In Emma Watson’s speech for United Nation’s conference in 2014, there is a quote regarding the issue of gender inequality; “both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men and women should feel free to be strong. It is time that we all perceive gender on a spectrum not as two opposing sets of ideas.”
People of today have very different perspectives of what a great career means. They want equality in their professional lives too. There is an upcoming project and we need to vote for a leader for this particular project. However, most of the people in this building or room disagrees that a woman can and should lead. I am here to address a few suggestions on how to solve an issue that my colleague is facing in the workplace.
How can we eliminate gender discriminations in our office? I can suggest that the senior managements can start to make gender equality as a part of training and education in the office. People should be able to feel supported in choosing their work that is future-oriented and promising, regardless of their gender. This should be applied the same when choosing a leader. Next, we have to be proactive about welcoming women in our workplace. Companies should clearly state that they want to support and promote women in doing greater and better at their jobs. Other than that, we can also try to change the culture in the company by eliminating gender stereotypes that associates with work-life balance programmes. This promotes gender-neutral flexible career paths and practises us be more open-minded about both genders in taking charge of a task or project.
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During the World Economic Forum ‘Global Gender Gap Report 2017’, they mentioned that the imbalance between men and women across the globe is at 32 per cent – that’s how far away we are from achieving universal gender parity. Unfortunately, this is already proven in our company where we discriminate and immediately treat woman differently when it comes to leadership. Let’s take Indra Nooyi, a CEO of PepsiCo for 17 years as an example. She successfully manages a bunch of 300,000 employees in the company. Unlike any other ordinary people, she has her own famous, unique way of becoming a good leader throughout the 17 years. She holds onto a principle of the 5 C’s Model of Leadership; competence, confidence, character, commitment and courage.
Perhaps this example of Dato Wan Azizah sounds more familiar and relatable to us. She has been carrying this legacy for nearly 20 years as she faught for her husband’s justice. Throughout the 20 years, she managed to get a high position in politics. She is also the first woman to hold that high position and her success in political forms has inspired many women to get involved in politics and to take the lead of something. If Indra Nooyi can handle a big company consisting of 300,000 employees and a mother figure to the nation can handle millions of people in 20 years, I am sure that a woman can handle our project as well as Indra and Dato if we put our trust and cooperation towards her.
Other than that, a quality of a leader is bias-free. It does not only applicable to one gender. Let us take honesty and integrity as the examples of genderless quality of a leader. It clearly does not refer to one specific gender and it was never define that it is applicable to one gender only. Therefore both men and women can be a leader, equally. With Sarah representing women of this company, she can be the role model of the company where other companies can look up to in running a project as a leader. As a saying goes ‘a woman is like a tea bag– you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water”. Therefore gentlemen, let us give women a chance to lead and support the women in the company to make a better change.
