Women and Leadership Real Lives, Real Lessons

A powerful call-to-action for gender equity that offers 10 key lessons for women aspiring to a leadership role—be it in politics, business, law, or their local community.

Featuring words of wisdom from female leaders like Hillary Clinton and Theresa May, this empowering study reads like a You Are a Badass volume on world leadership.

Women make up fewer than 10% of national leaders worldwide. Behind this eye-opening statistic lies a pattern of unequal access to power. Through conversations with some of the world’s most powerful and interesting women—including Jacinda Ardern, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Christine Lagarde, Michelle Bachelet, and Theresa May—Women and Leadership explores gender bias and asks why there aren’t more women in leadership roles.

Speaking honestly and freely, these women talk about having their ideas stolen by male colleagues, what it’s like to be called fat or a slut in the media, and what things they wish they had done differently. The stories they tell reveal vividly how gender and sexism affect perceptions of women as leaders. Using current research as a starting point, Julia Gillard and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala—both political leaders in their own countries—analyze the lived experiences of these women leaders. The result is a rare insight into life as a leader and a powerful call to arms for women everywhere.

Julia Gillard was the 27th Prime Minister of Australia, serving from 2010 to 2013. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is the Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the first woman and first African to hold the position. An economist and international development expert with more than forty years of experience, she served as Nigeria’s first female and longest serving Finance Minister (seven years) and the first female Foreign Minister in 2006. She was also Managing Director of the World Bank from 2007 to 2011. She was Chair of the Board of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (2016–2020), the African Risk Capacity (2014–2020), and Cochair of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate.  She is the author of Reforming the Unreformable: Lessons from Nigeria (MIT Press).

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