Inequalities Within Leadership in the Workforce and Women in Leadership Roles

Abstract

Leadership roles need to be filled by people qualified through experience, education, and knowledge in fields such as ethics, decision making, and crisis management. Leaders understand how to communicate with their team and have qualities for making leadership effective. Today, there is an increasing number of women in leadership roles, but it is only a fraction compared to men leading. Women are underrepresented in the workforce due to issues of inequality that need to be corrected by those in power. I conducted an anonymous virtual questionnaire to 31 current undergraduate students in the Purchase College community. The purpose of this questionnaire is to understand future leader's thoughts on leadership, core values for a leader, and women's capability in leadership roles. The leading core values are honesty, integrity, communication, and accountability which gives insight into future leader's expectations for higher powers and how they will eventually lead others. When it came to their opinions on why women are better leaders or why men are better leaders, most respondents believed that gender should not matter; in a perfect world, gender should not matter for who can be a leader. Unfortunately, in this realistic world, more men are leaders but more women are capable of the job. Research has proven women are capable of doing anything anyone else does, and they often do a better job at successfully completing the task. Women constantly face issues trying to obtain and retain leadership roles due to men and even other women who believe in older, more traditional ways. This can be changed by more people being aware of the problem, learning if their own organization has an issue of the underrepresentation of women, and create a plan to fix it.