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The impacts of undervaluing women's stories are equally detrimental to men, women and the ... [+] organizations they lead.
Beowulf Sheehan / Deborah Feingold / Leadership Story Lab
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.
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