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NEW CHALLENGES TO LEADERSHIP Keynote Address by PRESIDENT MARY ROBINSON Stockholm,  6 May 1996

NEW CHALLENGES TO LEADERSHIP Keynote Address by PRESIDENT MARY ROBINSON Stockholm, 6 May 1996

The long struggle for equality has also been a struggle for leadership. Implicit in that struggle has been the vision that women exercising leadership would make a difference. That is the core challenge to women leaders today. The courageous women who paved the way by surmounting so many daunting barriers challenge us now to fulfil that vision.

We should begin by acknowledging our debt to them. In doing so we evoke images not just of the campaigns for women's suffrage, for equal pay and for reform of social laws, but also of the deeper struggle to have women's rights recognised as human rights against a trend of increased feminisation of poverty and the victimisation of so many women. The emphasis at Beijing on recognising women's rights as human rights was not a recasting of the woman as victim, but it marked instead the starting point for the woman as leader.

The next step is to be honest in admitting our limited progress in exercising a leadership that would make a difference. Part of achieving that difference requires, I believe, a different approach to leadership itself. This is not easy because leadership, as a concept, lacks precision. It is not something which can be easily defined, much less bottled or replicated. There are many varieties and levels of leadership, and variations in how it is acquired and exercised. However, it is not my purpose here to engage in an academic treatise on power and leadership. Suffice it to say that leadership, whether in the political or economic sphere, has tended to be hierarchical, and exercised by an individual or group on the basis of recognised authority which has an inherent interest in perpetuating itself.

But when discussed among women, as it has been extensively in the decade between the world conferences of Nairobi and Beijing, a subtle but inchoate change occurs in the perception of leadership. It is not seen as hierarchical but as empowering. It is not so much about exercising power as about influencing others. The approach is to listen, discuss and seek to reach consensus or compromise. The emphasis is on practical problem solving. Women who exercise compelling leadership may not have any visible power, such as Aung San Suu Kyi, the recently released Burmese Nobel Peace Prize winner, who, in a keynote address to the Beijing forum by televised link, called for mutual respect between the sexes instead of "patriarchical domination and degradation".

This development of a different approach to leadership is still tentative, but it is innovative and exploratory. What is striking is the scale of the audience listening for it, hungry for the signals. Nor is that audience confined to women, but extends to a diverse range of people who seek a different value system, different ordering of priorities, a changed approach to our caring for the environment and to what constitutes sustainable development; an audience including local voluntary organisations of all kinds and international humanitarian and human rights groups.

The globalisation of the economy has also facilitated the globalisation of ideas, including new approaches to effecting change. The speed of communication is phenomenal, partly because of information technology and partly because of that background of listening attention. And so, the very potential which now exists for making a difference through a more conscious promotion of new ways of leadership, challenges those of us perceived to hold that responsibility.

How does the individual woman leader respond? Each will respond, of course, from the reality of her own position and experience and perspective.

Women leaders are as diverse in their ideological beliefs, backgrounds, experience and influences as their male counterparts. Is there any yardstick, then, against which it would be fair to measure or recognise a discernible quality of leadership that may be distinctive because - and simply because - it is done as a woman? It seems to me that there is: that it flows from the inherent perception of the leader as the person telling the story of a people. We recognise this dimension easily in great leaders: that they have personified a sense of nationhood and told the story in a way that also helped to shape that people's sense of their own identity. But telling the story is a component in all leadership, good or bad. It is one of the ways of influencing, persuading, inspiring, or perhaps frightening.

It is a bleak truth that an authoritarian and destructive leader can often begin their task of ruining an era by captivating a whole people in a mesh of stories. And there are recent and terrible examples in European history to remind us of that.

In essence, to tell a story is to make choices. In the telling of the story, in the choices made, women leaders can exert an influence on how issues are perceived. For a Head of State it may be as basic as the choices of who to meet, who to visit, who to include as significant in making a public statement. It may encompass, for a Minister of Finance or Justice, a re-ordering of priorities out of an express recognition of the need to re-evaluate certain activities or address certain needs. At the international level, it poses questions of how women leaders together assess and then tell the story of, for example, the structural adjustment programmes adopted by many developing countries. Are they listening to the impact of those policies on hundreds of thousands of women trapped in poverty, bearing the burden, coping - as best they can - with rearing their children?

All of this has been very much at the front of my mind in the past few years. I have witnessed these energies for myself. In many instances, the old energies of a society are organised by precedent and hierarchy. And a Head of State is very likely to see these forces at work. Often, for instance, one spokesperson interprets the issues on behalf of many. I think that is a way in which many of the established centres of our society work. From that background, it has been fascinating for me to observe - in a preliminary and unscientific way - a different style of doing things. Often when women's groups have come to visit me everyone in the group spoke to me. Everyone had their say. There was an alternative running order. I am not saying that this sort of detail represents a hard-and-fast difference between women's groups or community gatherings and the rest of society. But I do suggest that there are fresh, improvisational responses in these groups to the contemporary challenges of our society. And that I as a Head of State have felt honoured to be able to incorporate that narrative into my own story-telling. And women, I have no doubt, will change the story-telling as well as the story. The issue of Third World debt is less abstract and statistical when it is being considered by a woman leader who has a consciousness of both knowing the details herself and telling the story of those most directly affected.

Let me make it clear, however, that a focus on the woman leader's perspective in telling the story should not be interpreted as a sexist perspective. For centuries men have been the dominant story tellers and priority determiners in their capacity as leaders. Leadership itself, therefore, had a male orientation. Now, in a balancing and enriching way, the opportunity is arising for more and more women to make the choices and fill in the substance of the story. A conscious commitment by women doing that, women exercising that kind of leadership and taking the opportunity to tell a confident and rounded story from that perspective, would, I believe, make a difference.

I want to finish by recognising the importance of creativity in all of this and mentioning a poet - Edith Sodergran (1892-1923) - who was born in Russia and drew her language from the Swedish speaking minority of Finland. And so she speaks to us in her clear, lyrical voice across the fractures of a century and with that one quality which no leadership can be without: human authority. These lines are from her poem "The Day Cools":

 

You looked for a flower

And found a fruit.

You looked for a well

And found an ocean.

You looked for a woman

And found a soul.