Analysis of women in power

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

It's not surprising that our childhood experiences affect the adults we become. Nor is it particularly newsworthy that the adults we are determines the way in which we interact in the world. But how much so?

Women in Power: The Personalities and Leadership Styles of Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher (McGill Queen's University Press) by Blema S. Steinberg examines how the personality traits of Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher developed and whether they influenced each woman's leadership style. The conclusion of Steinberg's book – that personality is an imperfect predictor of leadership behavior – is less interesting than how she came to that discovery.

The book is divided into three main sections – one for each woman – with each section also divided into three, starting with a brief biography, followed by a personality profile and concluding with a leadership-style analysis. There is a very detailed appendix, which outlines the methodology used, but, even with it, Steinberg's exact process is hard to understand. Regardless, readers will get the idea and, despite some clunky, repetitive and at times over-technical language, they will find Women in Power compelling.

First of all, the subjects themselves are accomplished, fascinating people. It's a bit uncomfortable finding out about all their insecurities and having them exposed in such a manner. While it may appeal to our voyeuristic side, we should be cautious of giving too much credence to psychoanalyses based on biographical and autobiographical data and not a direct clinical interview. The accuracy warning also applies to the evaluation of leadership style based on biographical and autobiographical data supplemented by speeches, letters, political accounts and other secondary sources. Memories are not reliable and opinions and impressions are subjective, being influenced by any number of factors and agendas. For example, someone's decisiveness may be someone else's non-inclusiveness; someone's characterization of a leader as cutthroat may simply mean that the leader rose in power, while that someone is now jealously nursing their wounds.

But there is much that is worthy in Steinberg's effort to develop a systematic, reproducible empirical analysis of the relationship between personality and leadership behavior. Steinberg, a professor emeritus at McGill University, a member of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society and a practising psychoanalyst, is well ensconced in the topic. In 1996, she published the book Shame and Humiliation: Presidential Decision-Making on Vietnam, in which she used a psychoanalytical approach to examine the decisions made by U.S. presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War. In it, she argues that the men's personality traits/insecurities influenced the decisions they made about American intervention in Vietnam.

The three women in Steinberg's most recent analysis also "had an extraordinary political career, often amid political upheaval, crisis and war, and their impact on their respective states was enormous." As well, all of the women operated within a parliamentary system of government. Steinberg also picked Gandhi, Meir and Thatcher because "they lived interesting and, in some ways, comparable lives before attaining office." Steinberg finds it noteworthy that "none of them had an older brother; Indira was an only child, Golda had an older and a younger sister and Margaret has an older sister." She continues, "In a previously published article, I showed the impact that the gender of siblings can exert on the career trajectory or women. In the absence of an older male sibling, girls are more likely to receive encouragement at home to explore male-dominated realms of activity, including politics."

As the child of a prime minister, Gandhi was certainly around politics a lot and Thatcher had a close relationship with her father, but Meir's parents were not encouraging at all and she followed in the footsteps of her older sister, Sheyna, who was active in the Zionist movement. To explain this apparent aberration from her theory, Steinberg hypothesizes, "Had Sheyna been a boy, he, like her father, might have tried to discourage Golda's political interests and activism as unsuitable pursuits for a young woman."

Meir also challenges Steinberg's theory in a more substantial way in that, unlike Gandhi and Thatcher, Meir's personality was not a great predictor of her leadership style.

The personality attributes identified by Steinberg are dominant, dauntless, ambitious, outgoing, accommodating, contentious, conscientious, reticent and retiring. The leaders were rated on these personality traits, which, if present in the extreme, qualify as mental illnesses. All three women exhibited the dominant pattern prominently, with Thatcher crossing the threshold into moderately disturbed; Gandhi passed into the moderately disturbed area in the ambitious and reticent categories.

Leadership style was measured in three areas: individual style (motivation for political activity, task orientation, investment in job performance), managerial style (cabinet and information management strategies) and interpersonal style (relations with personnel, the party, opposition parties, the media and the public). The data for the personality profiles and leadership behavior were then compared.

In addition to being dominant, Meir's other prominent trait was contentious. Many of her leadership characteristics – being goal-oriented, tireless in her work, ideological, pragmatic, heavily involved in collecting information and in relations with her personnel and the public, as well as being competitive and controlling with the political opposition – were to be expected from a dominant-contentious personality. However, power was not an important motivating factor for Meir, she relied on her ministers and advisors about equally for information, she was very collegial and she was more open and informative than her main two personality traits would have predicted.

Clear conclusions, therefore, are hard to draw from Steinberg's analysis and she doesn't claim otherwise. As well, this study lacks comparative data for male leaders, which would help give context to the analysis. The only tidbit Steinberg offers readers about male leaders is that, in other psychological leadership-profile studies, U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe scored lower on the dominant/control scale than Gandhi, Meir and Thatcher.

By way of explanation, Steinberg points to the small sample size of her analysis, but also theorizes that perhaps this dominant trait in these three women is the result of their having to fight to assert themselves in the "essentially masculine world of politics." Ultimately though, she concludes that "a larger study in the personality profiling of male and female elected political leaders must be the next logical research step." When Steinberg writes that book, the Independent will be there to pick it up.

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