Normally inclusive is invisible and hardly recognized, whereas exclusive is quickly recognized, hardly ignored (Nugent, Pollack and Travis, 2016). For this problem, I think unconscious bias is the important key. For gender equality, people thought it was normal to treat male and female differently for a long time in the past. The society has changed but still now the stereotype and the bias clearly exist. In my opinion, it is hard to diminish all the stereotypes and the bias from us because there is difference between male and female. We should not put our stereotype gender idea to a certain person to say something, however, surely we have some general idea about each gender has more certain traits.(For example, men are more aggressive, female are more empathic.) Secondly, although there are increase of female leaders in the society but still female leaders is not common. For us, female leaders are still new concept and have not got used to it. Naturally human being has a nature to exclude what they are uncertain or familiar. It is natural ability to protect ourselves from danger. My score of Implicit Association Test (IAT) shows I do not have bias but I guess that it is just because I AM the female leader and easily can connect leader = female.
Nugent et al. suggests leaders to make inclusion visible for improve this situation. However, I do not agree with this suggestion. For gender equality, I think we should focus only to reduce exclusion and not to focus visible inclusion because our ultimate goal is to make inclusion taken for granted or overlooked and also too much unnatural attention makes people feel exclusive or biased, too (Nugent, 2018). Northouse (2019) states promoting gender equality, we should make changes in organizational level, societal level, individual level and interpersonal level respectively (p. 413). With this changes, if more female leaders rise and people get use to female leader more in the society. Inclusion will become unconsciously.
Reference
Nugent, J., Pollack, A. & D. Travis, (2016). The Day to day experiences of workplace inclusion and exclusion. Retrieved from http://www.catalyst.org/system/files/the_day_to_day_experiences_of_workplace_inclusion_and_exclusion.pdf
Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and practice, seventh Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications
Hiromi,
Your analysis is insightful in terms of thinking about the roles of women and men throughout history – a lot has changed in recent generations. And today, as you note, exclusion may be more obvious than inclusion.
— Leadership Prof
Having read this I thought it was really enlightening. I appreciate you spending some time and energy to put this article together. I once again find myself personally spending a lot of time both reading and leaving comments. But so what, it was still worthwhile!