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.

Now in Currency paperback -- Sally Helgesen's classic study of female leaders and how their strategies represent a highly successful revision of male leadership styles. Sixty thousand copies in print! In her bestselling 1990 book, Sally Helgesen discovered that men and women approach work in fundamentally different ways. Many of these differences hold distinct advantages for women, who excel at running organizations that foster creativity, cooperation, and intuitive decision-making power, necessities for companies of the twenty-first century. Helgesen's findings reveal that organizations run by women do not take the form of the traditional hierarchical pyranaid, but more closely resemble a web, where leaders reach out, not down, to form an interrelating matrix built around a central purpose. The strategy of the web concentrates power at the center by drawing others closer and by creating communities where information sharing is essential. She presents her findings through unique, closely detailed accounts of four successful women business leaders -- Frances Hesselbein of Girl Scouts USA, Barbara Grogan of Western Industrial Contractors, Nancy Badore of Ford Motor Company's Executive Development Center, and Dorothy Brunson of Brunson Communications. Helgesen observes their meetings, listens to their phone calls and conferences, and reads their correspondence. Her "diary studies" document how women leaders make decisions, schedule their days, gather and disperse information, motivate others, delegate tasks, structure their companies, hire, and fire. She chronicles how their experiences as women -- wives, mothers, friends, sisters, daughters -- contribute to their leadership style.

Could language be a reason why women are under-represented at senior level in the business world? Using data from senior management meetings, this book explores how female leaders use language to achieve their business and relational goals by arguing that senior women have to develop linguistic expertise in order to be effective leaders.

What would your church look like if it maximized the dormant gifts of the women God has brought there? Discover how to develop and leverage the leadership abilities of women within your congregation. Leadership and people development veteran Kadi Cole offers a practical strategy to help church and organizational leaders craft cultures that facilitate the development of women as volunteer and staff leaders. In Developing Female Leaders, Cole shares eight easy-to-implement “best practices” that help accelerate a woman’s organizational contribution, such as: Seek to understand Clearly define what you believe Mine the marketplace Integrate spiritual formation and leadership development Be an “other” Create an environment of safety Upgrade your people practices Take on your culture Combined with current research, thorough appendices and references add even more guidance for setting vision, milestones, and goals. Using interviews and surveys of more than one thousand women in key church and organizational roles, Developing Female Leaders is a one-of-a-kind resource for identifying what is missing today in your church to help it flourish in the future.

On June 23, 2008, President George W. Bush nominated Ann Dunwoody as a four-star general in the US Army-the first time a woman had ever achieved that rank. The news generated excitement around the world. Now retired after nearly four decades in the Army, Dunwoody shares what she learned along the way, from her first command leading 100 soldiers to her final assignment, in which she led a 60 billion enterprise of over 69,000 employees, including the Army's global supply chain in support of Iraq and Afghanistan. What was the driving force behind Dunwoody's success? While her talent as a logistician and her empathy in dealing with fellow soldiers helped her rise through the ranks, Dunwoody also realized that true leaders never stop learning, refining, growing, and adapting. In A Higher Standard, Dunwoody details her evolution as a soldier and reveals the core leadership principles that helped her achieve her historic appointment. Dunwoody's strategies are applicable to any leader, no matter the size or scope of the organization. They include lessons such as "Never Walk by a Mistake," a mandate to recognize when something is wrong, big or small, and to hold people accountable. Not only can this save billions for industry, it can sometimes save the lives of soldiers and citizens. She also advises that "Leaders Aren't Invincible-Don't Try to Be": to be our best, we have to acknowledge our worst. And she encourages readers to "Leverage the Power of Diversity" by creating teams of people from different backgrounds to provide a broad range of ideas and devise the best-informed decisions. With these and other guiding principles, A Higher Standard offers practical, tactical advice that everyone can use to lead and achieve with maximum success.

In this book, historians of religion and gender studies explore the biographies of a number of female leaders, and the factors within their groups and cultural contexts that support these women’s religious leadership. New Religious Movements have been supportive of women taking roles of leadership for a long time. Authors of this book examine issues of gender and female leadership from diverse theoretical and methodological standpoints. The book covers a broad range of groups both with regard to time and place, covering Paganism, Hindu guru groups, Christian organizations, esoteric/ mystical movements, African churches, and a Japanese NRM. The common focal point is the powerful, prophetic, charismatic women who have founded and/ or led New Religious Movements.

Women and Leadership, edited by George R. Goethals and Crystal L. Hoyt of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond, is a compact collection of thoughtful essays by experts on leadership theory as well as women’s history. Women and Leadership has been designed to help students and citizens who want a more nuanced explanation of what we know about women as leaders, and about how they have led in different fields, in different parts of the world, and in past centuries. It includes twenty biographies of women leaders in many different domains—not only politics but also education, fashion, sports, and social and environmental movements.