What Will We Learn About New Female Leaders?

As we head into the long months of summer, women leaders remain strikingly in the news. Next month, Drew Gilpin Faust (pictured left) will officially take the reins as Harvard’s first female president. She replaces Derek Bok - who also happens to be a wonderful mentor and long-time advisor to the research center I run. We are about to experience here at Harvard, first-hand, what differences, if any, female leadership makes in a nonprofit of our size and nature.

In the meantime, NPR ran a story this Monday about France’s new President, Nicholas Sarkozy, who appointed a relatively young French woman to be justice minister. NPR’s angle on the story was less that Rachida Dati, age 41, is a woman, and more that she is Muslim and of North African (Moroccan and Algerian) descent in a France troubled by both immigration issues and conflicts with its Muslim population over questions of assimilation. Her four-point diversity score (age, gender, ethnic identity and religion) is certainly impressive, but it also will make it hard to isolate what impact her gender, or any other of her diverse characteristics, has on her leadership or the outcomes of her work.

It is useful to notice that women finally have penetrated hallowed levels of nonprofit and government leadership - even if not in all countries - and are on their way to penetrating the rest. But with a growing data set available, we can begin moving beyond a conversation about which women are getting which leadership jobs, and to one about what that actually means - for performance, for pay and other forms of equity, for workplace environments, for other underrepresented populations in leadership roles, etc. My recent column in Philanthropy News Digest raises these questions in greater detail.

Tiziana Dearing