Many of the world’s most powerful women’s leadership stories have been forgotten by history. Take Zheng Yi Sao for example, the most successful pirate in history who at the height of her power had a confederation of 70,000 pirates under her command. Her incredible financial success and biography have been well documented. So why have we been taught that pirates look like peg-leg Long John Silver?
Women’s stories have been persistently glossed over and buried. “It’s like women’s history has been written in disappearing ink,” said Elizabeth Harmon, PhD, with the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. “It’s well documented that historians and writers have neglected women’s history.”
Women have been so conditioned to be undervalued women’s stories — they undervalue themselves. The impacts of this are equally detrimental to men, women and the organizations they lead. Though this problem has persisted for centuries, it’s critical to address right now because we are in a period of rapid digitization and the dawn of machine learning. These technologies hold the possibility of making women’s stories more discoverable — or bury them further.
Yuval Harari points out in his book Nexus that AI doesn’t care about truth if humans disregard it. That is, if the stories we chose to tell and the words and data we use for machine learning perpetuates the erasure of women’s stories, the silencing will only increase. For this reason, we must recognize the problem now and proactively find ways to mainstream women’s leadership stories. In this article, we will look at why women’s stories are buried, the opportunities that are overlooked due to erasure, and what we can do to make sure women’s stories live in the mainstream.
Why Women’s Leadership Stories Are Buried
Did you know the only American who held a leadership role in the German resistance against Nazism was a young literature professor named Mildred Harnack. As a PhD student in Berlin, she recognized the danger of Hitler’s rhetoric and started what became the largest underground resistance group in Berlin. Her heroic story is unarguably the stuff of movies. Yet it remained unknown in America’s mainstream consciousness until her great grandniece, Rebecca Donner, published her harrowing story in All The Frequent Troubles Of Our Days in 2022.
Through her persistent research, Donner was able to give value to Harnack’s incredible contributions when primary sources that documented her life often undervalued them. For example, she found a document listing the people who were part of Harnack’s resistance group and their professions. “The fact that [Harnack]
was a professor wasn’t indicated on the document, nor did the document note the professions of the other women in her resistance group,” said Donner. “They were listed simply as ‘wife,’ which reflects a particular mentality about the value of these women’s contributions.”
Donner saw the same diminishing of women’s role perpetuated museums today. “We see the same bias in books and articles that describe Mildred as ‘a wife’ who ‘supported her husband’s resistance activities,’ when Mildred and Arvid Harnack were, in fact, standing side by side. They supported each other’s resistance activities.”
“We know women have been making history for centuries,” Dr. Harmon with the Smithsonian said. “People have collected their records. Their stories have been recorded in archives, but so often their stories are left out of mainstream narratives of U.S. history… we want to acknowledge this problem, but then we also wanted to ask why.”
Dr. Harmon saw how easily women’s stories could inadvertently be lost during the archival digitization process. For example, some Smithsonian records left out honorary titles when they were digitized so all the natural history specimens collected by Mrs. Charles (Mary Vaux) Wolcott were attributed to her husband. This error was only caught because an attentive intern questioned how Charles Wolcott was still collecting specimens after his death. If it were not for the intern’s curiosity and attention to detail, Mary Vaux Wolcott’s contributions could have been unfindable in the digital archives.
It’s not just institutions that diminish women’s stories. It’s women themselves. It’s not uncommon to see women leaders undervalue their own work today. “When you’re completing an oral history with a woman that was award winning in her field,” Dr. Harmon said, “she might end an interview by saying, I’m not giving my papers to a university because they’re not important enough.”
What’s At Stake When Women’s Leadership Stories Are Lost
“When half the stories aren’t being told,” said Elizabeth C. Babcock is the director of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, “we’re literally missing half the story. We’re telling ourselves an incomplete narrative about ourselves as a nation, how we were, how this country has evolved and changed over time. It’s like reading a book and skipping every other page.”
In her bestseller, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Caroline Criado Perez demonstrates the real-life, business and public policy consequences of missing out on half the story. She uncovers how using males as the default consumer can make products harmful to women. Car safety is one glaring example that Perez uncovered: During a car crash women are 47% more likely to be seriously injured than men and 17% more likely to die, even when researchers control for factors such as height, weight, seat-belt usage, and crash intensity. Because crash-test dummies were based on male-as-default models, safety ratings didn’t have the data they needed to understand how women’s anatomical differences changed the results.
Perez says that women’s data and stories are overlooked or dismissed for the sake of simplicity, which is a tempting goal in any business trying to streamline its operations, but, she argues, this “makes sense only if you see women as an added extra, a complicating factor. It doesn’t make sense if you’re talking about half of the human race. It doesn’t make sense if you care about accurate data.”
Businesses are constantly searching for ways to expand and grow — be it in market shares, profitability or innovations. Perez makes it clear that half of the markets have not been adequately addressed. This is a massive missed opportunity! If businesses want to continue to grow, they should consider how adding women’s stories, data, and perspectives can help them innovate, create, and address overlooked needs.
Asking, Listening and Recording: How Leaders Can Turn The Tide and Recover Women’s Leadership Stories
If you don’t want to miss out on understanding the perspectives of half your customers, clients and team members, you must make space for their stories to be told and shared.
When Monique Demery heard about the life of Madame Nhu she was intrigued. “This woman lived a Shakespearean life,” said Demery, author of Finding the Dragon Lady: The Mystery of Vietnam’s Madame Nhu. “It was so strange to me that no one had taken the time to tell her story,”
One reason Nhu’s story has been passed over is because she is the villainized leader of South Vietnam, a failed government. Outspoken, beautiful, and an influential public figure, Nhu defied stereotypes. In her research, Demery had to practice empathic curiosity.
“I can’t possibly imagine what it was like for her, to grow up in that time,” said Demery, observing that it is easy to cast a figure like Nhu as a bad person without trying to understand her context or the reasons she made the choices she made. “In today’s world things are often laid out there as if they’re black and white, and most often, things are shades of gray.”
By including women’s stories — even complicated stories of figures like Madame Nhu — you gain a more nuanced perspective. It may not be convenient, or easy to digest, but it gives you a broader and deeper perspective.
Similarly to Demery, Alessandra Simmons was motivated by curiosity and empathy to research the intriguing life of her grandmother. A Holocaust survivor, her grandmother was one of only 22 people who survived Maly Trostenets, a concentration camp in Belarus.
“My grandmother was reluctant to tell her story,” said Simmons. “But she honored my request and let me interview her.” By recording her grandmother’s story, Simmons was not only able to record a nearly forgotten piece of history with the details of what it was like to be a child in a concentration camp and the confusion of escape, and she was able to reframe a story that had caused her grandmother pain and shame for so many years.
“For most of her life, my grandmother felt it was safer and easier to conceal her story. She didn’t have a role model for how to tell her story,” said Simmons. “It’s important to tell our stories so that other people feel safe to tell theirs.”
Vicky Nguyen, author of an upcoming memoir Boat Baby and NBC news anchor, decided to be a role model by using her platform to help share women’s stories, encourages us that we don’t have to be writers, historians, or public figures to help make space and record women’s stories. We can do it in our everyday lives, at home and at work, on the platforms we do have.
Here are some tips for sharing and recording women’s leadership stories:
- Be curious and ask questions. Like Demery and Simmons, allow yourself to ask questions that help you get past the surface. Press against reluctance with empathy.
- Be persistent. Like Donner, who had to dig deeply and read the blank spaces, we must not give up when research is not straightforward. The Smithsonian Discoverability Lab is helping people do this kind of research.
- Read! By reading great fiction and nonfiction you will become more familiar with story conventions that help grab our attention.
- Use the IRS model (Intriguing beginning, Riveting middle, Satisfying end) to shape any anecdote into a memorable leadership story.
- Lead by example: share your own stories. Need inspiration to get started these four women leaders share about how storytelling has had profound impacts on their leadership.
Story facilitation is a leadership skill that can be learned through practice. Together, we can turn the tide and make sure women’s leadership stories are incorporated into the mainstream for the benefit of us all — now and for generations to come.