Midnight thoughts
INFRASTAR project is
teaching us how to communicate our science and research. It requires sharing
our Ph.D. experience in social media (Facebook Twitter LinkedIn ,http://infrastar.eu/)
and our research in open access sources (https://zenodo.org/record/2553561#.XOCGxcgzY2w).
Communication makes us visible, makes
our ideas and opinions transparent.
We spend a lot of time
communicating with each other. Sometimes we feel uncomfortable, embarrassed,
and sometimes, exited, loved and belonged.
You can guess now the topic of my
writing: communication and particularly normal life conversations.
Lastly, I was discussing with one
of my friends how to lead a discussion, and how to make the first step during
work or friend meetings to start or change the conversation topic.
We were wondering why men lead
mostly the discussions during dates and in normal life conversations more than
women.
Is it a cultural thing, or a men
innate skill?
In many cultures, we say that ‘a
man falls in love through his eyes, a woman through her ears’, which make women
in society ‘good looking’ and men ‘good speakers’.
But……
Is leading discussions an innate
or acquired skill?
In the past, a polite European girl was a girl who does not raise her
voice or defend ‘fiercely’ her opinions in front of men. In a lot of cultures,
the voice of women has a sexual connotation. Women are then forbidden to raise
their voice (in Arabie saoudite …) or sing (in Iran…). Moreover, in many
religions, women should not say ‘no’ to their husbands.
We can be sure that in many cultures, feminity was and still confused
with subjugation and weakness.
Men in leadership positions are considered charming and strong.
While women in leadership positions are considered ruthless and
aggressive.
Maybe our grandparents, our
parents or even us were confronted with this culture or its ‘remains’. And as
much as we know that this is changing from generation to another, there is
still a lot of work to be done.
This cultural trait can explain
why men still lead discussions more than women during decisive meetings. Even
if women can have high positions and strong opinions, they find themselves
eliminated by culture (so they don’t even try to lead discussions because it
was normal in their society or education that men talk, and women listen and
‘laugh’), or eliminated by statistics in a male-dominated workplace (They find
themselves in meetings full of men: when they talk no one listens because to
listen to a light voice inside a lot of hard voices, silence is needed).
What to do? Why and how to bring more women in leadership
roles?
How about changing what is normal,
let’s acquire this skill, let’s break the glass!
And, why not to find a mentor, it
can be the boss, a college, a friend, a family member, a man that can make
silence for you that you can speak. Good men are everywhere!
During the training school in
Nantes, we had a lecture by Ariane Dupont (Director of the Sorbonne School of Economics at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon
Sorbonne) where she presented some examples of some societal
behaviors and how they were affecting genders differently (find lectures in http://trainingschool.infrastar.eu/
).
I was wondering if this cultural
trait can affect women in leader positions: Why still we have a small number of
women leaders?
Today we need both women and men to
lead. They can present different leadership abilities and qualities that
complete each other:
Men leaders deny emotional
vulnerability to reduce stress, they are hierarchal, care more about larger needs
and encourage less feeling, more actions and they collaborate competitively. [Louann
Brizendine]
And
Women leaders resolve emotional
conflicts to reduce stress, they are oriented toward participative and group
problem solve and verbally encourages and praises, and they collaborate
connectively. [Louann Brizendine]
In families societies and
companies, we need both for balanced leadership and good decision making.
Midnight Aalborg, Danemark |
Holy Moly! those are some powerful words
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