On 20 October 2020, the UN published the ‘The World’s Women: Trends and Statistics 2020 Edition”. The disconcerting fact was that after 25 years of the Beijing Declaration, the change in status of women in leadership position was dismal. It reported that the proportion of managerial position globally held by women in 2019 was 28% which shows no improvement over the statistics in 1995. In 2013, women accounted for 8% of all national leaders and 2% of all presidential posts and the story goes on.
Closer home, the situation with regard to women leadership mirrors similar trends. As per the Annual Report 2020 – 2021 of the Royal Civil Service Commission, the percentage of women executives (Ex1, 2 & 3) is only 12.1 % with only 19 executives out of a total of 157 executives in the civil service. Similarly, women’s representation in Parliament is 15.2% which constitutes 8 out of 47 in the National Assembly and 3 out of 25 in the National Council. The representation of women as CEOs or as member in the Board of Directors in the companies under the largest and only government owned holding company in Bhutan – the Druk Holdings Investment (DHI) is no better.
Ironically, while women across Bhutan lamented the poor representation of women in leadership position, the national newspaper Kuensel ran a story with the headline ‘A big win for Women – Bhutan elects 7 out of 10 women candidates’ after the conduct of the Parliamentary elections for the National Assembly in 2018. While we congratulate the elected women parliamentarians, there is a need to breakdown the statistics and see it in its entirety. 7 women in the 47 seats is only 14.8%, therefore it can hardly be considered a big win for women when compared against Bhutan’s gender ratio.
The lack of women with the necessary professional qualification and skills has been regularly quoted as key for not being able to promote women to leadership positions. Sheryl Sandberg COO of Facebook in her Ted talk says that there is no doubt that women have the skills to lead in the workplace and presents compelling data of women graduating in equal numbers at the undergraduate level as well as the master’s degree in the US.
A closer look at statistics in Bhutan also points to the availability of women with the requisite skills and qualification. The gender disaggregated data for graduates appearing for the preliminary exams shows that there are equal number of women to men. In fact for the 2021 data, it shows that there were more women, appearing for the preliminary exams than men. Similar observations can also be made from the civil service officer training provided in the Royal Institute of Management at the post graduate level, where men to women ratio is at par. In fact for the 2021 PGDPA, there are more women (28) than men (17) in the PGDPA class.
Statistics tells us a different story and herein lies the gender paradox. The paradox is that if women are graduating with similar level of qualification, why aren’t the numbers translating into representation of women in leadership position. As per probability, the numbers should also have similar output at the leadership levels.
In trying to explain the paradox, gender studies and discussion have centered around and talked about the existence of a glass ceiling and the triple burden of women for a long time. Of late, an interesting concept that has surfaced in the explanation is the existence of a ‘broken rung’ which is the biggest obstacle keeping women from leadership position.
As per the McKinsey “Women in the Workplace” report, the broken rung results in more women getting stuck at the entry level and fewer women becoming managers. As a result, there are significantly fewer women to advance to higher levels. This is true in the context of Bhutan, at the entry level, it has been clearly demonstrated that women enter in equal numbers in the civil service and going by the merit records, women fare better in these entrance exams, which implies that there is not only quantity but also quality of women entering the civil service. So, it is not really fixing the glass ceiling that is required but the policy makers need to pay closer attention to fixing the broken rung.
Another paradox for women in leadership position is the double bind dilemma for women, where conventional feminine qualities and the mental model of leaders are at the opposite ends of the spectrum. These contradictions demonstrate the conflict aspiring women leaders experience in regards to how they are expected to behave as women and how they are expected to behave as leaders.
No one demonstrates the ‘double bind dilemma’ better than Hillary Clinton. In February 2016, the Washington Post ran a story ‘Our Impossible expectation of Hillary Clinton and women in authority’, it talks about the expectation from Hillary to be docile and soft spoken and exhibit the conventional traits of a women and at the same time display characters of being strong and ambitious and competent to lead the country.
While we may be at the opposite ends of the world, the experiences of aspiring women leaders in Bhutan are no different. There is always a consistent play of internal debate on how much would be construed as too much from the overwhelmingly male counterparts sitting around the table or even from your peers or subordinates whose mental model of leaders are highly gendered.
The challenge with the double bind is that these are not overt discrimination at play in the workplace. They are what is called as second generation bias, which is a subtle and an invisible barrier that arise from cultural beliefs about gender roles as well as workplace structures and practices that had inadvertently favored men for centuries. Therefore, it is difficult to decipher the discrimination aspect to such issues. Often it is easily dismissed as a problem with the individual.
The challenge to all these is that in the assessment of leadership capabilities and promotion to managerial positions, the yardstick used for women and men are still the same. So, how can the measurement be same, if the perception and mental models of leadership is highly gendered? While it is understandable that coming up with two very different assessment models for men and women may not be feasible but putting a gender lens at the time of assessment is most crucial, if we are to promote women to move up the leadership ladder and also to do well as leaders.
But why should all these matter. Simply put, you cannot expect good informed decision using half your brain. It also makes good economic sense to include women into decision making to bring the perspective of the other half onto the decision-making table. At a more fundamental level, getting women adequately represented is the democratic way to doing things. The good news is that of late, there has been a paradigm shift in leadership development from the command and control to leading with values, emotional intelligence and collaboration which are capabilities often attributed to women.
Coming up with ways and means to address the gender paradox is another topic altogether but a good starting point is to acknowledge the existence of the broken rung or the double bind dilemma for women. More importantly, it is time to move beyond symbolic representation of women at the leadership position and see the number for what it truly represents.
