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Bongiwe Nkomazana on Gender
Women have made significant strides, we all see that. To even be able to have access to a newspaper or the internet at work or at home as a woman means that we have been lucky to be in a world that is different from the one the women that came before us lived in.

Today we have basic civil rights meaning that we now enjoy unlimited career choices and we have the liberty to chase our dreams no matter what they look like.

What however remains is that women are yet to make it to the top in most professions in the world.

Men still hold most leadership positions across the board, from head pastor at church, vice-chancellor at a university, chief executive officer at an organisation and president of a country.

We appreciate the role that men are playing that has kept these institutions, organisations and even countries running but as women we feel we have the capacity to head some of these institutions or organisations.

I want us to imagine a situation where we have women occupying most of these positions.

Just try to picture how that organisation or even that country would be. I will give you a minute.

I love how numbers are able to just summarise a story and emphasise a point. According to research, in March 2017, there were only 15 female world leaders in office, eight of whom were their countries’ first women in power.

While the number of female leaders excluding monarchs and figurehead leaders, has more than doubled since 2000, these women still represent fewer than 10 percent of 193 UN member states. Just 10 percent.

I have read and heard a lot of discussions around how the world is not ready for female presidents and the thought that keeps popping up from the back of my mind is how women are already running the world.

In fact, women have been at it for centuries and for us, as the world, to convince ourselves that we are not ready for them to occupy formal offices of leadership is a big lie.

So, to try and counter the idea that women cannot be presidents just yet, I will put across two very simple reasons why more women should be in power.

Ethics. The lack of them is directly linked to issues of corruption, violence and every other negativity that we see in politics and in all the industries that make our economy run, such as finance, manufacturing, technology and agriculture.

Maybe my memory fails me but I cannot think of any female that has been involved in any ethical scandals. If you do come up with any names, it is a fact that they are nothing you can compare to the number of males involved in similar scandals.

Women are generally more aware of and in tune with their conscience hence can immediately differentiate what is right from wrong.

Our natural upholding of ethics means that a woman leader has higher chances of maintaining honesty and transparency.

Yes, we are aware that power does change an individual and there is no guarantee that a woman will resist the temptations that come along with it but like

I mentioned before, women have no track record of being corrupted by power so they should be given powers to run offices.

Studies show that women are more likely than men to possess the leadership qualities that are associated with success.

That is, women are more transformational than men and I totally agree.

We live in the new millennium and millennials, also known as generation Y, are very different from generation Z.

In earlier times a leader needed to be intimidating and used fear to get the team to comply and get the job done. People nowadays prefer to co-create culture as opposed to it being forced upon them.

Leaders that intend to achieve any success today need to take up a transformational leadership style.

This is where a leader works with a team to identify needed change, creating a vision to guide the change through inspiration.

Women do just that. We care about developing our followers.

Rather than condemning them for say poor performance, women choose to listen to them and stimulate them to think outside the box.

A female leader would absolutely keep the respect for her team and/or subordinates thus a more motivated team and/or subordinates.

Think Michelle Obama as a leader in every church, university organisation and country…yes we can.

On the not so pretty side, I am still always surprised by the extent that women in power will abuse that power to keep other women in their place.

You know how they say if you give a woman enough power she will use it against other women, not men.

This is another factor that has kept the number of women in leadership positions at a minimum. We tend to be our own biggest enemies.

You will find that many females in power will try to break the other women down emotionally and psychologically through constant verbal attacks and dismissals.

Allow me to be very honest here ladies. Another reason why only a few of us get leadership positions is that we are too modest or timid.

The idea of a leader to us is a man yet we even run the lives of those men in some cases.

I have met men in my profession whom I feel I was just as good or even better than them.

Who has better chances of climbing up that career ladder between me with my humility and the pompous male who is recommending himself from the rooftops?

My point is that we should not be afraid of our excellence, instead we should sit at the table and make sure we make just as much noise there as our male counterparts.

When we stop underestimating our abilities, the rest of the world will open up more to female leadership.