- Women face bias about their leadership style precisely because they bring qualities that are both necessary and differentiating: intuition, sharp perception, sensitivity, strong focus, and the ability to handle multiple responsibilities at once.
- A woman seeking promotion generally has to work considerably harder than a male counterpart to demonstrate she is better at what she does, and that is how the market still operates regardless of whether the decision-maker is a man or a woman.
- Because management roles have been dominated by masculine references, many women adopted more masculine behaviors at work, from attire to how they communicated and made decisions.
- The feminine dimension that Carl Gustav Jung called the anima is what most needs to be developed in any human being, which makes exploring both the decisive side and the sensitive side a path toward the completeness leadership requires.
Despite so many positive attributes, women are still not valued as fully as they could be. According to current research in Brazil, women's compensation is lower than men's even at equivalent levels of performance. On top of that, women face bias regarding their leadership style, precisely because they bring distinctly feminine qualities that are both necessary and differentiating: intuition, sharp perception, sensitivity, strong focus, and the ability to handle multiple responsibilities at once.
In most cases, a woman who wants to advance in a hierarchy and stand out against a colleague in a selection or promotion process must work considerably harder to demonstrate that she is better at what she does than her male counterpart. Whether or not we are conscious of this dynamic, it is how the market still operates, decides, and promotes, regardless of whether those decisions come from male or female figures.
It is common to hear men say that era is behind us. Is it really? If we think about it logically, we realize that, unfortunately, it is not. Data and facts confirm this. In Brazil, the average pay gap between men and women is 27 percent. Ten years ago it stood at 36.4 percent, according to a recent study published by ISTOÉ magazine. In the United States, of the 500 largest companies ranked by Fortune, female executives account for 20 percent of board seats and just 4 percent of CEO positions. Both Brazilian and American women, even with more years of education than their male peers, receive lower salaries.
Why do masculine references still shape leadership?
Because of the overwhelming number of masculine references in management and leadership roles, many women, in order to be accepted, consciously or not, adopted more masculine behaviors at work, from their attire to the way they communicated and made decisions. Today the landscape is slowly shifting. Women have been gradually claiming more space in the workplace, and they are also doing more to embrace and express their feminine qualities: sensitivity, intuition, sharp perception, and systemic vision, among others.
It is worth pausing to appreciate the importance of these qualities in corporate environments that are so starved of them. If we look a little deeper, we notice that the feminine dimension, which psychiatrist and analyst Carl Gustav Jung called the "anima," is precisely what most needs to be developed in any human being.
What makes a more complete leader?
We need to shed our biases, revisit deeply held values and beliefs that no longer serve us, and then explore the full range of our potential as human beings: the pragmatic, objective, and decisive side, as well as the sensitive, intuitive, perceptive, and even the loving side. This can be an excellent path toward the completeness that leadership truly requires.
The short answer
Feminine leadership is not a softer variant of leadership but the set of qualities corporate environments are most starved of: sensitivity, intuition, sharp perception, and systemic vision. Women have long been pushed to suppress those qualities in order to be accepted in workplaces shaped by masculine references, and they are still paid less and judged for their style even at equivalent performance. The more useful conclusion is that the feminine dimension Jung called the anima needs developing in every human being, so leadership becomes complete only when the decisive side and the sensitive side are both available.