Blog

What Is Feminist Leadership?

At The STAR Centre we are proud to be a feminist organisation. I have been asked a couple of times recently what that means and what feminist leadership means in practice, so I was inspired to try and put it into words here.  

[Read Time: 1-2 mins]

Whilst researching different definitions I came across Action Aid’s ten principles of feminist leadership and what it takes to be transformative feminist leaders ( https://actionaid.org/feminist-leadership.) They sum it up as ‘leaders who enable others to lead, building power with them instead of over them’. Theirs is the best definition I have come across, and believe me I have read many over the years! Thank you Action Aid. 

So, let’s look more closely at some of the principles - self awareness, self-care and care for others, courage and inclusion – all vital and values I hope I bring these to my professional practice every day. 

But for me what really separates a feminist leadership approach is sharing power, transparent decision making and a culture of zero tolerance to enable teams to call out bias and any abuse of power without fear of repercussions.  

My last reflection for the day is on the value of respectful feedback. Whilst I have never felt I had to actively ‘promote non-violent and respectful communication and behaviour’ amongst our staff team here, I will continue to actively take steps to ensure that remains the case.

We are a team of strong, skilled, knowledgeable, professional women and I will take every opportunity I can to learn from them, trust and challenge them, and celebrate their individual achievements.  

As an organisation we define our commitment to being feminist in our values (shown below) and as a team we will not stop until our vision is a reality - A society where everybody is free to live without the threat of sexual violence 

Feminist 

• Challenging patriarchy: We believe that sexual violence is a cause and consequence of women’s unequal status in a patriarchal society. 

• Women-only spaces: We provide women-only services and space for women’s voices to be heard (whilst being proud to support other gender identities). 

• Challenging systems: We work to challenge attitudes, beliefs and systems that normalise and perpetuate rape culture and sexual violence 

Elaine Davis - Centre Manager