Women and Leadership: Real Lives, Real Lessons

An inspirational and practical book written by two high-achieving women, sharing the experience and advice of some of our most extraordinary women leaders, in their own words.

As a result of their broad experience on the world stage in politics, economics and global not-for-profits, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Julia Gillard have some strong ideas about the impact of gender on the treatment of leaders.

Women and Leadership takes a consistent and comprehensive approach to teasing out what is different for women who lead. Almost every year new findings are published about the way people see women leaders compared with their male counterparts. The authors have taken that academic work and tested it in the real world. The same set of interview questions were put to each leader in frank face-to-face interviews. Their responses were then used to examine each woman’s journey in leadership and whether their lived experiences were in line with or different from what the research would predict.

Women and Leadership presents a lively and readable analysis of the influence of gender on women’s access to positions of leadership, the perceptions of them as leaders, the trajectory of their leade...

ISBN-13: 9780262543828

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: MIT Press

Publication Date: 02-15-2022

Pages: 336

Product Dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

Julia Gillard was sworn in as the 27th Prime Minister of Australia on 24 June 2010 and served in that office until June 2013. Ms. Gillard is the first woman to ever serve as Australia’s Prime Minister or Deputy Prime Minister.Ms. Gillard delivered nation-changing policies including reforming Australian education at every level, creating an emissions trading scheme to combat climate change, improving health care, commencing the nation’s first ever national scheme to care for people with disabilities, addressing the gender pay gap for social and community sector workers, and delivering an apology to all those who had suffered through the practice of forced adoptions.Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is an economist and international development expert with over 30 years of experience. She served twice as Nigeria’s Finance Minister, from 2003-2006, 2011-2015, and briefly as Foreign Minister, the first woman to hold both positions. She spent a 25-year career at the World Bank as a development economist, rising to the No.2 position of Managing Director. Dr. Okonjo-Iweala has been ranked by Fortune as one of the 50 Greatest World Leaders in 2015, by Forbes as one of the Top 100 Most Powerful Women in the World consecutively for four years, by Time as one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2014, and by the UK Guardian as one of the Top 100 Women in the World in 2011. Dr Okonjo-Iweala holds a Bachelor’s in Economics from Harvard University and a PhD in Regional Economics and Development from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is an Angelopoulos Global Public Leader at Harvard University Kennedy School, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received over fifteen honorary degrees, including from Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, Tel Aviv University and Trinity College, Dublin. She is the author of Fighting Corruption is Dangerous: The Story Behind the Headlines and Reforming the Unreformable: Lessons from Nigeria.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Women and Leadership is a powerful reminder that there is no limit to what women can accomplish when we have the chance. Written by two celebrated, trailblazing leaders, it is a deeply personal portrait of the obstacles women in politics have overcome and the barriers we still face. Every page of this book is brimming with candor, wisdom and humor—leaving the reader rightfully convinced that while women still have to try a little harder and fight a little longer, sooner or later we will get the job done.”
—Madeleine K. Albright, the first woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State

Table of Contents

Prologue Why are we writing this book? 1 
1 Doing the numbers 19
2 Our framework 27
3 Pathways to power: Introducing our women leaders 40
4 Hypothesis one: You go girl 107
5 Hypothesis two: It's all about the hair 128
6 Hypothesis three: Shrill or soft - the style conundrum 153
7 Hypothesis four: She's a bit of a bitch 174 
8 Hypothesis five: Who's minding the kids? 191
9 Hypothesis six: A special place in hell - do women really support women? 211
10 Hypothesis seven: Modern-day Salem 234
11 Hypothesis eight: The role-modelling riddle 254
12 The stand-out lessons from eight lives and eight hypotheses 274
Annex Snapshots of the pathways to power 303
Notes 309
Acknowledgements 321
About the authors 323 Show More