It is imperative that I write
about this topic because still far too many men do not get
it yet about leadership in the community, home, and
relationship. They are causing more pain than joy. Here
are a few key points to note: First, the modern woman
does not want a man to lead her. She has her own brain and
can think for herself. Second, a woman does want a man in
her life who is a leader, one who leads his own life--not
her. If a man is not a leader of his own life, the
relationship with his spouse or partner is in trouble.
Third, a woman wants a man who can lead with her.
She wants to share power and decision making.
How can you tell if you are a
leader of your own life? I advise you not to seek a
romantic partner until you are already a leader of your own
life. Being a leader of your own life (female and male)
means:
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You are old enough to make
life-long decisions independently in all areas of
your life without having to inform or report to
others.
-
You can make simple day-to-day
decisions without the need of input from any other
adults, including mom or dad.
-
You have and manage your own
bank account and have a source of personal income.
-
You have negotiating powers
when it comes to purchasing assets of any kind.
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You can sleep alone and feel
safe and emotionally secure.
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You can keep focused and
grounded on your courses of action.
-
You feel emotionally fulfilled
and satisfied from the decisions you are making and
continue to make in your life.
-
You do not crave the approval
of others to assure yourself you are okay.
Dear reader, if you cannot
answer affirmatively to all of these statements, you are not
a leader of your own life.
Although these are for both
male and female, my greatest concern is about females
because far too many are not raised to be leaders but
subservient followers instead. Both male and females are
designed with equal capacity to lead, and it first starts
with personal leadership.
Let’s look at it another way.
Both the male and female brains are equipped with equal
ability to think, reason, critique, analyze, and thus make
independent decisions. Not one brain is superior over the
other. Over the centuries, without any foundation or
evidence, men argued that women were intellectually inferior
and did not have the capacity to do mathematics, science,
and logic. Also, they asserted that women were mere
emotional creatures destined to bear children and engage in
domestic activities. However, just simply reviewing the
facts will dispel that notion. More women engage and
graduate in from higher education than men. For example here
are a few women who were great scientists and leaders in
their own spheres. These are cited from a BizTech May 11,
2012 article entitled “Mothers of Technology: 10 Women Who
Invented and Innovated in Tech.”
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“Hedy Lamarr (1920s)
proved to be more than just a pretty face. She played a
key role in the invention of spread-spectrum technology;
specifically, by conceptualizing the idea of frequency
hopping, which is a method of sending radio signals from
different frequency channels. Lamarr and her
co-inventor, George Antheil, developed the technology
originally to help the Navy remotely control
torpedoes.”
-
Called the Queen of Software by
some and Grandma COBOL by others, Navy Rear Admiral
Grace Hopper helped invent some of the early
English-language programming languages. She is most
famously associated with the Common Business-Oriented
Language (COBOL), which was based on the FLOW-MATIC
language that she designed back in 1958. Before the
invention of such language-based programming, computers
spoke exclusively in binary code, which was illegible to
human beings. Hopper was convinced that if programming
were produced in a form that anyone could read, then
there would be more programmers. It turns out that she
was right.
-
Network engineer Radia
Perlman helped make Ethernet technology a household
name. Her Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) made it possible
to build massive networks using Ethernet by creating a
mesh network of layer-2 bridges and then disabling the
links that aren’t part of that tree. This networking
innovation had a significant impact on network switches,
which has led some to call Perlman the Mother of the
Internet — a title that she eschews.
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Dropped calls and busy signals
are an annoyance that most could do without. But we’d
have a lot more of them if it weren’t for Dr. Erna
Hoover. While working at Bell Laboratories, she
invented a telephony switching computer program that
kept phones functioning under stressful loads. “I
designed the executive program for handling situations
when there are too many calls, to keep it operating
efficiently without hanging up on itself. Basically it
was designed to keep the machine from throwing up its
hands and going berserk
-
Kay McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff,
Fran Bilas, Ruth Lichterman, Adele Goldstine (and
Betty Snyder), these ladies were the first “computors”
working on ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania’s
Moore School of Engineering. Bearing the job title of
“computor” the ladies were responsible for making
calculations for tables of firing and bombing
trajectories, and to determine the correct sequence of
steps to complete the calculations for each problem and
to set up the ENIAC accordingly. (This, by the way,
meant the women maneuvered 3,000 switches and 80 tons of
hardware in order to program ENIAC by hand). The need to
perform the calculations with greater speed prompted
ENIACs development, hence making these flesh-and-blood
“computors” obsolete. Adele Goldstine and Betty Jennings
were instrumental in programming ENIACs stored program,
Goldstine was also responsible for writing ENIAC’s
original technical manual. Through their contributions,
we gained the first software application and the first
programming classes.
If women have been leading the
world in science and mathematics for centuries, why would
they need men to lead their personal lives? Or why would
they need men to be the exclusive leaders in the home, world
of politics, community, business, etc.? I have observed
that women who are raised to depend on men to lead them are
not truly happy. They have been taught to accept these
masculine “bullish” traits as normal. I have also
discovered that far too many mothers are still teaching
their daughters that their role is to serve their brothers
and other men in their lives.
Conversely, many boys are
being raised not to do certain things in the home and expect
to be served by their mothers and sisters. They are being
trained to use women as objects of utility and abuse them.
They are not taught to respect, love, and serve women
unconditionally.
This must stop. Our community
will be better when we acknowledge and accept the natural
leadership ability of both men and women.
When we understand this
concept, we will have no problem accepting gender equality
is not a choice but a natural design. It is an empowering
principle that propels individuals and communities to a
noble attainment–gender justice.
Men, remember, your romantic
partner wants you to be a leader, but not OF her but WITH
her. That’s invigorating.
 |
|
Before Gates, Zuckerberg, or Jobs, 6 women
programmed the first digital computer |
Barrington H. Brennen, MA, NCP, BCCP, is a
marriage and family therapist and board certified clinical
psychotherapist, USA. Send your questions or comments to
question@soencouragement.org
or
write to P.O. Box CB-11045, Nassau, The Bahamas, or visit www.soencouragement.org
or call 242-327-1980 or 242-477-4002.
