Lately, I've been reading a lot of articles that go something like this:
"But we asked women to join the club and women still didn't join the club. Our conclusion? Women don't want to be in the club."
I'm using metaphor here. The "club" can stand for anything in this case but at Secretariain't, the club is business. The problem with this conclusion is that it is too narrow. It does not get to the root cause of gender imbalance in business. It does not ask "why?" Companies want more women and believe that women in their executive ranks is a good thing. They make promises and goals to increase these numbers and yet, continuously fall short of them. If companies want to further a constructive dialogue about achieving gender balance in the business world they will have to utilize a systems approach to understanding the lack of balance. When you do, it becomes clear that women "not wanting to join the club" is actually a symptom of a larger issue and not the root reason for the imbalance.
Systems thinking is challenging because it is complex. Humans tend to oversimplify, which causes us to lose site of the root causes for the huge systemic problems we want to solve (the complexity of climate change is a good example of this). The result is poorly designed ineffective solutions or no solution at all. The same thing happens when it comes to solving women's issues. Even calling them "women's issues" is oversimplifying, since limitations on women also create limitations for their families, which include men and sons. When you expand your gaze from families, you see that limitations for families create limitations in society. "Women's issues" further oversimplifies because it does not adequately express or capture the wide spectrum of impact that gender discrimination has when accounting for experiential differences due to race, class, sexual orientation, age...the list goes on.
What's the real problem?
One story I heard recently was about a tech start-up that tried to hire two women who declined because they didn't want to take on the risk. In that individual instance, the women very well could have been risk averse for various personal reasons, yet "risk aversion," in this context, was offered as an explanation for why there are few women in the tech-sector. But this conclusion oversimplifies and plays into an age-old stereotype that women are too soft for business or too risk averse. In reality there really are no differences between male and female entrepreneurs. Plenty of men turn down start-up job offers every day because they don't see the venture being profitable and consider it too risky. Yet in this example, all women were generalized when two turned down the offer. I wonder why the founder of this start-up chose to generalize all women instead of considering the declined offer as a reflection on the strength of his business model?
These kinds of generalizations about women happen all the time in the business world. But, they don't really explain what the problem is and so they don't help male leaders to attract female business partners. In this instance, risk aversion could have been fueled by many things that are not related to what has been ascribed as innate qualities of gender, but the systemic impact of gender discrimination:
- women on average make less than men in their careers and cannot afford to take the same kinds of financial risks
- women take time out of the workforce to care for children and parents, which impacts their retirement savings, so a failed venture could have worse financial consequences for a woman
- tech start-ups tend to be all-male and those all-male environments can feel unwelcoming and non-inclusive to women
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wonderful post, nina. things like this need to be required reading for men (and women) in business.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. I'm not sure that your claim that there is no difference between male and female entrepreneurs is supported by all the data out there. I've been doing a bit of research on business incubators (thinking the BGI might want to start one) and discovered that though in most cases, the failure rate of business in incubators is higher than those started in other ways, female owned incubator business are about 17% more likely to succeed than those owned by white men. There are two possibilities for the difference in failure rates overall that the author of the study thought were likely.
ReplyDelete1) the incubators are actually doing their job and businesses that were bound to fail eventually simply do so faster inside of the incubator program.
2) Incubators are basically a way of subsidizing start-ups. These subsidies inhibit the exposure to competition and risk which is essential for long term survival with their more "street savvy" counterparts.
I think it's important not only to recognize that the similarities between the capabilities of men and women, but to also recognize that each gender has unique strengths and weakness that are often complimented in gender balanced partnerships/teams.
Thanks for adding to the research. My claim is linked to a TechCrunch study that was specific to the motivations for why male and female tech entrepreneurs start businesses. There weren't many differences. I would love access to your research. I agree that women have have unique strengths, however I run into a lot of research as well as testimonials that many women feel their strengths are reframed as weaknesses or are completely under-utilized within their companies. Thanks for commenting!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the insight.
ReplyDeleteI agree that simplifying our complex human nature down to two attributes, (male and female), is a gross simplification. It is fascinating to think about how much of our gender identification is culturally indoctrinated and how much is not. I think time will tell, and I wonder how much time it will take.