MetaJess

The traditional masculinity/femininity split often arbitrarily assigned things to one gender, like “only men can be leaders”. More modern views tend to have a knee jerk “this is bogus” reaction. But being careless about this has the risk of hollowing out gender.

The key step to avert this is to recognise that masculine and feminine leaders are different. (NB: not saying that male=masculine and female=feminine. The relationship between these is also complicated!) But how are they different?

And here my knee jerk reaction is to say masculine=bad, feminine=good and just put all bad leadership traits like abuse of power etc under masculine and all good leadership traits like compassion under feminine. But of course this is b.s. too. And I’m honestly a little stumped!

To a first approximation we can say there is good femininity, bad femininity, good masculinity and bad masculinity. But of course context also matters and maybe a masculine leadership style works in one context and a feminine in another. (And there are prob multiple m/f styles)

And of course, I’m not proposing gender as a single dominating system, just as a lens to view different leadership styles to get to the bottom of the “what is masculine / feminine leadership like?” question. At the end I don’t know enough about leadership to answer this.

Hmm I think in the end this may actually be a recursive subdivision! Compassion is feminine => Actually both genders have compassion! => The question is not *whether* you do compassion but *how* you do compassion. Etc.!