What comes first – the trailblazer or the trail?
Tanvie Hans grew up in India at a time when female footballers were not easy to find. On our podcast L for Leadership, she voiced the lack of a map, an example to follow. “There was no athlete or footballer at least, who was showcased in the newspapers. Nobody that we could look up to. There were male footballers of course – Pelle, Maradona, Ronaldo, Beckham…but I wasn’t opening the newspaper and saying, ‘Oh my God I want to be like her!’”
This got us thinking about what kind of role models do we really need?
Role Models and Possibility Models
The thing about role models is we don’t actually want to become Sachin Tendulkar, or Indira Nooyi, or…Tanvie Hans. What we want is someone who expands our repertoire of possibilities, someone who helps us see ourselves differently.
A couple of decades ago, we might have imagined a leader as a man in his forties, in a suit, sitting behind a desk in an office. Today, that picture could just as easily be a woman in her early twenties, leading a team from her laptop, working from home in whatever she feels comfortable in. The ways of leading have widened and so have the people we can imagine as leaders.
A leader might show you that authority doesn’t have to mean command.A dancer might show you that tradition can be interpreted differently. A football player might show you the rewards of persistence. An entrepreneur might show you that there are unconventional ways to build a career.
Who would have thought that ‘AI prompt engineer’ is a job, but it is today. The world keeps changing, and so does our picture of success.
Lori Beaman, and her team of researchers studied the effects of female political leaders in Indian villages. In villages where women had served as leaders for two election cycles, the gender gap in adolescents’ aspirations narrowed. Girls were more likely to aspire to education, employment and lives less constrained by traditional expectations. The researchers also found changes in parents’ aspirations for their daughters. The important thing wasn’t that these girls necessarily wanted to become politicians. They had simply seen a woman occupying a position of authority. Their options had become visible.
Role Models, Inspiration, and Identity
“Do boys play football?”
We develop beliefs about our own capability partly by observing others. If someone we can identify with succeeds at something, it can provide vicarious evidence of our own potential. And this is particularly relevant to young people because they haven’t yet accumulated much personal evidence about what they can do. While people at the top of any profession encountered at the point of achievement can be dazzling and inspiring, a role model needs to show us how people actually get there.
What is useful to someone starting out is seeing someone a few steps ahead of them on the path, to see how they began, what they struggled with, how they chose, and what they sacrificed. Tanvie mentions several times that there was no woman a few steps ahead whose career she could study, whose choices she could borrow from. This helps us understand that a role model needs to be someone far enough to be motivating, but close enough to know their journey.
Role models and “people like me”
And the most interesting thing about role models is that they challenge the stories we have about ourselves.
We all carry stories about who people like us are, what people like us do, and what people like us are capable of. Many of these stories are absorbed long before we consciously examine them.
Seeing someone violate that expectation can disrupt the stereotype. So role models aren’t simply motivational. They can be identity-expanding. They enlarge the answer to: “Who could someone like me become?” Which means, too much similarity can be limiting! So we need role models who are not only mirrors but we also need windows to who we can be.
Tanvie did not have the role model she wanted. But she went on to found Sisters in Sweat, which gives other women a space to experience sport, belonging and possibility. There was an endearing anecdote she shared about her business partner’s son, who had grown up seeing his mother playing football. When he was taken to a game, he asked in all innocence, “Do boys play football?” and life comes a full circle.