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Gender Awareness Neccessary for Good Leadership

Culture, religion, race and social class are all very important but there is nothing that dominates your identity more than your gender. Gender concerns us all, men and women alike. Gender awareness is necessary for good leadership but unless you see the patterns from a deep individual level nothing will ever change.

No one in the audience was unaffected by the wise words from senior leadership consultant Barbro Dahlbom- Hall, who has written several books on gender and leadership and trained many world leaders in gender awareness. In her very capturing lecture
“Leadership and Personality” she shared some of her lifelong experience and deep knowledge in the field of gender perspective, leading to many emotional discussions and personal reflections in the group.

— Gender awareness is about knowledge, not emotions, she stressed. But working with gender is very threatening for both men and women. Gender is connected with control and power balance and very often there is a gender issue underneath a bitter conflict, not least in the medical/academic sector. — Gender conflicts hurt because they always have an emotional impact. Some of the worst conflicts I have ever seen in my work have been in the medical/ academic sector, she declared. Apart from having trained many doctors Barbro Dahlbom-Hall also has personal experience from the medical world. She has suffered from rheumatoid arthritis for many years and lead educational leadership programmes for Swedish rheumatologist. She also told the audience that many of her female friends from childhood, the ones that were very bright in school, became doctors.

— When I followed their careers over the years and compared them with my own, I saw stagnation, not development. This made me so frustrated that I decided to write my first book – “Teaching doctors to lead” – which is about gender and leadership in the medical world, said Barbro Dahlbom- Hall who is also MD honoris causa of the Uppsala University Hospital. Gender affects our personalities, behaviour and actions from the moment we are born. — Bright girls talk a lot when they are about four years old. After that they usually are suppressed whereas little boys are encouraged to take space but on the other hand they are seldom allowed to show any feelings. To be praised a “real” girl has to be happy,smiling, obedient and loyal. She is allowed to be clever but never brilliant and she should never question anything. If women talk about 30 percent as much as men, the men – but also the women – usually get the impression that women are “taking over”.

To understand gender patterns is to be in a continuous process. Everything cannot be explained and it takes time, training and reflection to develop awareness, Barbro Dahlbom- Hall emphasized. — For a leader it is important to see both your own individual pattern AND the general pattern. There is not only ONE way to be a man or a woman.
You have to find your own best way to integrate gender awareness in your identity and in your leadership. You must learn to lead yourself before you can lead others. — And to become a successful leader you must learn how to deal with gender conflicts. Barbro Dahlbom-Hall stressed many times that society needs to be changed by women and men
together, in a respectful dialogue. — Todays leadership model is male but we are in a period of big change now. The weakest leaders are those who are afraid of women. Therefore its important to work with and focus gender awareness training on men to
prevent them from being so scared of women that they will try to stop them.

Accordingly, her latest book is called

“Teaching men to live – the dilemma of leadership”.? For more info on Barbro Dahlbom-Hall and her work please see www.dahlbom-hall.se

Barbro Dahlbom-Hall, MD honoris causa