Hanna, Glasgow champion women’s leadership

The goal of the roundtable was to bring together scores of women from politics, business and academia from all walks of life to discuss the inclusion of more women in leadership.

It is the first in an up-and-coming series of roundtables being planned for women empowerment and action.

Women shared that their gender needs to be more forgiving and supportive of each other. Moreover women in leadership should do more to “bring our sisters into the networks that matter,” championed Head of the Private Sector Organization of Jamaica Sandra Glasgow. Glasgow, one of the roundtable panelists, also pointed out that this is how the guys do it…they recommend each other for board positions.”

This move to increase women’s participation in leadership is especially significant since research shows that people in general trust women in leadership more. Trust, according to Dr. Sheila Brown from the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Public Affairs, is one of the key ingredients of leadership and more women should therefore be included on boards and in government. “Women in leadership is not only the right thing but the bright thing,” she reasoned.

Lisa Hanna, Member of Parliament for Southeast St. Ann, emphasized that the political process has a lot to gain by including more women in leadership. She revealed that “90% of my workers are women. If you go into a constituency and all your workers are men, then leave…women are the momentum and the vibration.” She noted that the umbilical cord of dependency that women have on men needs to be cut and that women need to make the transformation into leadership.

In terms of her own journey as a female leader she admitted that “I am the oddity in politics.” She says that given her experience and training in media and communications and success in beauty pageants, society would not have expected her to sojourn into politics. As Hanna puts it, people would have expected her to be doing something more “pretty.”

The Embracing Ethics and Gender in Governance roundtable was organized by the Women’s Resource and Outreach Centre in collaboration with the Association of Women’s Organisations in Jamaica (AWOJA), the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, UWI and the Governance Committee of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ). For more information or feedback send your emails to communications@wrocjamaica.org