Understanding the Difference in Leadership

This final assignment for Organizational Behaviour sorted us into groups that would each select a chapter from the course textbook, and our group chose to tackle the chapter on Leadership in the workplace. Particularly, we chose to look at the differences between the leadership styles, challenges, and portrayals of men and women in positions of leadership as well as their portrayal within political roles and the impact that media has on these individuals.

For my portion of this report, I chose to look at women in leadership and political roles, as throughout our history, women have had an immense impact on change through their leadership, but their voices have also been suppressed and choked out by the voices of male figures. Because of this, I was very cautious and careful when writing this piece about women in leadership roles as I wanted to portray them as they were and are and ensured their voices were heard through my analysis.

In this analysis, I focused on women who are often forgotten and left out of conversations around gender equality and women in positions of leadership. I focused on women such as Minnie Geddings Cox who stood strong against the male-dominated American business industry under Jim Crow laws, and activists Marsha P. Johnson and Slyvia Rivera who fought not only for the rights of women and LGBTQ+ individuals but to be recognized as women themselves.

In the larger report, my colleagues detail the portrayal and history of men in positions of leadership and political roles and the way in which men are treated differently by their colleagues and by the media simply because they are males. Understanding this idea is extremely important to understanding the negative portrayal that women often receive for being in positions of power, as while their male counterparts can get away with murder, a simple mistake can be the end of the line for a woman in a position of power simply because of our volatile society that seeks to suppress the voices of those who are not the ideal.

For this portion of our final report and presentation, we were required to create an interactive piece in addition to a short presentation on our topic. For our interactive piece, my group used the concept outlined by Neel Kolhatkar's short film, The Privilege Game in which each person is a "player" in a game of the same name with the goal being to reach the top of the wealth ladder, also known as the Top 1%.

For our version of this interactive piece, we used a modified deck of playing cards with each number being assigned a level on the wealth ladder from 1 representing an individual below the poverty line, and 10 or a face card representing a Billionaire. Following this, our colleagues were given the instructions that they were to socialize with one another and act in a way that demonstrated their rank on the wealth ladder without outright revealing their stage and then organizing themselves into a line representing their social hierarchy.

Following this, we used the results of our interactive piece to speak to the way in which social inequality can affect anyone, and played The Privilege Game film to elaborate on this point of representation before presenting the findings of our report on the portrayal and leadership styles of men and women.

The Privilege Game. Courtesy of Neel Kolhatkar.