{"id":1150,"date":"2018-07-07T00:40:09","date_gmt":"2018-07-07T04:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/?p=1150"},"modified":"2018-07-07T00:41:59","modified_gmt":"2018-07-07T04:41:59","slug":"theories-in-action-week-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/2018\/07\/07\/theories-in-action-week-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Theories in Action – Week 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my LDST 300 class with Professor Von Rueden, we discussed Evolutionary Leadership Theory to a great extent. Evolutionary Leadership Theory “considers why leadership exists at all and how evolved decision rules contribute to leader emergence and effectiveness in our modern organizations<\/span>“.\u00a0<\/span><\/i>Within the context of Evolutionary Theory, one of the central aspects we discussed was the role of gender in leadership and how it can effect leader emergence primarily. From the standpoint of Evolutionary Theory, it argues that women have emerged within formal leadership roles to a lesser extent than men due to evolutionary processes such as women being primarily responsible for raising offspring, as well as males being more likely to deal with conflicts among competing tribes within the context of small scale societies centuries ago. <\/span><\/p>\n

These evolutionary processes have tremendous implications today as women are severely underrepresented in formal leadership roles at all levels across the United States. Our cohort had the privilege of meeting with Sharon Sayles Belton, who is not only the first female, but also the first black Mayor of Minneapolis. Ms. Belton served the city of Minneapolis from 1994 to 2001, during an era where the crime rates within the city reached historic levels, effectively labeling the city of Minneapolis as “Murder-apolis”. During our conversation, Belton, reflected on her challenges as a black female in such a high formal leadership role. Because she was a female of color, Belton expressed that people not only in Minneapolis, but around the world, correlated Minneapolis’ extremely high crime rate with her inadequacies as a leader. She mentioned that the Governor of Minnesota undermined her leadership on numerous occasions and attempted to send the National Guard to the city to get a hold on crime, despite Belton’s insistence to do the opposite. Despite these challenges to her leadership, Belton spoke a message of perseverance and determination which lead her to reducing the crime rate in Minneapolis by 16% and reversing the City’s economy out of a 50 year decline. Belton’s story contradicts an underlying gender based assumption within Evolutionary Theory — that women are unsuitable for formal leadership roles because they have evolved to assume lesser roles. Unfortunately, stories such as former Mayor Belton’s are far to uncommon and dispersed throughout the private, public, and non-profit sectors. Her effectiveness as a leader, despite the tremendous obstacles she faced, demonstrates that women are beyond capable to serve in the highest leadership positions. As a society, we need to grapple with the biases and structures which limit leader emergence for women and actively implement organizational policies and practices which allow women to emerge as leaders at a rate equal to men.
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In my LDST 300 class with Professor Von Rueden, we discussed Evolutionary Leadership Theory to a great extent. Evolutionary Leadership<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2648,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[76611],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theories-in-action"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2648"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}