Women Leadership: Challenges and Opportunities

Women Leadership
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1. Introduction
Organizations cannot run by itself. It needs capital, human resource, and other
resources. They all are equally important but to utilize it effectively and efficiently,
it needs a good leader. “Leadership is like the Abominal Snowman, whose
footprints are everywhere but who is nowhere to be seen”- Bennis and Nanus
1997. There are various theoretical approaches of leadership, which define the
leader and follower relationship. The leaders can motivate and guide their
colleague. This quality makes them stand out among all. “A manager takes people
where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily
want to go, but ought to be.” Rosalynn Carter, U.S first lady (b.1927). Being a
leader, they must have vision; for which she must know how to operate, utilize
resources and achieve organizational goals. Being a manager does not mean going
alone but it means taking everyone with you by guiding them. As per the
structure of organization, different leadership style is used. For example: In
military, autocratic leadership style is used where top position take all the
decision and other follows it. One of the most talked topics is -Leaders are born,
not made. Regarding this everyone has different opinion and as per their belief,
they hire people. If they believe leaders are made then they will give that person
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training, teach them and if they believe leaders are born then they will look at
certain quality of person. As per the leadership qualities, people will either follow
you or hate you. In this essay, I will be talking about women leadership. The
number of women leading the organization is increasing as women are breaking
the stereotype; that women should be working in kitchen and man should be
working at job and provide at home. Women leadership is taking the organization
in another great level.
2. Analysis of the first article
2.1 Literature review analysis
The article “Gender & Disability in Male Dominated Occupation” Sang; K.J.C,
Richards, J & Marks, A. (2016) explains understanding of the experiences of
disabled men and women in male-dominated workplace. Conceptualizing gender
as social relational provides opportunities for the analysis of how the social places
of man and woman are related to the ‘doing gender’ of masculinity and femininity
(Power et al., 59). Research has been done as it showed as how people with
invisible impairment were treated as non-disabled and visible impairment people
were treated as disable and looked upon differently. They did not get the
opportunities as other in work. However, the invisible impairment people were
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not looked as disable so they were treated as same as others, because of which
they do not want their impairments render them as a subject of jokes. Due to
male dominated workplace, important and challenging tasks were given to men.
The result also showed people do not apply for senior position, as they feared of
getting more work pressure, giving presentations, leading others. Some of them
also feared of making the mistake so they try to avoid such situations, as they do
not want to be the center of gossip.
The study aimed at understanding the high levels of disability that is encountered
by the male dominated sections in diverse working environments. The study
enumerated a model of disability, which is not dependent on the social
construction or the experiences that are gathered by the disabled. Therefore, the
study aimed at portraying the different experiences that are gathered by the
genders in a working environment. The purpose of undertaking the review is to
identify the differences in the experiences of the genders in the different working
conditions.
2.2 Assessment of methodology used
The study made use of different semi- structured interviews for the seven focus
groups. The research methodology that was utilized in the study was qualitative in
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