Women and Leadership

I have been preparing for a class that I am teaching with Klyne Snodgrass next week on Women, the Bible, and the Church and I think I have finally found a book on women and leadership that I want to recommend to others. I wish I had found it sooner. I would have added it to the required reading for the class! The book is titled Leading Women: How Church Women Can Avoid Leadership Traps and Negotiate the Gender Maze by Carol E. Becker (Abingdon, 1996).

The book draws on various sociological studies regarding women, leadership, and the church but does so in a way that is very approachable and readable. I am in the midst of the section on leadership traps that women fall into. Don't let the title fool you. It is not simply about the things that women do that cause their leadership to go unrecognized, but also about the many traps that seem to be set up by our culture. Ways in which women, at times, can't win no matter which path they choose. The first chapter is called "Organizational Wives or New Paradigm Leaders?" It highlights the way that women often end up functioning like psuedo-wives in a various professional and ministry situations. Women have often been shaped from an early age to multi-task and to attend to the needs of a group. They tend to be peacemakers and calendar keepers. While this leads to strong administrative gifts, these gifts are often used in a marginal way. Women are seen to attend to detail but lack the ability to think in broader categories. In addition, in family system theory thinking, women often end up attending to the emotional needs of the group. While this is valued as bringing unity to an organization, it is not considered leadership.

I have been in several positions that have had "organizational wife" aspects too them... a minister of Christian Education on a large staff and the dean of students at the seminary. I realize that it is not simply the positions, but also the way that I function within them. And it is something that I need to change. As the "organizational wife" in various organizations, I often bear much of the tension within a community and internalize it to a greater degree than is necessary. I also find that I end up doing more day to day administrative tasks than most of my male colleagues. Partly this is a function of where I am on the administrative ladder in a system. The farther down the less administrative support you receive. In my positions as dean of students I went from stuffing mailboxes to operating with several office staff. I had to learn to let go and be all right with asking for administrative support from another person. When your identity is located in knowing all the details within the family, this can be difficult to let go of. Some of you probably know exactly what I am talking about!

I'll try to post more on various sections of this book in the next few weeks. If anyone has read it and would like to comment or make other suggestions, please let me know!

A Gendered Society

This past week I have been reading Julie Ingersoll’s Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles. The title betrays Ingersoll’s bias… one I probably share a bit more than I’d like to admit. I have my own war stories to tell. Much of the sociological information was familiar to me, but the analysis was interesting… and challenging. Ingersoll explores how gender is constructed in the evangelical world. Now before you start arguing about gender, creation, and biological differences between men and women, let me state that I agree that there are differences. I also believe that gender is more than our biological differences. It is also a social construction… the way we live out and interpret those differences. The values we place on them. How we structure economies and societies around them.

Ingersoll describes the gendered nature of the evangelical world… the segregated small groups, the men’s and women’s ministries, the gender-specific social events. She goes into great detail describing a Christian bookstore with its Victorian knick-knacks designed to harken back to an imaginary time when gender roles were so much clearer. With its “Jesus loves Me” plaques with sports figures for the boys and angels for the girls. The books for women that deal with relationships, healing the pasts, building friendships. The books for men that talk about leadership and servanthood. Ingersoll argues that within the evangelical culture, the gendered body has become something symbolic. And the pressure to conform to gender roles, both explicit and subtle, can been extremely powerful and at times extremely wounding.

How does this gendered-society impact women clergy? We can see from other studies (ie. Clergy Women by Zikmund. Lummis and Chang) the pressure clergy women are under to be good Christians by fulfilling traditional roles as a wife and mother as well as fulfilling their duties as a pastor. And that these expectations are significantly different than that of clergy men. We also see differences in how congregations expect women to lead and how they interpret the ways they leave. While a majority of male and female clergy feel that they are democratic rather than directive leaders, congregations feel that their male clergy are more directive and female clergy are more democratic.

I am raising questions that I don’t have answers to. One’s I’ll probably continue to explore in this blog in the next few months. But for now, that will have to wait. You can anticipate the next blogs to take a turn in another direction… reflections on my upcoming trip to Peru. Maybe when I return you’ll have some additional insights into all of this to help guide my way.