Women Take the Lead

I cannot say and do not know whether Wesley Yang has developed his thought at greater length, so I will limit myself to suggesting that he has raised an interesting question. The question is, is there a substantive difference between men and women as leaders? Do representatives of the different sexes lead differently?

In a series of Twitter posts Yang suggests that we know what happens when male leaders in male dominant organizations malfunction. Apparently, it leads to violence. Obviously, the model of male organization is the military, but we ought to distinguish between violence committed against an enemy in warfare and violence committed within the organization.

 When the Biden Defense Department chooses to purge its ranks of counterrevolutionaries, it is setting one group of soldiers against another. It is encouraging snitches. In truth, the Democrat led attack on bigotry, on thought crimes, has also worked to divide Americans against themselves.

Of course, one might say that this level of dysfunction is not characteristic of a well-functioning male organization. It is largely a function of a leadership failure. When an operation fails, as has happened often to the American military of late, group cohesion can be maintained, but only if the leaders take responsibility for the failure. Today, such is not the case. Such was the charge that one Lt.Col. Stuart Scheller brought forth, and for which he was thrown in jail.

Obviously, this was designed to shield the pathetic leaders of our military for any responsibility for their own failures.

One might imagine that a group where women are in charge would function differently. Yang suggests that the internal dynamic in a female dominant group might have something to do with the mean girls phenomenon that we see in high school girl groups. We ought to be able to find a female dominant group that functions efficiently as a group, and perhaps sororities would be one example, but still, sororities are not constructed for industry, commerce or warfare.

That being the case, we can also examine the obvious fact that the most obvious case where a woman is in charge involves motherhood and the home. Obviously, this does not involve an extra-familial group, but it does involve one individual having considerable power over another. The other being, a baby, an infant, a young child.

If we dare call it leadership, we can certainly see that the relationship between mother and infant involves one individual telling another what to do. And it also involves one individual obliging the other to subject itself to its authority.

We might even suggest that a government run by a woman might feel something like what happens in what psycho professionals have called the mother/infant dyad. 

For example, one of the leading female politicians in the world, the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who is also the mother of a young child, has led the world in babying her people, by shutting down all most industry and commerce-- these latter being more manly occupations. Of course, the liberal prime minister of Australia has done as much, to the outrage of those citizens who do not like being treated like big babies.

Strangely, the current rebellion against governments that force people to do what they are told feels more like a matriarchal organization than like a patriarchy. 

As for female leaders, the world has seen many of them. Margaret Thatcher seems largely to have escaped both the mean girls and the motherly aspects of female leadership. She was more manly than many men. 

On the other side, Angela Merkel, soon to be exiting her job as chancellor of Germany, will be noted for the fawning press she keeps receiving, but also for the weakness she displayed by allowing over a million migrants to invade her country-- because she has a lot of empathy, a notably motherly characteristic. And she also displayed weakness in shutting down her country’s nuclear power plants, the better to avoid risk-- another quality that is more evident in women than in men. 

Yet, as a great environmentalist, she turned German green and made it dependent on coal generated electricity from Austria and Hungary. And, let’s not forget that she was the mastermind who allowed Germany to depend on Russia for its natural gas supplies. 

As energy supplies shrink and as energy prices spike upwards, the eunuchs who occupy the courts of the great mother goddesses will happily explain that the fault lies with anyone but the people in charge.

Didn’t Tom Friedman, a man who happily expressed his admiration for Merkel several years ago, for having greened Germany, recently write a column explaining that if Europe was running out of energy, the fault did not lie with the greens. Which means, that it lies with the greens. 

It’s not just that Merkel, like a dysfunctional male leader, will not take responsibility for her own failed policies. In the current political climate no one will dare to hold her to account.