Is There a Gender-Specific Leadership Style?
“While not wishing to generalise, many women have leadership styles that have been described as ‘empowering leadership’ or ‘consensual leadership’, where they build leadership structures that share responsibilities according to the ‘best fit’, and in doing so, often create new types of leadership,” Ayesha Kajee, former researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs and board member of Transparency International’s South Africa chapter, tells IPS. “Since women also tend to discuss problems more openly and utilise ‘group-think’ to seek solutions, such solutions are often more acceptable to teams. Some have described these as inherently female ways of interacting, but these styles can and should be learnt by both men and women leaders.” Joanne Sandler, deputy executive director for programmes at the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), says she is reluctant to buy into the “essentialist argument” that women have a different way of leading. “Some evidence
