Women in Power: The Personalities and Leadership Styles of Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Margaret Thatcher – By Blema S. Steinberg

Abstract

Reviews the book, Women in power: The personalities and leadership styles of Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Margaret Thatcher by Blema S. Steinberg (2008). The author's study looks at these three female leaders on three dimensions: career path, personality, and leadership style. The biographical material, while well-traveled ground, is very good and gives a sense of where these women leaders came from, how and why they rose in male-dominated political systems, and how their choices impacted their career trajectories and styles of leadership. But the key to this book is in the personality and leadership style profiles. The author provides a solid methodological approach with which to examine and compare leaders. In fact, she is too modest in her initial goal of examining the collective experience of women leaders. In this work she provides a most useful methodological approach for examining leaders generally, regardless of gender. This valuable contribution allows us to more rigorously examine the impact and interaction of both personality and leadership style on political performance of a variety of leaders in a variety of circumstances. Methodologically sophisticated, rich in qualitative as well as quantitative material, this is a valuable addition to the literature on leadership and deserves to be widely read. If seen as a starting point that can animate further studies of other leaders, this book could have a lasting impact on the way we study and view political leaders across systems and across time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)