Importance of Female Leadership in Higher Education
As said that “the function of leadership then becomes the creation of system, structure and environment where, interaction and learning can occur.” So the role of leadership has much importance for the development of any society in every field. In higher education leadership play a vital role because this leadership leads the whole society as compare to political or any other etc. because this leadership is recognized by the educational abilities of any person, whereas having much importance this part of leadership is mainly affected by gender difference. Men get more opportunities as compare to women to play role as a leader, but still we cannot ignore the importance and functions of female leadership.
Female leadership play vital roles in women empowerment, women development, women education and job security of women in a society. A woman can give guidelines and knowledge to a girl more effectively as compare to a man.
There is a pipeline theory which implies that “the more women students, the more women junior faculty and the more women lower level administrators, the more women will rise to the top”. This theory shows the importance of female leadership that it is very important to provide appropriate female leadership in higher education so that more and more women get chances to lead any team. To achieve this goal first of all, we should create awareness in society about importance of female leadership for the development of any society. As we know that in our society there is lack of female leadership because women do not show interest due to their personal or family issues. Most of the women get married just after graduation and they stop to think about leading a team and looks for a comfortable job therefore in our society the ratio of leading females is very low. If we observe we can see that the principals, Vice chancellors and even head of departments in universities are mostly men as compare to females. This lack of leadership is due to not having much awareness in the society.
As there is a popular saying that “Give me an educated woman, I will give you an educated society”. This quote easily tells us how much important is women leadership especially in education sector. The main hurdle in female leadership is gender inequality or gender discrimination. I think that, In the society like Pakistan, especially in backward areas the degree of gender inequality is very high which is a big hurdle in the way of female education and if there is no education then we can easily say that there is no leadership as well. So these barriers should be eradicated to provide true leadership equally to women as well as men. So the question is, how we can eradicate these barriers?
Creation of awareness in the backward areas about the importance of women education and women leadership will be very effective to produce women leaders in higher education because the educated leaders can create influence on many more women. Another step that we can take to achieve our goal is to ban on the early marriages and to provide freedom for women after marriages to study and to do jobs. The mindset of people about women must be change by taking effective steps.
Concluding this topic, we can say that the women leadership is as important as male leadership is, so we must focus on this part and must promote female leadership especially in higher education.
Regards:
Syed Muntazir Mehdi
STEM Team Skardu.