It is impact rather than outcome that determines the success
“I ask no favor for my sex… All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”
In this powerful statement, the iconic figure Ruth Bader Ginsberg (also known as “Notorious RBG”) quoted the words of Sarah Grimké. Grimké was born 141 years earlier than Ginsberg, and like Ginsberg, she pursued a career in law. Grimké, however, was prohibited by her father from studying law. Later, she did manage to become a minister, although society never truly accepted her in that role.
Ginsberg was more successful in her pursuit of a legal career, in spite of all the pushback she received. Both Grimké and Ginsberg faced great resistance but managed to do what seemed at the time to be impossible.
Why did people, predominantly men, object to these women entering the legal profession in bygone times? Were they afraid that they would have to surrender their power to a woman?
Grimké and Ginsberg were merely asking their male counterparts to give up the power they wielded over the ability of women to shape and control their own lives independent of the constraining power of their male-dominated societies. They weren’t trying to take power away from others or to gain power over others. They just wanted to gain the kind of power that was necessary to take control over their own lives: agentic power.
Campbell describes this type of agency as “action that is independent of the constraining power of social structure.” [1] Possessing agentic power enables you to take responsibility for your own life.
The importance of this type of power became particularly evident to me about two decades ago, when I was working with an organization that distributed small business start-up loans to women’s groups in Kenya. Agentic power proved to be not only essential for our beneficiaries to build a better life for themselves and their children but also the gateway to other types of power.
In many countries, women are viewed as having less importance than men. Accordingly, women often are not afforded the same privileges that men enjoy, such as access to financial means and property. This inequality provides men with a power advantage over women who, due to these circumstances, have become dependent upon men. Possessing power over others tends to go hand in hand with constraining the less powerful in their development of agentic power.
While the resulting power imbalance forces women into roles they might not choose for themselves, men conversely have substantially more freedom to decide over their own lives. Women, however, need and deserve the same personal power to ensure that they can take care of themselves, and take care of their children in their presumptive role as primary caregivers.
Empowering women was precisely the objective of the microcredit project that I was charged with administering. Our organization was there to provide Kenyan women with the opportunity to develop the agentic power they so desperately needed. And I can assure you that I have never witnessed such devotion and drive as that exhibited by these women in leveraging this opportunity to carve out a better life for themselves and their children.
While distributing small loans, known as microcredits, among these women, we also helped them to develop income-generating activities, such as making clothing, sandals, and furniture that they could sell on the local markets. The microcredits were used to buy the raw material. With the profits from their product sales, the beneficiaries’ financial independence grew, and their agentic power grew along with it. It was truly amazing to see the energy and enthusiasm of these women who used the program to transform themselves into business owners. Agentic power was, however, not the only type of power that they gained.
About a year into the project, I began to understand that agentic power can become the gateway to other forms of power. Beneficiaries of the project increasingly voiced their wishes to better understand their respective markets and to learn how to expand their small businesses. In response to their requests, we began to provide them with another type of power: informational power.
Through sales and marketing workshops, we taught them how to collect information about their clients, competitors, and suppliers. We trained the beneficiaries, for instance, on how to set a good price for their products so that they wouldn’t be underpaid or lose clients due to overpricing. We also helped them to develop communication strategies aimed at persuading potential customers to purchase their products. Additionally, we gave them access to information on the internet regarding larger regional markets and opportunities for expansion.
Using donor funds, we provided strategies to introduce these newly minted women-owned businesses to larger neighboring marketplaces. This gave the program beneficiaries access to another type of power: social network and connection power.
While interacting with these larger markets, the women found people with whom they could work together to expand their businesses. They were able to connect with new suppliers who could provide better quality material or the same quality material but for a lower price. Other businesses started to refer their customers to our beneficiaries when market demand exceeded their own production capacity. As their network expanded gradually, some beneficiaries needed additional financing to grow their business, while others paid down the balance of their loans whenever they had a good month. The loans kept revolving, and more women got the chance to get on board with the project.
The project wasn’t what you would call “a cakewalk.” As we all know, venturing out by setting up a business requires grit. It is hard work, and most of our direct beneficiaries had young children to tend to, along with husbands who were not necessarily supportive of their endeavors. Husbands often demanded that their wives hand over the proceeds from their microcredit loans to be used for something that the husbands needed. Program participants were also frequently targeted by loan sharks who tried to sell them on additional loans that came with a 100% interest rate. The offer was regularly accompanied by the threat that if they didn’t take the loan, the loan shark would make sure the women wouldn’t be able to sell their products in the future.
Nonetheless, with the benefit of our awareness training on a wide variety of challenges, the women’s groups helped each other deal with the trials and tribulations of starting a new business. Helping beneficiaries to see how they were perceived by others around them (husbands felt threatened by the growing independence of their wives, loan sharks saw them as easy prey) helped them to develop communication strategies to counteract unwanted influence and to strengthen their agentic power.
Some of the women who we helped didn’t succeed, but others were successful in launching and expanding their businesses, especially those who were able to tap into another source of power: goal-directed focus. This power helped them to chart and follow a consistent and focused course in their cooperative and competitive endeavors, keeping them on track notwithstanding the attempts of others to move them in a different direction. It also improved their grit and determination to deal with challenges head-on.
The power of goal-directed focus was often employed in conjunction with yet another source of power: moral power. Sound moral reasoning manifests itself in healthy and appropriate conduct in our interactions with others. Moral power has the potential to inspire people to view others, in this case, the successful women in the women’s groups, as positive role models.
Some outstanding group members even managed to build one of the most coveted types of power: referent power. This power is associated with the qualities of charisma, integrity, and self-assurance. It is widely considered to be the most valuable type of power. People who demonstrate mastery and control over their environment have a natural ability to attract, persuade, and inspire others. The properties of this power are also effective in warding off unwanted influence.
The beneficiaries who enjoyed their newfound referent power helped us to train new women’s groups on issuing microcredits and setting up small businesses. They understood these budding entrepreneurs as no one else could, and they knew exactly how to inspire them to take their futures into their own hands and venture out into the unknown.
In the end, women’s groups became increasingly self-sufficient, which freed us up to move on to new women’s groups and start the project cycle all over again. The work wasn’t easy, but it was definitely very rewarding.
To conclude, through the microcredit project, we were able to stimulate women’s agentic power so that they gained control over their lives and became less vulnerable to hardship. This control over their own lives bolstered their ability to reflect on their own mental states and on those of others and to renegotiate their personal qualities, such as their level of self-regulation and self-efficacy, including a well-formed self-identity with clear personal boundaries.
Although their “rise to power” made some men in their communities uncomfortable, most men gradually started to see the benefits of this change and began to support women in their endeavors. They realized that these women were not out to exercise power over them. Women just wanted to gain more control over their own lives.
When I got involved with development work, I honestly had no idea about the far-reaching impact this kind of project could have. Initially, I merely looked at the direct outcomes: Will the money be well spent? Will the women pay their loans? Will new businesses be established? However, as I witnessed the broader impact that our work had on women’s lives, I realized how instrumental agentic power is in the development and expansion of many different power sources: informational power, social network and connection power, goal-directed focus, moral power, and referent power.
By helping to empower our beneficiaries, I grew mentally along with them. This “powerful” understanding helped me to build and broaden my own power sources as a means of leading a fulfilling life.
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