Certainly, female leaders who have made a mark in the business sector have emerged in the last forty years. The other side of the coin reflects the pay gap and promotion struggles being created by inequalities in the labour forces. There have been achievements, but not much has been done. All female managers/leaders should know the full history of inequalities across the world. Given that these traits help to advance their desirability in the business world, they should also understand the qualities of charismatic leadership. Finally, such a profile of a successful female leader can help show the direction any female manager should take.
Introduction
Leadership is the ability to influence a constituency to achieve a vision or goal (Robbins & Judge, 2008). This ability will be formal or informal and relate to managers and non-managers. Historically, the greater prevalence of male leaders than female leaders has meant that most women have had to struggle for respect in the business world. Women continue to fight against inequality in the workplace around the world and strive to gain a place amongst their male counterparts in the prevailing standards of highest leadership. Indeed, a review of the conditions of women in business around the world will provide a better understanding of such struggle (Morrison and von Glinow, 1990).
Earlier in the 1990s, there were only five female CEOs among Fortune 500 industrial and service companies (Feminist Majority Foundation, 1991). Of the highest-paid executives and directors in the largest industrial and service companies, equivalent to 1,300, women accounted for less than .5% (Dodge & Gilroy, 1995). According to a survey in the late 1990s, only 11% of Fortune 500 board members were women (Mann, 1999). In 2010, in the United States, women occupied 51% of professional and managerial positions, while 25% were chief executive officers (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2010). In Fortune 500 companies (2010), women held only 15.4 percent of corporate officer positions, 14.8% of board seats, and 2.4% of CEO positions (Evans, 2011). However, in 2011, women made up 47% of the US workforce (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2011) but only 5.2% of CEO (Catalyst, 2011a) and 16% of board seats (Catalyst, 2011b) of companies. Such statistics serve to beg questions about women’s limited access to key leadership positions (Kawakami et al., 2000). Therefore, women must be charismatic leaders to succeed, so it is important to know what the traits of a charismatic leader are (Bass et al., 2008).
But creating an image of a woman leader can also be useful in understanding women’s participation in business leadership roles. In the present paper, an attempt is made to explain some of the issues prevalent in the literature on women leaders. The main focus revolves around the character traits of women who are trying their best to prove that they have equal chances of becoming successful leaders. In order to proceed, they are historical accounts of charismatic women leaders along with the future outlook of women; ultimately, the unique characteristics of such women leaders will be noticed.
Timeline Of Women In Business
From 1880 to 1920, women in business were seen as workers and managers, flooding the western society in their numbers. The United States was transformed into one of the most important economies in world history by those people. This period improved the roles of women in businesses. Women stepped out of their homes to take junior positions like assistants, laborers and clerks. Sometimes, a woman could simply set up her own company and take the management control in her hand. Typically, these companies are in the women’s business sector and are related to goods or services that are usually purchased by women (Blaszczyk, 2002). For some already defined scholars, while the situation has improved, it still appears that men are more likely to occupy leadership positions and that successful men follow styles that are more masculine. However, this puts women leaders in a difficult position: on the one hand, if they use a masculine leadership style, their subordinates will not like them. On the other hand, the warmer they are and the more feminine their style, the more they give the impression that they are liked, but not respected (Kawakami et al., 2000).
There exists a 60 strong shift from a housewife to a breadwinner. While the majority of leadership in the US and across the world is held by men (Ware 2007, Stelter 2002), US companies began promoting female executives to manager positions and by the end of the decade, nearly half of US businesses were run by women. . In addition, women were found to be gaining education in greater numbers and eventually outnumbering their male counterparts graduating from college each year. Women with higher education qualifications today hold 52% of middle management positions (Robright, 2012). Thus, women are well educated than before; in today’s quota, the majority of graduates comprise people who enroll in industrialized countries, and they tend to go to developing countries (Cheung and Halpern, 2010).
Before 1990, salaries between male and female were really far apart; however, progress has shown progress in eliminating the disparity. But even then, men are more likely to have access to higher promotions than an equally experienced woman (L’Heureux-Barrett & Barnes-Farrell, 1991; Thurlow, 2009). Furthermore, there is ample evidence in the literature that women are not, in most cases, paid according to performance outcomes. Indeed, even in female-dominated markets, such as publishing (where evidence has shown that men do not outperform women, or even have an advantage), men receive more than their fair share of rewards (Kulich et al., 2007).
Most countries support equality in the working environment, but some countries lack such support. A typical example of this is the Arab countries. An article by the UN News Center states that the culture of Arab women deprives them of equal opportunity, even as it has “prevented the Arab nation from becoming a world leader in economy, commerce, and culture” (2006). The Arab woman lacks education; thus, she has no public engagement and is powerless in the business world. There are far fewer women than men among those employed. Reports show that in some Arab countries, women make up less than 10% of the workforce (ElSaifty, 2003). As mentioned, this figure represents the seclusion of women in Arab culture. Some Arab lands still prevent citizenship participation of the female population making a difficult transition to modern practice.
Like any other country in the world struggling to achieve equality, the Arab nation has its women emerging as leaders in both political and business fields. These are the women who have led the movement of other women towards more powerful fields. Some of the famous female Arab leaders are Reem Arka (fashion designer for Neiman Marcus), Sheikha Munira Qubesi (religious leader), and Sabrina Johar (Saudi Arabian journalist). These women are iconic figures in the fight for gender rights in the Arab nations (ElSafty, 2003). They can act as guiding torchbearers for other women walking the path of change and autonomy.
The fight for women’s rights can be traced back to the late 18th century, which paved the way for the rise of women’s movements. There was growing discontent among women over the limitations imposed on their activities by society (Radovic Markovic, 2007). Middle Eastern women—like millions of women around the world—are struggling for equal rights and the opportunity to work to improve their living standards. The notion that most Middle Eastern women are kept in their homes is no longer valid as more and more women are entering the workforce (Farnia, 2000). However, women face gender differences both socially and economically depending on their culture and tradition, which affects their society, parts of which have been explained in previous sections (Javadian and Singh, 2012).
Variations actually emerged between some of the countries in the region (Javadian and Singh, 2012). For example, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Report (GEM, 2008), about a quarter of Iranian entrepreneurs are women. However, the index in support of women entrepreneurs in Iran is low and little is known about Iranian women entrepreneurs (Razavi et al., 2008). As their numbers grow, women in the Islamic Republic of Iran engage in many occupations in the economy and more women are setting up new businesses, although a different picture of women in Muslim countries can be expected (IRIN, 2003). However, while their numbers are growing and Iranian women are more likely than men to receive higher education, Iran still has fewer women entrepreneurs than men (Sarfraz, 2010).
Nevertheless, the literature on the tradition of African American women leadership was largely ignored (Alston, 2012; Bower and Wolverton, 2009), and “African American women leaders are in the minority” (Gable, 2011); according to some research works, there are quite a few common characteristics shared among famous African American women leaders – such as using leadership style as an art, being both rational and emotional, and exerting social influence – which these famous individuals have taken on and helped shape significant forces in their society (Lewis, 2011). This comment reflects the findings of a research by Rosette and Livingston (2012) that these leaders face more leadership style accusations than black men and white women.
Some argue that African women leaders/managers have not received much visibility in the literature (Nkomo and Ng’ambi, 2009, 2013). While as Ozumba and Ozumba (2012) noted, throughout the African continent, there is evidence of African women leaders from the 7th century and beyond (e.g., some Berber queens, Kachin of the Maghreb; 9th century Magajiya of Daura; 16th century queen Amina of Zazzau; and 19th century Nehanda of Zimbabwe). But it is progressing, such as the Feminist Leadership and Movement Building Institute (FLMBI) was founded in 2008 in partnership with African Women Leaders (Ryan Rappaport, et al., 2012).
Based on the structural conditions it can be seen that Asian women leaders generally have an unfavorable socio-political context that inevitably operates on some basis – if not almost entirely – of a predominantly misogynistic gender ideology related to political agency (Fleshenberg, 2008); however, some of them were Indira Gandhi, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Benazir Bhutto, Sheikh Hasina and of course Khaleda Zia, who are considered the most active leaders on the continent (Choudhary, 2009). These women leaders engaged political affairs as a precondition for change in society (Shuli, 2011).
On gender issues, research conducted with discrimination against women leaders and the impact on policing, appears to be progressive in Europe compared to the United States. In principle, discrimination occurs and prevents position leadership for women throughout Europe. The absence of women in high positions of leadership needs to be analyzed. At the same time, stereotypes of women have become more favorable in some European countries, where women are considered more active and strong, while men are stereotyped as less active and strong. According to some scholars, a transformational model of collaborative leadership is most favored by women, and is in fact very effective, especially in large organizations. At the same time, we take into account the fact that emphasizing the “special” or “unique” leadership style of women leaders has its own dangers as it can reinforce gender biases.
Overall, even though women and men are considered to be similar with respect to leadership style and behavior, research on this topic over the past three decades has still made it a “subject of considerable complexity” (e.g. Eagly and Johnson 1990). Note as Ware (2007) mentioned in this context: “Efforts to clarify this issue can be divided into two distinct schools of thought outlined in the following: (i) researchers who propose minimizing differences; and (ii) investigators who support stable differences between the sexes”. There could be a consensus that women face more obstacles to becoming successful leaders than men (Eagly and Johanson-Schmidt, 2001). However, we acknowledge the two schools in this paper.
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