Women and Leadership Report

Women and Leadership Report

Upon the advent of the inclusion of women in leadership, there have been various discussions and research about their “preparedness” and ability to “adapt” to the highly recommended leadership styles in terms of language mannerism. This discourse builds upon the numerous research and criticism on effective leadership language. Drawing from a few videos from the Ted Talk website, we will evaluate the videos and tally them against the various schools of thought highlighted by Judith Baxter and Deborah Cameron, both of whom have a wide range of influential work on gendered communication.

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Methodology

A total of 8 videos from the Ted Talk website were analysed and lessons drawn in evaluating women leadership language. The speakers in the videos are female leaders in their own making who are from a wide range of professional backgrounds.

Introduction

There are numerous leadership training material that suggests that women, more than men, are likely to experience difficulty in public speaking rendering them as less assertive in public and professional fora. Cameron (2012) points out that while Assertive Training, introduced in the 1950s, was aimed at impressing on the trainees to be more socially competent by communicating their needs directly, in order to avoid aggression and passivity, this module was affiliated to feminine behaviour which psychologists used interchangeably with unassertiveness (Cameron, 2012).

Findings

Any specific pattern or verbal cue cannot be generalized to all women or men due to the fact that people choose to speak in a particular manner owing to their background and experiences and not because they are one homogenous group (Cameron, 2012). Maysoon Zayid, who is the founder of Maysoon’s kids, in one of her public speeches at the TED talk forum, constantly employs the occasional use of jokes. This can be interpreted as masculine communication – if the gendered communication guide is anything to go by.

Female communication on the other hand is expected to play out just as her counterpart – Sheryl Sandberg takes her time to listen to the facilitator without interjecting. This, in my view, was necessary in order for the audience to easily follow the discussion. She persuades her listeners to aim for the highest attainable goals by mentioning how she overcame her own failed marriage, and handled missing her daughter, who at one time did not want her to leave the house. It is apparent that women have numerous roles – including childcare (Micere Njuki et al., 2016). Critics of this approach would regard this as purely a female leadership communication style, whereas I view this as the most appropriate approach she needed to use in order to inspire her congregation at the moment. This social-emotional concept was important since she only had a few minutes to impact the audience.

Rupal Patel, in her interview at the TED Talk employed the use of a direct speech by telling her audience that she wanted them to take a listen. She also uses a rising intonation when employing the use of a tag question when telling her audience that she needs to give them a quick speech science lesson, then she says, “ok”. The tag question is by Lakoff (1975) described as a female only anecdote. Contrary to the “woman language used” Patel had earlier used “neutral language” by using an affirmative term “want”.

Conclusion and recommendation

The findings provide clear indications that men and women are at liberty to employ whichever leadership language they deem appropriate at the time. The discourse on male and female leadership is broad but as evidenced by the videos, leaders have been seen to use transformational and transactional styles – also perceived as male or female styles – whenever the need arose. I therefore see that there is no significant influence of gender on leadership styles. In designing a training course for women in effective leadership, I would suggest a module which cuts across both male and female-perceived speech styles and have women understand that no specific leadership style.

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