Last week, in Azusa Pacific University’s student newspaper The Clause, Laura Kinney wrote, “Women have the choice of leadership” (10/15). Her opinion article was in response to the ever-clever Anna Quindlen’s 10/13 Newsweek column “The Leadership Lid.” In this article, Quindlen makes the valid point that women are still an anomaly in leadership—only 20 percent of leaders in business, journalism and politics are women. At a global level, our female representation in politics ranks 69th, putting us behind Iraq and North Korea.
How have we managed to stifle female leadership more so than countries that bear Bush’s “axis of evil” stamp?
In The Clause article, Kinney negates Quindlen’s well-reasoned argument and instead argues the low numbers don’t attest to discrimination, or any other –ism, but rather because of choice. Women have simply chosen not to lead.
While there’s no virtue in diminishing women who genuinely have made that choice, I don’t believe women have willingly ceded the opportunity to lead. Or at least, I certainly hope that more than 20 percent of workingwomen aspire beyond what the glass ceiling has to offer.
I offer a simple example to make my point; last year during APU’s student government elections, three very capable women and one very capable man ran against a student body president. Today, we are lead by that very capable male. I believe all three of those women had every intention of leading our student body.
Until we stop justifying the absence of female leadership while offering up the “token” women leaders—ahem, Sarah Palin, Meg Whitman, and Katie Couric—as cheap examples of equal opportunity, women’s mobility will remain at a stalemate.
This letter was printed in APU's student paper, The Clause.
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