Ejercicio Grupo B - 3 · Inglés PAU Canarias Junio (Humanidades) 2022

GRUPO B

It is a critical moment for humanity. We need everyone to start leading like a woman

We talk a lot about leadership, but we don't often address the topic directly. We live in a world where

success is more about money than merit; most leaders come to power via a similar, pre-established route, so

we don't often stop to question our ideas about what qualities a good leader should have. But it is crucial that

we do this because every crisis the world faces is actually a crisis of leadership.

5 Before we can solve anything —from the climate crisis to social inequality— we need to solve the mediocre-

man crisis. We need to understand why so many incompetent men are in power. (And before all the men's

rights activists start yelling at me about incompetent women, please take a look around: this point stands

because the vast majority of people in charge are still men.)

How have so many incompetent men become leaders? The short answer is confidence. Lots of studies show

10 that confident people are more convincing —and humans have a lamentable tendency to confuse

confidence with competence.

There is, of course, a class element to this. A series of recent studies by researchers from two universities

found that "individuals with relatively high social class are more overconfident." But not only class affects

confidence, gender does too. Because the idea that geniuses are predominately male is so established, society

15 tends to reward men for overconfidence and narcissism, while punishing women for the same qualities.

As a female writer, I can also tell you that women are punished for pointing out that men aren't perfect, so

let me quickly tell you that a guy has said the same thing. In his book Why Do So Many Incompetent Men

Become Leaders? organizational psychologist Chamorro-Premuzic argues that men dominate positions of

power because they are more likely to exhibit toxic traits. "Women are better leaders, they have better people

20 skills, they outperform men in university...," he explains.

I agree with Chamorro-Premuzic on a lot of things, but I want to make something very clear: I am not

interested in having more women in power simply because they are women. Who cares about having more

women in charge if those women simply copy the same toxic model of leadership created by men?

I am interested in advancing a more "feminine" model of leadership. The next decade may be our last

25 opportunity to determine our future. Here is the thing, though: we aren't going to be able to change anything

if we don't drastically change the way we think about leadership.

Fragment adapted from The Guardian, November 2021

3. FIND a word or expression in the text that means... (1 point)

a)

b)

c)

d)