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The answer in this situation iseasy: No. What is difficult, though, is finding answers on to how to stop cyberbullying. It requires patience and fortitude to do so, that is, in our working to get a better grip on the problem and what underlies it and on the perpetrators and what drives them. It requires empathic understanding: not to be confused with sympathy or compassion, but with the ability and willingness to probe into emotional, psychological layers.
At first I took umbrage at the idea of anyone petitioning to get artistic work taken offline. But perhaps in this case, it makes sense, especially as we don't quite know who might be viewing sensitive (albeit artistic) photos online and having whatever unsavory, obnoxious thoughts about them.
Leadership isn't just about hand-in-hand as we climb up, although I believe that's crucial. It's also about those who are ahead, including the leader herself, helping to pull up those following behind. Moreover, from this image, I see that those who follow can serve as an anchor or ballast for those who are ahead.
This image is, to me, evocative. It reminds me of the lovely film with Robin Wright Penn and Kevin Costner:
I've never been lost before. You were my true north. I could always steer for home when you were my home.
Leadership may hardly be characterized as romance or grief. But I'd like to believe the much more than lending direction, leadership is about pointing us to what is meaningful, perhaps deeply so, and to what is right, perhaps tenaciously so.
This week, first, it is important to pause in front of the blackboard, or white space, if you will, and reflect on our notions of leadership. It is important to set aside for now other notions of it, as there is simply no shortage of concepts, models and positions on it.
One school of thought, I suppose, is to buck what may be a dysfunctional, archaic system and undermine it and ultimately overthrow it. Another school of thought, however, bears serious consideration, as Saadia Zahidi suggests: Work within a system, find best fit solutions for a culture, and leverage media and technology for this purpose. Some companies in Saudi Arabia apparently find ways that work well.
Brilliant!
But the work is far from complete. Large gaps between women and men’s labor-force participation remain: for example, about 47 percent of women in the United Arab Emirates that could be working are employed, compared with about 92 percent of men. If, during the next 15 years, the participation of women in the workforce across the Middle East and North Africa simply reaches that of two-thirds of men—around 60 percent—it has the potential to spike regional GDP by 20 percent or more. As businesses and policy makers recognize the benefits and momentum gathers to eliminate the barriers blocking Muslim women from full economic participation, this largely unseen population will truly become a force to be reckoned with.
Saadia Zahidi is... head of the Gender Parity Programme and head of Employment, Skills and Human Capital. In November 2014, the proposal for her book, Womenomics in the Muslim World, won the inaugural FT/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize for business writers under age 35.
McDonald's in Pakistan deliberately set a policy to bring in educated women from lower income families. The notion of their working is perhaps at best a foreign concept and at worst a target of resistance. But because these young women have a safe workplace, get transportation between work and home, and (not to mention) earn an income, their families are evidently coming to accept their new normal.
Hooray to McDonald's for overcoming a barrier for women!
All of this underlines the conscious, often deeply personal and brave decision of millions of ordinary Muslim women and men to break family tradition and sometimes shun cultural pressures. As a result, a new segment of the labor market has emerged—and unprecedented consumer power.
Saadia Zahidi is... head of the Gender Parity Programme and head of Employment, Skills and Human Capital. In November 2014, the proposal for her book, Womenomics in the Muslim World, won the inaugural FT/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize for business writers under age 35.
