The Brightside: Women In Leadership
SALISBURY, Md. – A Salisbury University professor is helping to pave the way for women in leadership by highlighting current leaders, and showing young women how to be one themselves.
“The more we diversify leadership and become more inclusive, the better our teams are going to be, the better decisions we make,” says Dr. Chrys Egan, Associate dean of Salisbury University’s Charles R. and Martin N Fulton School Of Liberal Arts. We’re told a team of educators, leaders, and researchers are in the process of adding to the discussion of women in leadership, through a new book series; Transformative Women leaders. Dr. Egan adds, “We we’re doing a lot of work on women in leadership and just got tired of starting all of our publications by starting our publications with, ‘there’s not much worked published on women in leadership,’ that got old.”
The goal of the series is to celebrate women leaders and the leadership styles they use to achieve success. “I genuinely believe women of color are going to rule the world, we just need to help that happen,” says Dr. Egan. After the publishing of the series, ‘Women Leadership: Theory and Practice’ a few years back, editors like Dr. Egan wanted to use her leadership role, experience, and knowledge to make this upcoming series even more influential. “We also know women tend to be more transformative leaders themselves 22 the way they lead is notably different that can inspire an organization to a vision,” she says.
The series will dive into three concepts starting with ‘Gender Washing,’ which Dr. Egan says, is “The idea that sometimes an organization will put a gloss on diversity, equity, and inclusion without really doing the work.”
The next concept, ‘Wisdom From Older Women Leaders,’ “Look at these amazing women who had to trailblaze some of these pathways for the rest of us,” says Dr. Egan.
The third concept, ‘Women and Faith,’ which Dr. Egan says they’ll be “looking at religion, spirituality, and faith-based organizations.”
Dr. Egan tells us, their series explores in-depth research about diversification, marginalized groups, and others who have doubts about performing. “Sometimes it’s a matter of first convincing ourselves that we can see ourselves as leaders and then sharing that vision with other people to convince them that we can be seen that way,” she explains.
While DR. Egan is focused on giving women the tools to become leaders, her overall goal is to share leadership skills with everyone. “There’s an idea that you can’t be what you can’t see and to some extent that’s true but I think we need to push past that sometimes somebody has to be first,” says Dr. Egan.
The first volume, “Gender-washing in Leadership: Power, Policies, and Politics,” will be launched sometime this year. For more information about the series, just click here.
