Women and The Art of War

Having spent now close to two decades in the corporate world, I am beginning to realise certain things about us women in the work force.

Despite our outcries at being put down and subjugated, one of our biggest failures I think is perhaps our inability to realise that we do it to ourselves.

Where I work now, and in other places I have worked as well, the majority of personalities that leave a lingering distaste in my mouth and keep me awake for unproductive reasons are sadly, more often than not, other women. Not men, who generally (and I generalise here) tend to fail themselves and their subordinates through actual fallibilities in leadership, egotism and short-sightedness. But women, like myself, educated, articulate, achieved at a young age, or not so educated yet successful worker ants who have sweated enough to be promoted through the ranks.

The problem often lies in what they do when they get to the top because who cares how they got there to begin with. Instead of using their positions of power, as men do, to elevate their own, mentor other women, lead with integrity and by example, they instead choose to engage in a vicious game of self-defense, even when the closest warring enemy is two continents away and will probably only reach their door-step once they retire.

They subjugate other women by putting them down.

They gossip and spread lies or coloured assumptions.

They use their wily womanly ways to coo their male colleagues into submission.

They cover up their weaknesses with a flip of the proverbial fan, a bat of the mascara-ed eyelashes.

They promote other women as a means of control rather than to open doors.

They seek, above all, to be the flower among the thorns, and take pride in their success at keeping other women at bay.

This is why we are still faced with a glass ceiling. Because without us male leaders will not have to face the complexity of team dynamics that take into account the baggage women carry with them from being female and constantly under threat.

It is a vicious cycle, but one that unfortunately, only us women can break. The men can't help us here, ladies. We have to do this by our selves. And do this by being the essence of what we are - mistresses of the collective, the builder of strength in numbers, the rearer of children by community and not the individual.

If it takes a village to raise a child, what does it take to raise a woman? The answer, is other women, in the plural and not the singular. Women of different shapes and colours and beliefs who are united by a common goal to better ourselves as a gender, as one half of the human race.

Because our nature is to nurture. Let's not forget that. Every time we go against it, we must realise we play into the hands of masochism and the sexism of men. The very thing we battle, or think we do.