to understand others and navigate through issues.
6. We must create exclusive spaces for women by having women-oriented and women-driven businesses to redefine and quantify the value created by them in each environment.
7. The idea of leadership is to be accepted, embraced and internalised by women as their possibility. They need to know that leadership is directly conditional upon their determination to reach their highest potential and fullest expression. The levers for optimising our person are education, knowledge, mastering environments and utilising all experience to learn and lead.