Ladies, raise your hands if your organization has ever “suggested” (or straight up required) that you attend a leadership development program specially designed for women.
All hands up?
Cool, same.
I have attended dozens of women-targeted leadership development seminars, workshops, courses, and programs over my academic and corporate careers. In my younger years, I eagerly signed up for these opportunities. I love being a woman, and I love being surrounded by women. A half day off from work to sit in a room of ladies and talk about our ambitions? Sign me up!
It wasn’t until I got a little older that I started to ask myself, what exactly is the point of these programs? Why are the women around here constantly called on to improve themselves? And why don’t I see any programs rolled out specifically for men at my workplace?
To get to where we’re going, we need to go back in time a bit.
I started my career in the oil and gas industry in 2011.
It is no secret that my industry has a gender balance problem. In my over 12 years in the industry, I have frequently been the only woman in the room.
Even so, I never considered my gender to be a strike against me. In many ways, I saw it as a strength. In an industry riddled with boom-and-bust cycles and slash-and-burn style layoffs, being a high performer and a woman seemed like a shield.
Of course, I am here writing this article, which means something happened at work that made me acutely aware of my gender in a way I previously had been able to ignore.
Six years into my career I was offered a role in sales and excitedly took the opportunity to step away from daily technical work and learn a new skill. At a town hall shortly after I started in my new role, the business manager read an anonymous question. The exact phrasing of the question is lost to time, but it was something to the effect of, “A lot of people have received new roles recently, but why are only women getting new jobs?”
A few weeks later a colleague (a man) looked me in my face and told me I only had my job because I was a woman. I heard a rumor later that another colleague (a woman) posited that the only reason I was offered a sales role was because I was a young, attractive “girl.”
Setting aside the fact that the manager clearly should have vetted the questions and come up with a strong response denouncing any suggestion that gender was the primary reasoning behind any promotion (if you’re guessing he fumbled this one, you would be right), these incidents opened my eyes to the reality of gender in my workplace.
Previously I had not thought much about my gender at work. I was not naïve enough to think my gender was not a factor, but I had never before been singled out as a woman in the office.
Fix the Women
Author Caroline Criado-Perez wrote the book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed For Men. The thesis of the book is simple: the world is not designed for women. As a result, all data collected (from car safety reports to clinical drug trials), which shapes so many of our daily experiences, is biased toward men. Criado-Perez introduced me to the term “male default” in her book; the idea that in any given situation, the default gender is male.
Leadership development has a default male problem. I feel this in my experience with women’s leadership development programs (which I will henceforth refer to as WLDPs to save us both a little sanity).
Many popular books on women’s leadership continue to be default-male-centered. Women’s behaviors, habits, and experiences are written as the foil to men’s. Despite research and popular leadership books asserting that individuals have different leadership styles and that all are valid, necessary, and beneficial, leadership continues to be a highly gendered construct.
My experience attending forums, trainings, programs, workshops, and coaching sessions dedicated to the development of women leaders has signaled a simple message: women need fixing, women need to do more, and women just need to act a little bit more like men to get ahead.
Women’s Leadership Development Programs: Conform or Transform?
This article marks the first in a series I am writing on women's leadership development programs (referred to by researchers and those in the know as WLDPs).
In 2023, in pursuit of my master of arts degree from the University of Texas at Austin in the Human Dimensions of Organizations, I completed my capstone research on women's leadership development programs. This series of articles is a recount and expansion of that original research.
To come are reviews of the ways by which leadership development programs are marketed differently to women, personal accounts and reflections of my own experiences as a participant in WLDPs, and musings about what can be done to improve gender-specific leadership development in organizations.
I am always curious to hear about others’ experiences and how they are similar and different from mine. If you, the reader, have a story about leadership development you would like to share I would love to read it.
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