Alternet has excerpted part of Madelin M. Kunin's Pearls, Politics, and Power (Chelsea Green, 2008), which states the case, not just for more women leaders, but leadership more in the recently-identified women's style of running things. It's provocative. A too-brief runthrough of the difference between transactional leadership, said to be clearly masculine, one of hierarchy and command, and transformational, a more feminized process that's shared and premised on common purpose, led to an obvious irony. Hillary Clinton's style seems nearly textbook transactional, while Barack Obama's is transformational.
I don't know whether she gets to those other women who've learned to act mega alpha because they think that's the only way they'll be heeded. And, I'm wondering, too, about those pearls.
