Feminist Leadership Series: Empowering Female Leaders

With the goal of building the capacities of female leaders among its constituents, YSW held a series of transformative feminist leadership sessions across the SCORE project sites.

The feminist leadership series seeks to enhance the leadership and decision-making knowledge, skills, tools, and support for young women. It also aims at linking these leaders to feminist movements for community and movement building.

Encompassing both in-person and virtual sessions, the series explored several themes including.

• Introduction to transformative feminist leadership (in person)

In this session, participants were introduced to transformative feminist leadership and how it can be applied in their organisations. The session also highlighted some leadership topics and emerging issues to be explored in subsequent sessions, among them self-esteem and imposter syndrome, barriers and myths to women’s leadership, access to education and resources, and lack of role models.

• Female leadership and self-esteem (in person)

The session was dedicated to exploring the concept of low self-esteem and its impact on personal development and leadership aspirations, especially among women. Through interactive discussions, participants were encouraged to reflect on their own experiences and challenges related to self-esteem.  To boost their confidence, the participants were linked with women-focused networks and made aware of leadership positions to vie for.

• Exploring the impact of gender roles on women leadership (virtual)

This session delved into the intersection of gender roles and female leadership in communities, and examined how cultural expectations, stereotypes, and systemic barriers affect women leaders. It sought to increase understanding of these dynamics to empower women leaders to overcome obstacles and make meaningful contributions to society.