Leadership Roles

“See how the majority of them are males. They always want to dominate, to lead” exclaimed my colleague.

I looked around the room and I had to admit it was true! Majority of them were males! And that’s a lot considering that the group had only a handful of males. But, they always want to lead??

I and my colleague were at a workshop on “true education” with our trainee students and the facilitator had just divided the participants into groups of 8. Being part of the staff we were silent spectators to the on goings. The participants consisted mostly of females with a spattering of males.

The facilitator insisted that each group select amongst them a facilitator who would lead and monitor the discussions of the group. She then asked all the selected facilitators to stand up and invariably most of them were males. Of the groups which had females as facilitators, there were no males in the group. Groups with only one male too had that lone male as the facilitator.

Social conditioning? Low morale? Dominating males? Born Leaders?

I watched the group in front of me go through the “selection process”. The moment the group converged to talk the lone male chipped in that he “volunteered” to be the facilitator. The females of the group, a few of them looked at each other and slowly shrugged an ok, some were just glad to be relieved of the “spotlight moment”, and there were still others who were indifferent.

Now who is at fault here?

Time to be more proactive girls!