Women and Spiders

Anyone who knows me well, knows that I'm deathly afraid of spiders... At times, I've even traveled to the embarrassing depths of waking up my step-mother in the middle of the night, to kill them for me! As much of an arachnophob as I am, I've always been fascinated by their amazing webs and how they tirelessly weave these forms of art, with the sole purpose of drawing others to it.
I picked up a book recently called, The Female Advantage, by Sally Helgesen because I wanted to better understand how to empower the women I work with. The book explores leadership styles of top executive women and parallels them with executive men. It identified the women's leadership role as a web of inclusion and like the spider, in the middle of things. The image of the web resonated with me because, the way we structure our network of relationships can be "web" like. This begs the questions; Do we reach out rather than down and do we put ourselves transparently in the center like the spider?
I don't think this read has helped me with my fear of spiders, but by exploring this unique outlook on the way women lead, it has made me aspire to be in the middle of things and not alone at the top.