An Interview with Dr. Susan R. Madsen

“I believe that God must have more women become leaders to move the Church forward in ways that have been predicted and prophesied for so many years.”

Those are the words of Dr. Susan R. Madsen—professor of Leadership and Ethics, global scholar and speaker, and founding director of the Utah Women and Leadership Project and the Utah Women and Education Initiative. Her recent interview with Kurt Francom on Leading Saints focuses on the growing importance of helping women to see themselves as leaders.

The Urgent Need for Female Leaders

In recent years, we’ve repeatedly heard the call of prophets, apostles, and other leaders of the Church for women to take their place in the ongoing Restoration. In 2000, Sheri Dew pleaded, “Sisters, the time has come to unleash the power of righteous happiness that exists among women of God.” And, in 2015, President Russell M. Nelson proclaimed that “the women of this dispensation are distinct from the women of any other.”

“God needs us to lead and influence, today more than ever before,” Madsen says. “Moving forward in this world, it is the women’s voice — engaging with their communities, engaging with their families, using [their] voice in public policy and so forth — that is going to change things for families throughout the world and [allow] the Gospel to move throughout the world.”

Why Women Shy Away from Leadership

Many women have received both spoken and unspoken messages throughout their lives telling them that they are ill-prepared to lead. While General Authorities invite women to contribute, women continue to face a culture of female submission and restraint. “The research is very clear that when there’s only one or two women in a group of a lot of men, their voices are silenced, both [by] themselves, [and also in being] talked over by men,” Madsen says.

Boys and girls are often raised differently, both intentionally and unintentionally. Madsen explains that most people talk about leadership more with their sons than with their daughters. “Boys are socialized much more often to see themselves as future leaders than girls,” she describes. “We’re socialized as girls in elementary school to wait our turn, to keep our mouths closed. We’re socialized as being kind and nice. So, twenty years later, in the mission or in the workplace, we’re still waiting our turn.”

A Study on Sister Missionaries

Interested in these phenomena, Madsen worked to uncover how gender differences play out in a Latter-day Saint context. She noticed that her own assertiveness, learned in a household of six brothers, is quite uncommon among other women in the Church.

So, Madsen decided to survey 700 return sister missionaries. “It was important to really help sisters who have served, but also future sisters, understand that missions are powerful incubators to developing leadership,” Madsen says, explaining her motives for conducting the survey. “There are so many competencies and skills that, sometimes, [women] don’t think are related to leadership, when they are.”

In her survey, Madsen asked the following questions, among others:

1. What leadership skills did you develop on your mission?
2. How do you use those skills now?
3. What other experiences related to leadership do you wish you had had on your mission?

Madsen found that women had developed a wide array of leadership skills on their missions:

Just to name a few.

For many women, these skills carried over brilliantly to their families, ward callings, and careers. However, only about five of the women in the entire survey cited using these abilities in community and civic engagement. This fact troubled Madsen.

If women of the Church are to assume the powerful part that the Lord expects them to play in the latter days, then we must help women aspire to be leaders in their communities.

What Leaders Can Do

“If the processes and systems in society, or even in mission fields, are the same as they’ve always been in tradition, you can only go so far to help women,” Madsen says. “We can encourage women and girls to use their voice, but we can also make changes.” Women and men need to begin questioning what roles men are doing that women are equally qualified to do. They also need to recognize which responsibilities are in fact limited to males.

Madsen used missionary service as a model for the changes that leaders can make within the Church to help women find their voice.

“To develop leadership identity, girls and women and young women that are serving missions need to see women leading.” In many missions, the mission president’s wife could be playing a more significant role in the training of both sisters and elders. “The personal revelation that the husband and wife can gain [together] needs to be really obvious to the mission.”

When wives of mission presidents lead trainings and are a spiritual force in their missions, sisters will see their own latent power and potential as well. In her survey, Madsen found that sisters who had “individual connections, mentorship, [and] interactions with their mission presidents’ wives did see themselves more as leaders.”

From there, “mission leaders can also create and support additional sister-only learning opportunities, including trainings, conferences, developmental networking and relationships, [and] one on one mentoring.”

In general, parents and leaders need to help girls and women reflect on their leadership experiences. “I’m hoping that in the future mission presidents and others at the missionary training centers will [make] tighter connections between what [missionaries are] learning and leadership skills. If we help [sisters] understand that their development of certain competencies and skills definitely do link to leadership, then more sisters will see themselves as leaders.”

What Women Can Do

The responsibility of empowering women does not only fall on the shoulders of leaders. If women want to live up to their potential for influence, then they must take initiative.

Madsen invites young and adult women to get out of their comfort zones. Throughout their lives, women are cautioned to be careful and avoid risk. But leadership opportunities open up when people reach beyond their current capacities. Madsen encourages women of all ages to go for the higher positions — student council, the jobs they aren’t qualified for, public offices. Women need to learn self-compassion in the face of failure and drop the perfectionism that may be preventing them from taking risks.

One female leader with whom women can begin to identify is their own Heavenly Mother. “We have full rights to envision our Mother in Heaven and who she is and how we can be like her,”

Madsen says. “[We can] picture her not just as a subservient person to Heavenly Father, but as an equal to [Him] in creating worlds.”

Find Your Calling

Throughout the podcast, Madsen emphasizes the importance of uncovering what the Lord has called you, personally, to do. This notion will resonate with all of God’s children — in Athens, Greece, Madsen taught a conference where even nonreligious women grew emotional at the prospect of finding and fulfilling their callings. She learned that “women, if they feel called, will step forward and lead.”

“Being called officially to a calling in the Church is so small compared to what your life calling, or callings, are,” Madsen says. Each of us, whether man or woman, is endowed with unique and potent capacities. It is our privilege and responsibility as daughters and sons of God to discover those gifts and employ them in accomplishing God’s work on the Earth.

Brooklyn Edwards is a 21-year-old student from Evergreen, Colorado, attending Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. She is majoring in editing and publishing with a business minor. Her experience in Church leadership includes a full-time mission in Sweden as well as various callings within YSA wards, including service in relief society presidencies and activities committees. Brooklyn interns as an editor for BYU Continuing Education’s strategic marketing team. Along with writing, she loves running, reading, violin, cooking, and spending time with friends and family. Her desire to lead by following the Savior is what brought her to Leading Saints and keeps her passionately listening to and sharing its messages.