Daddy’s Wishes: My Daughter to Become a Future Leader

Photo by Tatiana Syrikova from Pexels

In an ILO survey of enterprises in the Asia Pacific in 2018, as we go up the corporate ladder, the lesser number of female participations. It was reported that, on average, middle management level has 34,8 per cent of female participation and decrease to 26, 9 percent at senior management, and down to 20,5 percent at top executive level.

The survey results also show that the larger the enterprise size, the fewer women occupy senior management and top executive positions. Over 60 per cent of large enterprises, over 59 percent of medium-sized enterprises and 52 per cent of small enterprises report having less than 30 percent women at the senior management level.

What Makes A Leader?
There is some debate whether some children are “born leaders” or they “learn to be” leaders. All children have the potential to develop leadership skills. Leadership development can be a lifelong process. As adults, we can teach the skills necessary for children to take on leadership roles
now and in the future.

Teaching children how to be a leader at a young age will help children deal with peer pressure in the teenage years. Being a leader is not an exact science, but teaching children the skills needed to be leaders are important to help prepare the next generation to take the lead and become responsible adults.

Leadership skills are a combination of many characteristics and factors that enable children to streamline and correct their mindset and outlook. In fact, these characteristics will help children in whatever they do, wherever they go and however they live. These characteristics include:

• Facing tough challenges;
• Finding solutions to problems;
• Solving problems creatively;
• A strong sense of reasoning;
• Showing an ability to forge new relationships; and
• Self-motivation.

One way to increase more women leaders is to prepare our children the skills to be a leader, aside from the opportunity that companies provide for their female talent.

How Fathers Influence Their Daughters’ Careers?
All children are shaped by their parents and/or other caregivers, of course, but when it comes to women’s career paths, dad’s influence plays an increasingly weighty role. According to a 2009 study from the University of Maryland, women are three times as likely to follow in their father’s career footsteps these days than they were a century ago: Only 6 percent of women born between 1909 and 1916 went into their father’s business, compared with roughly 20 percent of Gen X and Y.

Why the increase? The American Psychological Association says that the changing economic role of women has greatly impacted the role of fathers in their children’s lives. Women now comprise over 50 percent of the workforce, leaving fewer families than ever in traditional “women raise the children” households. Fathers are now spending more time with their children than ever, and experts say that a “father’s love” plays a much different role in childhood development. Most specifically, that it develops a child’s sense of place in the world. Doctor Meg Meeker, author of Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters, is a firm believer that a father’s influence is a major factor, if not the single most important one, in the development of women. “A father has authority with a capital A,” says Meeker, who says she was influenced by her own father to go into medicine.

“From the first years of a girl’s life her father is larger than life. She looks up to him, and for the rest of her life she craves his admiration, his respect and his affection.” Meeker believes that if admiration, respect and affection are present and reciprocated in the father-daughter relationship, they are the recipe for a successful woman.

These trends by themselves don’t tell us which force (paternal, societal or otherwise) is pushing and pulling daughters down one career path or another. But they do tell us today’s dads are spending more time with their children–and their daughters are paying attention.

IBCWE held this activity to prepare more children, especially girls to become capable leaders in the future, also discuss norms that could hinder young women from becoming leaders, ways that parents can adopt to develop skills leadership to children, inspiring parents to take an active role in preparing the next generation of leaders.

Watch the webinar Daddy’s Wishes: My Daughter to Become a Future Leader at IBCWE’s Youtube Channel.