Girl Scout Utah CEO shares advice with women’s conference
“Women have different voices in leadership than men,” said Elaine Gause, CEO of the Girl Scouts of Utah. Gause will be the first of three speakers in a lecture series, sponsored by the Women’s Center on campus, which focuses on the need for and value of women in leadership positions.
“The U.S. is 104 in the world in the percent of women in leadership positions – behind Cuba and Afghanistan,” Gause said, “and only 16 percent of the Congress and Senate are women.”
When asked how the voices of men and women differ in leadership positions, Gause said men are more competitive, out to conquer and defend, while women are more collaborative and more concerned with progressing towards a goal.
“It is less important who wins for women, but both men’s and women’s voices work together and both are necessary,” Gause said.
Gause said the world views the U.S. as far more competitive than collaborative, which is a good reason why more women’s voices are needed in leadership positions. Gause has discovered this world’s view of the U.S. through first-hand experience. With her father in the military, Gause said she lived all over the world, from Adak, Ala., to the Isle of Guam in the Philippines, which was the first place she was a Girl Scout.
In her twenties, Gause said she lived and worked in England and toured most of Western Europe. She has visited every South American country except Nicaragua and El Salvador, though she says she speaks Spanish “very poorly.”
“In fact, everything I say in in first tense – last night I eat very good,” she said.
This past August, she and other Girl Scout adult volunteers and one teenage Girl Scout spent two weeks in Yanayacu, Peru, a village about 50 miles down the Amazon. In Peru, they followed up on service activities begun by another group of 11 Utah teen Girl Scouts who had traveled there the summer before. The activities included building chicken coops and stocking them with 100 chickens, supplying medicine and food for the chickens, providing and fitting more than 2,000 pairs of reading glasses to villagers and furnishing a cistern and supplies for a sewer line and toilet – the first in the village.
“We dug trenches, scraped rust and painted a roof so the water funneling into the cistern would be as clean as possible and built a frame and stand for the cistern to keep it off the ground and away from animals,” Gause said.
For Gause, living around the world has helped her gain a love of many cultures and different views.
Gause has also received leadership training through her formal education and career choices. She graduated from the University of North Florida with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and a minor in history. After graduation, she said she spent six years in Florida as a political consultant, advising candidates on regional and state levels. Gause then furthered her education at Harvard where she earned her master’s of public administration. She then spent three years as the executive director of Ogden’s Nature Center and now serves as the CEO of Utah’s Girl Scouts.
Gause said the Girl Scouts program teaches teenage girls valuable leadership skills that they don’t seem to get anywhere else.
“Teenage girls don’t see themselves as leaders – this is a big problem. Women think you have to run something or have a title to be leader. This is just not true,” Gause said.
Gause said she believes women lead when they write and share their views, follow good examples, create art or simply take action.
“Getting things done is leadership,” she said.
Gause said the Girl Scout program can provide a forum for girls to become leaders in the future.
“Girl’s Scouts provides a safe place where girls can try out a dream and fail,” she said.
Not only does the program provide a lot of adult supervision, Gause said, but the leaders teach girls to set goals and embrace both success and failure.
“We don’t talk about and embrace failure much and because we don’t, it is devastating to girls when they experience it for the first time – usually in college or in the work place or in family life. They don’t know how to handle it,” Gause said. “Girl Scouts helps prepare girls for success and failure and disappointment better than those who are shielded from it until they are older.”
Gause said that it was through Girls Scouts that she got to know her mother as a leader and not just “Mom.” Her mother was her Girl Scouts leader, but taught Gause more than just to set goals. Gause also watched her mother suffer from breast cancer and eventually pass away when Gause was 14.
“It was my mother’s strength through the illness that has has encouraged me to be strong myself and encourage others to raise their voices no matter what the challenges they face,” Gause said.
Gause’s lecture will be Wednesday, March 4 at 2:30 p.m. in the Merrill-Cazier Library, Room 101. A question and answer period will be held after Gause’s speech.
– jenni.whiteley@aggiemail.usu.edu