Nature and nurture in the executive suite
Sunday, 16 March 2008
Michael Skapinker
WOMEN are calmer than men. They are more collaborative and they disdain self-promotion. It is all in their genes.
For anyone who came of age in the 1970s, just when feminism did, there is something startling about women management writers using biology to explain the difference between male and female behaviour.
Progressive thought once held that men and women were essentially the same and that it was social conditioning that made men aggressive and women co-operative.
Some writers still argue this way. In an article in last September's Harvard Business Review, Alice Eagly and Linda Carli say the reason women managers generally adopt a softer style is unlikely to be genetic. They do it because people react badly to aggressive women and a collaborative approach is how female managers assert their authority.
A new book, Why Women Mean Business, is bolder: biology matters, it says. The authors, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Alison Maitland, approvingly cite recent research showing men's and women's brains differ. This inevitably affects the way they manage.
"Why would differences in communication styles, biological rhythms, hormones and brain functioning (to mention only a few) stop just short of leadership styles?" they ask.
They quote Matt Ridley, the science writer (and former chairman of failed mortgage lender Northern Rock), who said that studies of "our closest relatives, the chimpanzees" revealed the males were more competitive and status-conscious than the females. "So there is, in that sense, bound to be a biological legacy of men having a tendency to trample on each other on the way up the tree," Mr Ridley said.
If companies want to succeed they will have to come around to women's way of doing things, the authors argue. Faced with falling populations, companies in Europe will need more women in senior management.
In the new knowledge-based economy, they say, companies need collaborative managers who can persuade people to work in teams. There is no need for women to change their essential natures.
Why Women Mean Business is an innovative and stimulating book. (I should mention that Alison Maitland was an FT colleague for 20 years.) But the resort to biology raises problems.
First, scans have indeed shown differences between male and female brain functioning. Newborn girls look at human faces for longer than they look at mechanical mobiles, while boys do the opposite. But the science is far from settled. We still do not know the precise mixture of nature and nurture that makes men and women what they are.
Second, if you argue that women's empathetic nature makes them particularly suited to helping run collaborative enterprises, a corollary would have to be that they are less well equipped for other tasks.
Lawrence Summers, Harvard's former president, may have been politically reckless in suggesting that intrinsic aptitude accounted for the dearth of women in mathematics and engineering, but his argument is consistent with the view that women are natural empathisers while men are systematisers.
Third, the problem with characterising huge groups is that it takes no account of the large variations within them. Women, on average, may be more empathetic than men, but we all know collaborative male managers and sharp-elbowed female ones, just as we know boys who cannot turn plastic sticks into tractors and girls who do not listen quietly while others speak. This was my difficulty with Professor Summers. Nature is important, but humans are endlessly complicated.
There is, however, one inescapable biological difference between men and women: women have babies.
Both Why Women Mean Business and the Harvard Business Review article acknowledge career breaks hold women back, but insist vestigial discrimination and men's better networking skills matter too.
But having a family makes a crucial difference. Thomas Sowell, the US commentator, points out in his recent book, Economic Facts and Fallacies, that single, childless women aged 40 to 64 earn considerably more than men of the same description.
Both sets of women writers are ambivalent about arrangements for mothers to work part-time during their child-raising years, saying these risk creating all-female ghettos.
But they are a way of keeping part-timers in touch. Managed properly, they allow them to return full-time in their fifties. With the rise in longevity, those women could still have 20 years' work ahead of them, at precisely the time when, as Why Women Mean Business points out, many men are hoping to slow down.
If that is true, there will be fewer men for women to clamber over. I am not sure biology holds the key to women getting into the executive suite, but demography might.
FT Syndication Service
WOMEN are calmer than men. They are more collaborative and they disdain self-promotion. It is all in their genes.
For anyone who came of age in the 1970s, just when feminism did, there is something startling about women management writers using biology to explain the difference between male and female behaviour.
Progressive thought once held that men and women were essentially the same and that it was social conditioning that made men aggressive and women co-operative.
Some writers still argue this way. In an article in last September's Harvard Business Review, Alice Eagly and Linda Carli say the reason women managers generally adopt a softer style is unlikely to be genetic. They do it because people react badly to aggressive women and a collaborative approach is how female managers assert their authority.
A new book, Why Women Mean Business, is bolder: biology matters, it says. The authors, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Alison Maitland, approvingly cite recent research showing men's and women's brains differ. This inevitably affects the way they manage.
"Why would differences in communication styles, biological rhythms, hormones and brain functioning (to mention only a few) stop just short of leadership styles?" they ask.
They quote Matt Ridley, the science writer (and former chairman of failed mortgage lender Northern Rock), who said that studies of "our closest relatives, the chimpanzees" revealed the males were more competitive and status-conscious than the females. "So there is, in that sense, bound to be a biological legacy of men having a tendency to trample on each other on the way up the tree," Mr Ridley said.
If companies want to succeed they will have to come around to women's way of doing things, the authors argue. Faced with falling populations, companies in Europe will need more women in senior management.
In the new knowledge-based economy, they say, companies need collaborative managers who can persuade people to work in teams. There is no need for women to change their essential natures.
Why Women Mean Business is an innovative and stimulating book. (I should mention that Alison Maitland was an FT colleague for 20 years.) But the resort to biology raises problems.
First, scans have indeed shown differences between male and female brain functioning. Newborn girls look at human faces for longer than they look at mechanical mobiles, while boys do the opposite. But the science is far from settled. We still do not know the precise mixture of nature and nurture that makes men and women what they are.
Second, if you argue that women's empathetic nature makes them particularly suited to helping run collaborative enterprises, a corollary would have to be that they are less well equipped for other tasks.
Lawrence Summers, Harvard's former president, may have been politically reckless in suggesting that intrinsic aptitude accounted for the dearth of women in mathematics and engineering, but his argument is consistent with the view that women are natural empathisers while men are systematisers.
Third, the problem with characterising huge groups is that it takes no account of the large variations within them. Women, on average, may be more empathetic than men, but we all know collaborative male managers and sharp-elbowed female ones, just as we know boys who cannot turn plastic sticks into tractors and girls who do not listen quietly while others speak. This was my difficulty with Professor Summers. Nature is important, but humans are endlessly complicated.
There is, however, one inescapable biological difference between men and women: women have babies.
Both Why Women Mean Business and the Harvard Business Review article acknowledge career breaks hold women back, but insist vestigial discrimination and men's better networking skills matter too.
But having a family makes a crucial difference. Thomas Sowell, the US commentator, points out in his recent book, Economic Facts and Fallacies, that single, childless women aged 40 to 64 earn considerably more than men of the same description.
Both sets of women writers are ambivalent about arrangements for mothers to work part-time during their child-raising years, saying these risk creating all-female ghettos.
But they are a way of keeping part-timers in touch. Managed properly, they allow them to return full-time in their fifties. With the rise in longevity, those women could still have 20 years' work ahead of them, at precisely the time when, as Why Women Mean Business points out, many men are hoping to slow down.
If that is true, there will be fewer men for women to clamber over. I am not sure biology holds the key to women getting into the executive suite, but demography might.
FT Syndication Service