"Do Women Lead Differently? Reflections on
Women and Leadership."
MS. FORD: It's a great pleasure to introduce our
keynote speaker, Nannerl Keohane. Dr. Keohane served as Duke
University's eighth president. She was born in
Arkansas. She grew up there, and also in Texas and in South
Carolina. She has a wonderfully rich, rich background.
I'm going to tell you a little bit of it. I'm not going to
tell you all of it, but it's really wonderful. Her parents
were great music lovers and they named her after Mozart's
musically talented sister, Nannerl.
Her father was a Presbyterian minister who went on to earn his
doctorate in theology, and he taught religion and theology at St.
Andrew's Presbyterian College in North Carolina. Her mother,
whose name is Grace Overholser White, worked as a reporter before
her marriage and then later in life taught English and served as
dean at St. Andrews, so she has certainly come by her academic and
leadership roles very honestly.
She was valedictorian of her high school class and in 1961 she
graduated from Wellesley College Phi Beta Kappa with honors in
political science. Following graduation from Wellesley she
was awarded a Marshall scholarship and went to Oxford University,
where she earned an additional degree with first class honors in
philosophy, politics, and economics. She got her Ph.D. in
political science from Yale, where she was a Sterling Fellow, and
later was awarded the Wilbur Post Medal in recognition of her
distinguished service as an alumnus.
Before becoming a president of Wellesley, she taught at
Swarthmore College, University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford
University, where she was chair of the faculty senate and won the
Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching. She has written
extensively in the fields of political philosophy, feminism, and
education. She's the author of one book and coauthor of
another. She served on numerous boards including IBM, the
National Humanities Center, the Council on Foreign Relations, and
she currently chairs the Overseers Committee to Visit the John F.
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. She's been awarded
honorary doctoral degrees in a number of places. She is a
member of the National Women's Hall of Fame, and she won the
Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in
1998.
She's married to Robert O. Keohane. They have four grown
children and seven grandchildren, one of whom is a student at
Brearley, where she very generously has suggested that we pass
along her honorarium for being with us tonight. Please
welcome Nan Keohane.
DR. KEOHANE: Thank you so much for that gracious
introduction, Burch, and thanks to all of you for including me in
this weekend. I wish I could stay and go to every one of the
events that you have planned. It sounds like it's going to
be truly festive.
My topic today is: "Should Women Lead?" I have slashed a
few passages so that we won't be quite so far behind schedule, but
I look forward very much tomorrow to the session first thing after
breakfast, where I will be talking about the same topic with
several of our colleagues, and things that don't get said tonight
I'm sure will get said tomorrow.
In one of my recent essays on this topic, "Women in
Leadership," which I drew on liberally for the first section of my
speech, I described an experience that I had at my college reunion
at Wellesley in June 2006. And quite a few of you as
graduates of women's colleges will easily imagine the theme:
Hundreds of talented, feisty women who lived through Betty
Friedan, women's liberation, and post-feminism. So I took
the opportunity to do a bit of informal research. Around the
breakfast table in the dormitories, standing in line for the
clambake and the annual parade, I asked some of my classmates a
simple question. "Do women lead differently from men?"
And every single one of them said, "Yes."
When I probed, they mentioned things like more collaborative
behavior, deeper concern for colleagues, less competition for
status. Now, of course, four dozen members of the Wellesley
class of 1961 is hardly a representative sample of anything. But
as a soft social scientist, I found the experience thought
provoking, as I would not have been able to give such an immediate
and straightforward answer to my question.
So in my talk I want to explore some possible explanations for
this widely held belief, which is surely not limited to my
Wellesley classmates. What might it mean to say that females
have a distinctive style of leadership? Why do so many
people believe that this is true? What's the evidence and
what are the implications of this belief for women who do hold
power?
These questions may suggest several others which I won't
pursue today, but we might talk about tomorrow. For example,
do women in power set different goals from men? Are we more
likely to think about policies that deal with family life?
Or you might ask whether differences in styles of leadership come
because women may have different types of positions, be more
likely to have human resources or staff positions. Or you
might think that the ways in which women lead differently arise
because subordinates who are uncomfortable with a woman boss
resist ways of leading by a woman that would have been thought
perfectly appropriate for a man, and the women react by leading in
more conventionally female ways. And the fourth question is
a normative variant. Should women lead differently? In
other words, would the world be better off if women used some of
our putatively womanly skills to wield power in nontraditional
ways?
The answers to these questions would no doubt be helpful in
solving my puzzle, but they're not the same question. The
point is this: When a woman occupies a post that has always been
held by a man, and is charged with broad responsibility for an
organization with multiple goals and interests, will her style of
leadership differ in predictable ways from that of a man in the
same job just because she is a woman?
So what might it mean to say that females have a distinctive
style of leadership? In the first place, we should remember
that throughout human history and across almost every culture we
know anything about, leadership has been closely associated with
masculinity. The king, the father, the boss, the lord are
the stereotypical images of leadership. You don't even have
to look at history to get the message. Look at New Yorker
cartoons. Look at the front page of the paper. Look at TV.
Most of the illustrations are male.
Now, as we know, fortunately, this is changing fast
today. There are lots of women leaders. There are
women presidents of several nations, and our own country's
senators, governors, corporate CEOs, university presidents,
rabbis, generals, Anglican priests, and Supreme Court
justices. But what does that deep association of leadership
and masculinity throughout history imply for these women who hold
power today?
The first superficial reaction to someone in a skirt and
lipstick or jewelry may lead observers to assume that we will
govern differently, as well. But that tells us nothing
beyond the fact that most power-holders throughout history have
been wearing suits and ties. On a more fundamental level,
the fact that women leaders are new and atypical might indeed lead
women to behave differently from men, to lead in typically female
ways. But it is surely equally logical to predict that when
we have power, we will use it just like the guys have always done
and behave in exactly the same ways. I think, in fact, it
can work either way, depending on the individual and the
situation.
So I'll put my cards on the table right at the outset. I
understand the ways in which women might be likely to lead
differently from men, and we can all cite examples of women who
do. But I can also see how the pressures of power and the
difficulties of climbing to the top and the demands of belonging
to an organization could lead women to play the game just as men
have always done it, and we can all think of instances like that,
as well. Leadership is a complex form of human behavior and
it's impossible to generalize about all women or all men.
Today I'm especially interested, however, in exploring this
belief that women do generally lead in typically female ways,
which is an assumption made both by critics who assume that
because of our femaleness women are not capable of using power
effectively; we're not tough enough; we're too much likely to wimp
out; we suffer from raging hormonal disorders or whatever it may
be. And the same belief, that women lead differently, is held not
only by our critics but those who say that precisely because we
are women, we are superbly equipped to use power more sensitively
than men and thereby solve the problems of the world.
So old-fashioned male chauvinism and successful women
executives alike tell us that women do indeed lead
differently. Thus, either "I told you so" or "Hallelujah"
might be the appropriate response.
But how do women who are leaders actually do their jobs?
Look back and notice how many women across history have been
leaders in certain contexts. These include convents, women's
colleges, girls' schools, other all-female settings, as well as
occasions when blood or dynasty trumps gender, so that a
Hatshepsut or Catherine the Great can be a ruling monarch.
Or when men are temporarily absent -- Quaker Nantucket, when all
the men were out whaling for months at a time. Or in
wartime, some women have been fine leaders. Women are
leaders in social movements where their interests are thought to
be particularly involved: women's suffrage, the prohibition
movement, the settlement house and social work campaigns in the
19th century.
Women have provided leadership as heads of European salons,
healing wise women or market women in Africa and the French
Revolution. There are many societies in which women have had
authority over slaves or servants, but one would be hard-pressed
to call that leadership. And women have certainly also had
the ability to shape matters to their own purposes in contexts
where they would surely not be called leaders. The familiar
image of the dowager empress, of the powerful mistress behind the
throne, what you might call the éminence rose, makes it
clear that women often have had ample power in the sense of
influence rather than authority.
But as Deborah Rhode at Stanford sums it up in her book called
The Difference 'Difference' Makes, for most of recorded history,
women were largely excluded from formal leadership positions. And
when they did occupy thrones as reigning queens, some observer was
sure to grumble, as John Knox did, in his manifesto called The
First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of
Women, and I quote -- this is all in Elizabethan language -- "To
promote a woman to beare rule, superioritie, domination or empire
above any realme, nation or citie, is repugnant to nature,
contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will
and approved ordinance, and finallie it is the subversion of good
order, of all equitie and justice."
What's new these days is that for the first time in history,
significant numbers of women are exercising authority in
institutionalized settings over men and women of comparable social
and economic status. There aren't enough of us, to be sure,
but there are enough to demonstrate that women can do these jobs
and do them very successfully. And if you look at how these women
behave, it's clear that individual women display different styles
of leadership, just as men in such positions have always
done. Some women consciously behave like mothers or sisters,
looking after others in the workplace. That may be what
people have in mind when they talk about a womanly style of
leadership.
Others use their femaleness to gain an apparent advantage over
male colleagues through seduction, which is a tactic that
certainly did not go out of style with Cleopatra. A book
just reviewed in the New York Times two weeks ago entitled
Seducing the Boys Club claims that men love seduction in the
workplace and are oblivious to manipulation. And therefore,
says the author, one of the greatest tools or weapons that we have
as women is flirting. But given that one of the major obstacles to
women becoming leaders across the centuries is the uneasy sense
that female sexuality is fundamentally at odds with power-holding,
deliberately intruding that sexuality into the workplace strikes
me as ultimately self-defeating.
Other women play what you might call the helpless card at
work, evoking instincts of chivalry, and on the other extreme, a
number of well-known women leaders, including Margaret Thatcher,
Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Carly Fiorina, have been the best
men in their cabinets, by all reports, including their own.
They have adopted stereotypically masculine behavior in order to
succeed and be accepted as real leaders. Elizabeth I, who herself
used several of these strategies at different times, put it this
way. "I may not be a lion, but I am a lion's cub, and I have
a lion's heart."
Now, it's clearly not true that all women in all positions of
leadership behave in predictable ways that are typically womanly,
whatever definition you might use. But many people, not just
my Wellesley classmates -- including, I would imagine, quite a few
in this room -- would grant that this is true, and still argue
that the fact of being a person of one sex or the other is likely
to have observable and durable implications for how you use
power.
So in that vein, let's turn to the social scientists.
What do we learn from the experts? Carefully designed case studies
of men and women in power could be useful in addressing our
question. But there are very few studies of women in power, and
it's difficult to generalize from the ones that are
available. There are numerous psychological experiments in
which volunteers are put in situations where leadership becomes
relevant and differences between males and females are noted. Such
experiments sometimes find slight statistical differences between
the sexes, but the differences are rarely large, and they're even
smaller in situations where social status or expertise and other
resources are involved, not to mention same-sex
organizations. And these artificial settings have very
little in common with the ongoing work of organizations where most
of the work of leadership occurs.
In their excellent overview of such experiments, two scholars,
Alice Eagley and Blair Johnson, note that it's probable that
ingrained sex differences in traits and behavioral tendencies
could cause men's and women's leadership behavior to be somewhat
sex-differentiated even when occupants of the same roles are
compared. But they follow Rosabeth Moss Kanter of the
Harvard Business School in also saying that they believe that
organizational roles are more important than gender roles, so they
predict that the differences will be very small.
Now, when you actually look at organizational studies -- and
they have done this in their report in some detail, which I will
not go through tonight -- some experimenters have found evidence
that even in organizational settings as opposed to laboratories,
women's leadership styles are more democratic than men's. So
then we might ask why that might be so.
Some possible explanations: The influential line of
argument stemming from Carol Gilligan's book In A Different Voice,
which many of you are familiar with, I'm sure, holds that girls
and women are more likely than boys and men to make moral
judgments based on caring or personalistic views rather than on
the grounds of abstract justice. A number of scholars have
followed this lead and have developed theories of caring as a
distinctively female trait. And it's easy to see how these
might explain our leading differently.
Sara Ruddick has developed the implications of mothering as a
source of female morality and linked it with an emphasis on
caring. And it's interesting to see that a number of strong women
leaders today, including Michelle Bachelet, the President of
Chile, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the President of Liberia, are
using the language of motherhood to describe their relationship
with the people that they govern very effectively. Women
ambitious for power in the past have usually avoided that term,
because it was too soft and homelike for their purposes. But
that's odd, because mothering is in some ways a very good analogy
for leadership, combining caring with toughness.
If we turn to look for more experimental data, some
psychologists remind us that girls and boys behave differently
even in situations where their forward-looking parents attempt to
raise them without gender stereotyping, in choices of companions
and play habits and other social situations. The fact that
they behave differently comes as no surprise to any of us who are
parents. Psychologist Eleanor Maccoby ascribes these
differences to genetic predispositions. For example, greater
language facility of girls, and a tendency to indulge in
rough-and-tumble play by boys. And she says this leads to
self-segregation in play from a very early age, which persists
through later life in its influences.
Another area for exploring this question finally is brain
imaging, which I think is quite intriguing. A psychologist
named Tania Singer and her colleagues have found that women react
more empathetically than men in situations where pain is inflicted
on another human being who is perceived as having acted
unfairly. So a research team will assign a task to an
experimental group and a few of the people behave like
jerks. They grab too many cookies, they refuse to cooperate,
et cetera. They are, of course, collaborators with the
experimenters. They're insiders.
Then another task is assigned to the same group, including
rewards or punishments for the volunteers, and the bad guys
apparently get punished very severely. The members of the
group are all wired for brain imaging while this is going
on. And the brain signals of the men show that when the
jerks get punished, all the guys are thinking, "Right on.
They got just what they deserved," whereas in the women, although
some of these same revenge neurons are firing, women are more
likely to notice that the bad guys are feeling pain, or appearing
to feel pain, and feel sorry for them.
Now, maybe this is all deep-wired in our female brains, but it
could instead show that women in our society have been socialized
to feel more concern about harm to others. And this area of
socialization and prior experience seems to be the most promising
place to look for explanations of why we might approach leadership
in a distinctive fashion.
Almost all cultures promote particular forms of education and
experience for young girls designed to make them sexually
appealing to men and prepare them for the women's work of caring
for others and providing for the men in their lives; living in the
world as a girl and then a woman provides access to some
experiences that are not available to boys and men, and denies the
possibility of others. And given that this is true, it might
seem perfectly reasonable to expect that people with these
different experiences will behave differently in power as in many
other settings.
In the essay I wrote recently on women in leadership, as a way
of getting a handle on these rich and complex phenomena we call
socialization I turned to what might be an unlikely source, the
writings of Virginia Woolf, particularly two books of social
analysis that she wrote with a strongly feminist bent, A Room of
One's Own and Three Guineas. And in that essay, I talk about
how Woolf's perception of the education of women and girls, and
our experience over all those centuries as wives and mothers and
caretakers, leads her to assume that women will approach power
differently when we are able for the first time in history, which
was occurring in her own time in the early 20th century, to take
significant positions in the professions and take on
leadership. And she thinks that we will approach it
differently, because our experiences have been different.
But she also believed that this is fragile, and is likely to
change with the experience of being in power, unless we take
particular steps to hold on to these differences.
But tonight I want to step back, in the last section of my
talk, and notice that whatever may or may not be true about our
neurons, our genes, our socialization, our hormones, one major
point should not get lost in all this analysis. Leaders come
in all shapes and sizes, both sexes, all types of
personalities. Individual human beings have many different
types of experiences that prepare us for effective
leadership. We lead in many different contexts, both visibly
and behind the scenes, and leaders make a huge difference in the
quality of people's lives, of our communities, our nations, and
the world.
So I want to move from explanatory theories to prescriptive
analysis. How might we as educators prepare girls for
leading? How might we encourage them to draw on the
different parts of their personalities for effective leadership,
both the traditionally female ones and the ones that might seem
more masculine, as is appropriate depending on their own character
and their situation?
If the analysis I have been presenting is at all on target,
the answer to my question, "How do women lead?" is not cast in
concrete, and is not immutable from the dawn of time. All
women do not lead in the same way, and there are multiple factors
that contribute to explaining what we do. And this is where
you come in, of course. The style of leadership comes from
the character, the training, the experiences of women who become
leaders, and depends on the receptivity of those who will be their
followers. You're in a position of unparalleled importance
in preparing girls to become leaders and in sustaining them in
their ambitions.
As we all know, nobody in the world is as feisty or
self-confident as a smart, plucky five-year-old girl or an
11-year-old girl -- I have two of my granddaughters in mind -- who
knows that she is loved, who feels comfortable in her life, and is
quite sure that the sky is the limit on what she can
accomplish. You are in the fortunate position of being able
to help keep that flame alive. There are plenty of
challenges as they move through the traumas of female adolescence
and out into the world.
Now, here I will share with you a concern that is on the minds
of many of us who are on the university campuses these days.
At Princeton, at Harvard, at Duke, which are the institutions I
know best, we have seen clear evidence that women of college age
are retreating from the kinds of ambitions for leadership that
alumnae of these same institutions displayed in decades past by
their own reports. Too many of these women in universities
today are deliberately not putting themselves forward for
positions of leadership because they think that makes them
unattractive to the guys, or even because they believe that men
are really better suited to these tasks. They choose to run
for secretary rather than president of the organization, or they
act as campaign manager for a guy friend. And when they talk about
ambitions for the future, many of them express no particular
interest in having a professional career, despite their Ivy League
education and their stellar records. They're lowering their
sights, and to me this is very disturbing.
I should make it clear that I am supportive of women (or men)
who want to spend time with families when their kids are young, or
take time off to support their aging parents. I have a
daughter and three daughters-in-law, and they have all taken
different paths in dealing with the formidable challenges that
well-trained, ambitious women and their families face today,
challenges that make positions of leadership seem completely out
of reach for some women. These young women in my own family
have made choices ranging from working full-time with a nanny and
a housekeeper in tow to consulting part-time in the home for five
or six years while their kids are young, both women with a Harvard
MBA tucked in the portfolio and high ambitions for the
future.
We're launching a new program at Princeton called Pathways to
Public Service to help some of our alumni find onramps back to
active professional life specifically in government service when
they have been out in the home for awhile. And we're very
excited about this program, which will be debuting for the first
time this June.
What worries me is not the different paths that people can
take, but assuming that you have to lower your expectations for
yourself as a woman no matter what the future may hold. And
I see multiple signs of that on campus.
When we organized the Women's Initiative at Duke, which was
one of my major goals my last few years as president, these
attitudes came out in interviews with undergraduates. In
more informal ways I have found the same thing in three years at
Princeton, and my colleagues at Harvard tell me they worry about
the same things.
So what is going on? Have we scared these young women
with our success, with the complex lives that we are
leading? Have they bought into popular culture with its
emphasis on seductive sexuality and its pervasive negative humor
about women who are perceived as aggressive or bitchy?
Whatever is going on, it doesn't seem to be happening as much in
high school, although you will, of course, have a better sense of
that than I do.
When I ask these women students whether they behaved the same
way in high school, they say, "Oh, no." They would not
have gotten into Princeton if their resumes did not have ample
evidence of leadership in some form. Given the sadly fierce
pressures for admission to a place like Princeton these days, you
can be sure that they did what they needed to do to get in, which
could not have been limited to cheering the guys on behind the
scenes. But once they got on campus, too many of these young
women adopted a different stance.
My message for you, then, is to ask that you help your
students sustain their faith in themselves through their years in
school, and encourage them to do so in college, as well.
Help nurture the belief that gets instilled at schools like yours
and colleges like Wellesley that a girl can be and do anything she
wants, and send them on to Princeton and Duke, to UNC or Michigan
State, or whatever their goal is, determined to hold on to that
belief.
Of course it's true that some girls and boys have natural
talents that will help them succeed as leaders, and some people
are not interested in or apt for leadership. They will be
good followers and help accomplish goals that are worth
pursuing. I always recall the statement of Mildred McAfee,
one of my predecessors as president of Wellesley, when she read
the admissions application of a bright girl whose teacher says,
"Mary is not a leader, but she will be a very good
follower." And Ms McAfee said, "Admit that girl. With
a class of 400 leaders, we need at least one follower."
But we also need all those leaders. And preparing people
for leadership is a complicated business. Yet we do know
some things. It helps to have experiences of leading that
prepare you to take on bigger assignments, and a lot of that
happens in school. It helps to have your self-confidence
bolstered and your perspectives broadened. Specific
experiences like playing on high-powered sports teams, that were
unavailable to many women in the past, clearly matter. It
helps to have occasions to hone and test your judgment. You
need to strengthen your communication skills, your ability to face
a problem, to make a decision thoughtfully but in a timely
fashion, and move on.
To be prepared to lead these days, it helps to have some
exposure to human difference and diversity. You need a
strong inner compass so that your ethics and personal integrity
are intact as you face the various temptations that come with
power. And we know for sure that it helps to have role
models of strong, successful women leaders so that you can
envision being like them. In all these ways, your schools are very
well positioned to help these girls prepare themselves to be
leaders and to lead successfully in whatever style works for
them.
I mentioned Virginia Woolf. Let me turn in closing to
another of my favorite feminist authors, Simone de Beauvoir.
In one of the most famous sentences in The Second Sex, Beauvoir
says, "One is not born, one becomes a woman."
You have crucial opportunities to shape the lives of many
girls as they are becoming women, and you can make it more likely
that they will be strong, healthy, clear-sighted, loving,
appropriately ambitious women. Training girls to be
effective leaders and not submit to stereotypes, helping each girl
find the style of leadership that works for her, and the areas of
life where she wants to lead -- these are important parts of the
work you do every day. I commend you for it. I urge
you to continue it and redouble your efforts.
These young women will face obstacles. We all know it's
not easy to manage all the complex features of a modern life, but
you can arm them for success, and in so doing, you are
contributing richly to the supply of capable leaders in the years
ahead in a world that surely needs all the good leaders it can
find. Thank you and best of luck.
MS. FORD: Thank you. That was wonderful,
and something we're all going to be thinking about and talking
about more tomorrow morning