The place of Inclusive Speech as a deterrent for Women entering Leadership roles

In the spirit of international Women’s day, I thought to discuss something.

So the other day I postulated something that upon researching, I found already existed in a well thought out manner- Inclusive Speech.

I might not expound on this thoroughly but I would hopefully be opening the doors for some new thinking.

I believe it is the responsibility of Storytellers, those in authority or those who bear a semblance of influence to be inclusive of women in their addresses with the goal to normalize Women in Management.

I will list a few examples of how we could be more inclusive and how exclusivity in speech could keep Gender Bias where it is or worse.

• A pastor in church decides to teach on the subject of Grace and says “How you treat your wife will make her happy, how you treat your children would make them happy but Gods happiness with you is dependent on Christs perfect sacrifice”.
  This statement is true for the Christian reader however, it leaves out the women in the congregation listening to the message. Its important to highlight exactly how I, a woman can be a founder.

• An author speaks on running a business and how a founder should behave or address challenges as they come up. The author could consider making the protagonist both female and Male in examples in their book to normalize the founder status of women for readers.
  I didn’t know how the effect of this would be as powerful as I felt it when I read “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz.

• Childrens’ books, movies and stories need to have women as the heroes of the stories. This will normalize ambition for girls.

• Stories should avoid situations where women are portrayed as leaders without putting down their male counterparts as they lead. Leadership with women needs to not only be possible when male folk are portrayed as inadequate or downright stupid. Women need to never see THE route to leadership as emasculation. This article expounds men looking like idiots in advertising.

• Condiser that in Nigeria, where females from the Northern part of Nigeria are concerned, it has not occurred to a vast majority of them that a reality exists that they can aspire to anything outside domestic duties.
  Primary school texts where “Amina” or “Fatima” is a doctor or a lawyer opens girls to a reality where higher education is a possibility. “Eze goes to school is great”. Let’s also read “Amina becomes an Engineer”, especially in these parts.

The above are different areas I thought to highlight during this period.

Let me know in the comment section areas I missed out. In the course of writing this article, I kept thinking about an animated movie I saw once where the female aliens who were smart and industrious had removed men from their community. All the men were in fact dumb and only contributed to procreation. I can’t remember the name of this movie. Have you seen it?