From LaShawn Barber: Are Women Leaders Against Nature? Her answer is “Yes.” Here’s why: Nurturing, much more so than risk-taking, is in the DNA of woman. It’s just plain difficult, practically-speaking, if not impossible, for a woman to do both…

My main problem with you is that you give some examples of women doing a poor job of leading and then imply it is because they are women and not because they are just poor leaders.

If that isn’t the case then what was the point of you giving an example of a woman being a poor leader?

See, that’s the problems with this. You’re discussing averages, not individuals. For example. I have pet lizards, and I grow bugs for them for food. (Usually not roaches (landlords frown on that), but I prefer them to crickets, since the crickets usually get free and chirp all night.) I also used to keep rats for my pet snake. Spiders, well, I don’t run from them. But they aren’t fun pets or fun pet food, so they mostly lurk around outside. My husband’s obsessed with taking pictures of them, though.

Oh, and I used to work on my own car, back when everything wasn’t computerized. Replaced a few quarterpanels, a headlight, a window or two. Put in new spark plugs and a distributor cap… It’s nice to be able to fix your own car. It annoys me that I can’t do it anymore, since cars are too full of chips.

Anyway, my point is the average doesn’t matter. You don’t vote for the average man, either.

I agree that the pool will be small, because of obligations to children, lack of interest, or lack of ability. Still…. I’d say the same for men. They just havea slightly bigger pool of acceptable presidential candidates.

Heck I think anyone who wants to be president is insane.

Sometimes I get emails or comments on this site that seem to question whether sexism really exists in the U.S. today. I am not a sociologist so it is hard to say how widespread various kinds of sexist attitudes may

There are two or three different aspects at work here.

Firstly there is the impact of children. There doesn’t seem to be any way around the fact that women do most of the child-rearing and that in doing so they lose the opportunity to do a lot of things because raising a child is a tough job and practically a full time one. Or at least one that makes it really hard to have a second full time job (i.e. running the country) at the same time.

However once the kids have flown the nest I can’t see any reason why a middle aged woman (say in her 50s) would have any time handicap. Of course she might well have missed the boat in other respects because the tiem she spent raising her kids is the time that men spent starting the climb up the greasy pole.

On the other hand the fact that many/most women are nurtuting rather than risk taking or protective does not mean that all are. The types and nature of human brain may correlate with gender but the correlation isn’t 100%, however I can see that the pool of suitable females for president is likely to be enormoously smaller that the pool of suitable male candidates (FWIW musing on this kind of disparity was what got Larry Summers in trouble).

Between the two I’m not sure if her gender should automatically rule out a woman as leader, but I agree that it will rule out the vast majority of women and will almost certianly rule out the 100% of the “feminine” women.

There is another point which is that I believe that an unmarried (or unhappily married) leader will be at a disadvantage because he won’t have a person with whom he can truly relax and just chill out, and if the spouse is a nurturing sort that will improve the quality of the relaxation time. I don’t think that this requires the leader to be a heterosexual male – I can see that both a gay male or a woman of the right sort and with the right longterm partner would be just as good. For example although I don’t think he was precisely “nurturing”, Dennis Thatcher certainly acted like a stay at home wife to Margaret and I’m sure provided her with the same relaxation zone. But again this is going to be uncommon. The odds of a woman or gay male having this kind of partner is far lower than the odds of a heterosexual male having one.

I’m not against the concept of a female US president – I lived under Mrs T in England and appreciated it – but I think that the chances of such a person showing up is very very low. For every Mrs Thatcher-like woman there are hundreds of men who have the same qualifications.

As someone who spent three years with you going through Law School, I can be open minded to what you say. I am the career woman with two young children et. al. And for me, all it does is breed mediocrity in both realms. It is that much harder. While necessity requires me to continue to work, I do feel the children of stay at home moms get more from their moms than mine do from me. furthermore, at work, I can not give it my all like I once did. At times, I do — but not always.

As to leaders– yes, women can be leaders but they have to be the type that can be cutthroat and ruthless. They are out there. But most women are socially conditioned to be nurturing etc. When women do not fit the mold- they are labelled “bitch”.

I don’t have to prove it. Look at history, or have you revised it to suit your agenda?

I’m not saying EVERY woman cannot lead. There are exceptions: Margeret Thatcher, Elizabeth I, Joan of Arc… but the MAJORITY of good leaders are men. It’s biology.

Prove that by simple fact I have a vagina and produce estrogen I can’t be a leader or shouldn’t be? Maybe you know me or something?

Also prove to me that NO man in a leadership position has ever demoralized or committed acts that have produced a negative. Show me this one thing and I’ll concede to your opinion. Tell me in your heart you believe NO man in leadership has EVER done any of these things that you seemed to think only women leaders do, and I’ll call you delusional or unread, but I’ll concede.

Otherwise this is crap meant to put women in their place because of their biology and reduce us to nothing but walking dumb Victorian society swooning wombs. Or throw the bible on us and say we should keep our mouths shut and follow a man and pop out babies(what if a woman is infertile?). Sometimes a man will lead a woman straight to hell.

Then they take a few examples and paint us all with a loaded broad brush.

And sorry I won’t deal with it. So I guess you’ll have to deal with that.

I don’t have a problem with people viewing me as a woman as incapable of certain things. But at least have a reason that is sound and thought out. Lashawns opinion seemed logical and educated and she didn’t use silly “Well because this one woman out of the millions in the world, did this or that, no woman can do A. ” and she based her opinion(which she stated is an opinion only) on what her desires are in a leader. Mainly manliness and physical stature (which compared to men, women don’t have)

Women are the most egregious perpetrators of political correctness. In the old days it was called being “missish”. Hypersensitive.

That Major, who is a woman, demoralized her troops by caving in to dhimmitude. Bad leadership. The CO of Abu Ghraib, by the way, was a woman.

Your statement about men causing more grief and suffering is irrelevant. We are talking about leadership. Testosterone beats estrogen anytime when it comes to leadership and courage. Deal with it.

Some of your post got garbled in transmission. I’m suspecting you’re European.

“my,my,my. What a lot of power words get thrown about in this type of discussion ( “ordained”, etc.) and what a lot of cultural views are aired without so much as a “why do we think this?”. ”

I think that up until the mid to late 1800s, gender roles were fairly well defined, based on the Biblical model. In the 1860s, Darwin published his “Origin of Species,” which basically led people to believe that humans are nothing more than glorified apes. Though there isn’t a shred of archaelogical evidence for Darwin’s theory even today, Western civilization still remains “deep in the mire of folly” in basing its morals on the implications of Darwin’s theory.

On another front, your European philosophers began to attack the inerrancy and authority of the Bible. Though these debunkers have hitherto been debunked, the damage has been done: morality isn’t based on an absolute standard (the Bible), but on a sliding scale of cultural values and “what’s good for me.” Of course, these European critics were really just giving the same argument the serpent gave in Eden, “Hath God not said?” But no one paid attention to that. Suffice it to say, evidence abounds as to both the authority and inerrancy of Scripture, but our culture has lost interest in reading such evidence.

American values are largely based on the last remaining hauntings of the Bible being preached here. Moral and cultural relevatism still isn’t as bad here as it is in Europe. So when you ask why we believe in certain things here in America, that’s why.

Until someone is able to overturn the Bible’s explanation as to how we got here and what we’re here for, it remains the authority. So far, no one has been able to do so.

Why do “women make excellent Consultants, Advisors, and Teachers…

….none of which is ‘leadership’.”

No?

I understand the main point of the post, and I wouldn’t argue it… if honest I go in the same direction without thinking too much about it. But maybe it is time to think more, and gut-react a little less. You know the most pertinent question for me in all this? Why are some of the nations which are led by women some of the most conservative in views about women, generally, while the general view in the USA is far more restrictive in what it desires in a leader, although we have arguably one of the most open for women?

I don’t like the “power behind the throne” idea, frankly. It speaks of manipulative means being substituted for overt ones, and all that implies about a culture and a system of thought. I much more like the “hand that rocks the cradle” idea, although that doesn’t address the role of women in leadership, just that there are more modes of power than being in front of the microphone and on the board.

I think that view is only relevant to ‘coddled’ city girls. Does this hold true for all the millions of woman who live in tribes and villages where nature up close and personal is part of the daily life? Hunting grubs, skinning and boning, cooking animals that don’t come in packets? Or is your argument that God only made modern Western women to run a mile at the sight of a snake?

Regards,

JohnD