Women's Organizational Leadership

Women’s Organizational Leadership in Crisis

by Robin M. Chandler, Ph.D.

The challenge of the 21^st century is the challenge of the ‘gender line’. That ‘line’ is being eliminated because humanity’s destiny is justice. Politically and socially, women’s organizational leadership is at the crossroads where a new civilization is unfolding. Statistical and qualitative research for many decades suggests that a shift to women-centered leadership and organizational management provides transformative insights for a new world order and those with spiritual insight can see it coming like a speed train not stopping at any stations.

The qualities reified by a male-dominated patriarchy provide ample evidence of outmoded patterns of behavior across nations and among some of our most humble local organizations on the planet. In my own work as a gender specialist in many countries the narrative of women’s empowerment is a beacon of more humane approaches to principled action. It is already becoming a ‘welcoming partnership’ among those who embrace the essential equality of men and women after centuries of patriarchal failures.

In Liberia the story of AFELL (Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia), documented in my book Women, war, and violence: Personal perspectives and global activism explains how the principle of the independent investigation of truth lead to female-inspired strategies for reducing gender based violence. A judicial system, male-dominated and backward thinking, that failed to recognize rape as a crime drove women attorneys to break away from the Liberian Bar Association to form AFELL. What resulted was sweeping consciousness-raising, innovation, and social change-not that the fight is over there. This occurred because women’s political thinking, when energized by an inherently female empowerment, is different from men’s. However, the spiritual qualities that drove AFELL to novel thinking were empathy, moral courage, endurance, and a willingness to engage female austerity measures to get things done. The combination of substantive self-worth, a belief in gender equality, and spiritual approaches to change is straight out of Mandela’s playbook. Recognition of the oneness of humanity is not just a policy phrase, but also an actionable weapon in the battle against mediocrity and complacence. Confronting the accepted mythology that rape was not a crime, even among credentialed, cosmopolitan judges in Liberia, opened the path for decentralized reporting stations around the country, elemental human rights education for women and men, and legal representation for those targeted by endemic crises of sexual assault and GBV. The change narrative extends to the nation’s controversial rape law making it a bailable offense. Under the female leadership of former President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, elected on a platform of reducing GBV and government corruption, women lawyers, market leaders, and emerging local leaders around the country were emboldened within the empowerment enterprise. Even the streets of Monrovia, lined with giant billboards and signage such as ‘Real men don’t rape’ or a depiction of a rape with a giant “X” overlay became part of the gender equality climate necessary when a country is under siege and ripe for change.

By 2019 the OECD’s SIGI (Social Institutions & Gender Index) reported a tough climb regarding discrimination in the family, restricted physical integrity, restricted access to productive and financial resources, and restricted civil liberties. These same categories of high-medium-low performance metrics are necessary metrics in the fight for gender freedom in many nations.

In Brazil, Irmandade da Boa Morte (“Sisterhood of the Good Death”) emerged as an elder women’s community-based organization in Bahia as slavery was ending in 1888 and was an organizational retention from ancient African women’s pre-colonial social organizations. Women everywhere have always been organizing. Through syncretic religious practices that preserved cultural identity and an empathic service mission to maintain family unity by buying the freedom of non-manumitted family members, the sisters formulated a structural and strategic code that was centered in spiritual practice and community service.

Many countries are now modeling new and systemically significant thought and behavioral shifts that demonstrate the real possibilities of social justice and peace when women step up their game. Each provide lessons on a brand of conscienscious spirituality that has animated women’s identity for centuries, sometimes latent, other times local legend.

In the final analysis, the persistence of retaliation from old school hyper masculinity will continue to ignite the flames of misogyny. That is a fact. The weaponization of masculine modes of aggressive authoritarianism is resilient, mindlessly vengeful, and a ‘blind imitation’ of normative, unexamined masculinity. But women have always fought back; the stories just got silenced. Sometimes those battles were collaborations with men of insight and understanding. Now our terrain of battle is pointing towards the future, the distant horizon, glimmering and radiant. My personal idols are a small group of school children from Jaipur, India I have blogged about (http://peacedoors.blogspot.com/). They became a relentless and united team of child activists - girls and boys - who pursued the freedom of a classmate doomed to early marriage, clear evidence that we can be an admirable species and that when women and men are on the same page, the results are magical.

During the 2020 Covid crisis women public health workers and women political leaders have lead spiritually and have done so by simply being women of moral courage. We must make these stories legendary. We must make women and girls proud to women, not by emulating men, but by attacking the messaging that women and girls have less inherent value than men and boys and that they/we are incapable of power. Removing ourselves from entrenched ‘gender tracks’ will not be easy or swift. We must invest all of our resources, spiritual and economic, in gender equality. By redefining glory and power as service to humanity, girls and women can and do turn the course of history toward social justice and peace and freedom is the prize. The spiritual shift is already happening, perhaps imperceptively, but justice will exist and equity is emerging from under the ‘yoke of oppression’.