As a gender equality advocate, I always want women to win, but have had cold feet when it comes to conversations around women’s political leadership. I tend to question how effective female leadership would change the world from the menace of inhumanity that pervades the world. I assume women might not do better as leaders if their mentors were only men. But I have also never considered how the capacity to be female shapes their leadership approach.
At the same time, I am not oblivious to the fact that women make up less than 50% of political leadership globally. According to the United Nations, “Women make up 26.5 percent of Members of Parliament. Globally, less than one in four Cabinet Ministers is a woman (22.8 percent).” Therefore, increasing women’s representation in political leadership is essential for fostering equity, diversity, and inclusive decision-making.
And so, you might ask, what changed my perspective on female political leadership?
I recently listened to Adam Grant’s podcast discussion with the current president of Iceland, President Halla Tómasdóttir. Tómasdóttir had lost her first presidential election in 2016 but won the position in 2024. One takeaway from their interaction was her desire to listen more as a leader. Grant further probed what listening more would look like. She responded that she intends to have fewer meetings but engage in some town hall-like meetings, where she hears from people and exchanges perspectives with them. Her response got my attention and helped me understand the difference between being a leader who listens and a leader who speaks (NB: You can read the transcript of their discussion at the end).
A leader who listens is open to diverse perspectives. This openness creates an avenue to understand the challenges of the people being led. It would create avenues for solutions targeted at addressing the needs of the people. Whereas a leader who speaks has solutions that he or she thinks might be centered around the needs of the people and these solutions might be limited in impact.
Another piece of evidence to consider is how women’s emotion do not limit their potential to be great leaders. In a recent Instagram post by Grant, he highlighted a contrary perspective to what people generally thought of women in leadership, citing Winny Shen, Tanja Hentschel, and Ivona Hideg’s 2025 study. According to him, people generally opine that women’s emotional nature limits their capacity to be good leaders. But Shen, Hentschel, and Hideg’s research argues otherwise. They pointed out that when men are anxious or stressed, they tend to be rude, hostile, and abusive, while women tend to show respect regardless of their emotional state. This research explains that women’s emotions do not inhibit them from being effective leader,s but rather empower women to be emotionally intelligent leaders, such as providing the kind of leadership expectations that include family-supportive supervision and less abusive reactions in uncertain periods, such as during the pandemic.
President Tómasdóttir’s desire to listen more and Shen, Hentschel, and Hideg’s research on women’s effectiveness as leaders emphasize women’s ability to prioritize listening and respectfulness as a form of human-centered leadership. These also spotlight women’s capacity to be empathetic. These attributes potentially can move the needle in the right direction in global leadership, politically and organizationally. A type of leadership that considers the needs of the people being led and the consequences of actions on the populace and colleagues. This human-centered approach to leadership holds the power to replace militarization, corruption, and inhumane politicking with people-oriented politics.
Now, I am more confident in the capacity of female leaders to transform the world. I wonder why I am just putting the capacity of women to lead humanely into perspective.
Adam and President Halla’s discussion:
Halla Tomasdottir: . . . I really think we need to find sort of a very new way to do leadership, where we come together across these gaps, build bridges, listen more, learn more, and co-create more with compassion for the things that matter to all of us.
[00:16:47] Adam Grant: This listening theme is so interesting to me, Halla. I think, you know, at some level, you rise to leadership by being a great talker, but you succeed at leadership by being a great listener. And that paradox is complicated for a lot of people.
One of my favorite research findings in my career was when colleagues and I discovered that if you had a proactive team around you, who was bringing lots of ideas and suggestions to the table, you were actually more effective as an introvert than an extrovert in a leadership role. Both because you made people feel heard, and also because you got better ideas and suggestions by listening.
It’s easy to give lip service to that and say, as you did, listening is a weakness of mine. I wanna work on it. I think the hard part is actually putting it into practice. I’d be very curious to hear, given that your goal is to be a better listener, how are you trying to accomplish that? What does that look like day to day for you as president?
[00:17:43] Halla Tomasdottir: I am trying to hold fewer speeches and host more conversations. Presidence are asked to give speeches all the time, and I’m increasingly saying no thanks, but if you want me to come and be in a dialogue with, uh, someone from your organization or your event and then invite the audience into a dialogue, then I’m interested because I actually find that the conversation format is far more engaging when we allow ourselves to authentically rumble with the challenges and opportunities that are in front of us. And when we invite questions, it’s just much more of a sincere format to me than prepared keynotes and speeches. So this is a very concrete way that I’m starting the conversation trend and and prioritizing that over one directional talking at people. And I’ve actually had interesting comments from people, because we all have these ideas in our heads what presidence should do. Some people said, oh, should the president be asking questions? Shouldn’t the president be bringing the answers?
And so I’m really very deliberately pushing the boundaries on this. I am reducing the number of large events that I host at the residence and trying to get most of them down to groups of 25 to 30. And we sit in circles where I throw out one question depending on what the audience is, and listen to everyone in the circle and allow us to have more of a conversation and a co-creation process, and I’m trying to do this very deliberately across generations. I try very deliberately to curate as many spaces as possible where we have truly this intergenerational dialogue, and almost brainstorm as to how to deal with some of the tensions and challenges that are very real in Iceland, as everywhere else. And I find that after such meetings, and they don’t need to necessarily be that long, even an hour long meeting in a conversation like that makes everybody leave having learned something, having maybe changed their mind about something, having made a new connection to somebody.
Reference
Grant, Adam. (2024) “Befriending Your Impostor Syndrome with Iceland’s President Halla Tomasdottir (Transcript).” Accessed January 3, 2025. https://www.ted.com/pages/befriending-your-impostor-syndrome-with-icelands-president-halla-tomasdottir-transcript.
Shen, W., Hentschel, T., & Hideg, I. (2025). Leading through the uncertainty of COVID-19: The joint influence of leader emotions and gender on abusive and family-supportive supervisory behaviors. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 98(1), e12439. https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12439
UN Women – Headquarters. “Women in Politics: 2023,” March 10, 2021. Accessed February 16, 2025. https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2023/03/women-in-politics-map-2023.