Women's gains are slipping

The New Zealand Human Rights Commission released a report this week, "The 2010 Census of Women's Participation",  which shows that women's participation in governance, professional, and public life has started to slide,  erasing gains over the past decades, according to the Christchurch Press (8-Nov-2010).
(Image at left from flight.org)

According to that article,  women are "still being paid less for doing the same public sector jobs" and "Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner Judy McGregor said the census painted a deteriorating picture for women., saying 'New Zealand is seen as a world leader in ensuring a fair go for women. Unfortunately we risk real damage to that reputation unless there is a broad commitment to genuine change.'"

The article notes that:

Women hold less than 10 percent of directorships of the top 100 companies on the New Zealand Stock Exchange,a figure that has remained static since 2008.   There are 57 companies in the top 100 without a woman on their boards.,,,, Things are not much better in the state sector, which has traditionally been the leader for women's advancement in public life.'

The full report is available on-line here.

The newspaper article states that "The corporate sector should be embarrassed at this lack of female representation", and lists various ways pressure has been applied or could be applied to try to change this state of affairs.

What the article does not state, but seems apparent to even casual observation,  is that, especially in hard times,   embarrassment is not actually a driver of corporate behavior.  So "more of the same" will have only more of the same non-effect.  

 I have an MBA from the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University in the US, and was a lecturer there, and would affirm that my own experience with MBA's supports the perception that they are not swayed by issues of shame when money is on the line elsewhere.  Most of the US MBA's I dealt with were also quite openly and unabashedly sexist.

Now, what's interesting to me is that the whole tone and tenor of the news blurb treats this as an issue of performance evaluation of executives, that they are not being "fair", etc.

What it does NOT affirm, what it SHOULD affirm, in my mind, is the connection between the lack of women and the dismal economic performance of individual companies and the economy as a whole.

I'm suggesting here a profound truth , very easy to misquote me so please bear with me, that I want to put on the table:

Hypothesis: women are NOT equal and are NOT "the same as" men.

This is a pivotal issue in this discussion.  I'm not saying the "treatment" of women, by others, should be equal.    I'm saying that women, themselves, as beings, are not "equal".

They are ALSO  neither better nor worse than men.  They are DIFFERENT from men. (See my entire set of articles on non-transitive dice.).    Males and Females are multidimensional,   in some metrics men would score higher, in some other metrics women would score higher,  and,  in situ, in organizational settings, they will behave qualitatively DIFFERENTLY in an irreducible way when they are included in the structural feedback loops of control of a company or organization.

It is doing no one a favor to pretend they are the same kind of being, and that they should be treated as "plug-compatible components" whereby any one of any gender could simply be removed from their corporate role,  and replaced by a person of "equal qualifications" of the other gender,  without having a noticeable impact on the organization.


Consider this -- if they WERE totally equivalent, then aside from issues of legacy fairness, there would be absolutely no value to companies, to boards of directors, to stockholders, or to the economy and all the other stakeholders of replacing men in certain roles with women doing the same thing in the same roles.

It is my belief that there WOULD be a profound difference if more women were in management, and it is precisely that DIFFERENCE which is the compelling argument for change,  not issues of what is "fair" or "morally right" or "demanded by regulators".

However,  precisely because women are not men,  there is a subtle but crucial distinction that needs to be made.     Most of the studies and discussions of this subject talk about conceptually replacing men in certain roles with women,   and compare the pay for such performance.   The tacit assertions of that mental model that I'd call into question are

• that the ROLES THEMSELVES are gender-neutral
• and that the ROLES are meaningfully defined in a relatively optimal and non-controversial way.

IN other words,  it may well be, and I would not be surprised if it were true, that WOMEN DO NOT DO AS WELL AS MEN IN ROLES THAT HAVE BEEN DEFINED PRECISELY TO FIT HOW MEN TEND TO BEHAVE.

Let me immediately state the corroboratory to that, that MEN WOULD EQUIVALENTLY NOT DO AS WELL AS WOMEN IN ROLES THAT WERE DEFINED PRECISELY TO FIT HOW WOMEN TEND TO APPROACH BUSINESS.

And the explicit but unstated fact that: THESE ROLES WOULD NOT BE THE SAME OR EVEN CLOSE TO THE SAME.

==== start of digression ===
 IN other words, we need to take the structural view of an organization,  where the value of a person in a structural role is largely defined by the structure of the role,  not the person in that role.  Here we get into deep truth that has been revealed by "system dynamics",  revealed in work such as The BEER GAME made popular by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and discussed in Peter Senge's "The Fifth Discipline."   (Hey, Jackie, side bar,  THIS is the kind of thing "system dynamics"  is good for.)

In fact, this type of thinking is well documented, and I believe it can be found in diverse fields, including works such as "The Making of the [American] Presidency" (Schlesinger ?) which also says that it doesn't really MATTER WHO you put into that role,   because so much of the role has been pre-defined and pre-constrained in advance, and the ROLE DEFINES THE HOLDER FAR MORE THAN THE HOLDER (re)DEFINES THE ROLE.

MIT professor Peter Senge discusses structures of human decision making where the company will suffer huge cycles of boom and bust because of the STRUCTURE OF THE ROLES,  completely independently of WHO is in the roles.    He famously reports one executive who got that message and called his company at lunch to stop the termination of an executive, realizing that the poor performance attributed to the executive was actually due to the structure of the role and constraints that person was under, not due to poor performance of the executive and, more to the point would not be FIXED by changing who was in that role.

====== end of digression ====

OK, back to my discussion of women's "equality".    It appears to me to be a massive violation of the opportunity before us to assume that women and men behave identically, given the same situation.   They don't, in my experience behave the same.   So what? 


Example, possibly useful, from science:

-- I used to teach a course in radio and TV repair, back when they had components one could actually fix short of simply discarding the set and buying a new one.    The passive objects that can be placed into circuits come in two distinct types -- capacitive and inductive.  In a mathematical sense, they behave "identically" except for the mathematical SIGN, where one has a POSITIVE value of something and the other has a NEGATIVE value of something, where even positive and negative are defined arbitrarily.       Nobody in circuit design tries to make the argument that these components are actually "EQUAL"  or "EQUIVALENT"  No one tries to FORCE an inductive component into the slot that is defined for a capacitive one, or vice versa -- that's just silly.    Circuits are designed to take unique advantage of the unique characteristics of each one, in its own right, not to make them all act like each other.    

BOTH Inductive and Capacitive components are, in fact REQUIRED if you want to make an oscillator, or a tuned circuit as in a radio, that can detect weak signals from the environment and amplify them.  They work together, sort of sloshing the energy back and forth between them, improving their detection and resolution of the signal amid the totally different perception of the world they each bring to the table.

It would be totally dysfunctional to try to use ALL inductors or ALL capacitors to do this. It would simply not work.  Period. It has nothing whatsoever to do with "fairness" or "shame."

IN my mind, we have the identical situation in corporations -- there are POTENTIAL ROLES and POTENTIAL STRUCTURES which could make great use of BOTH female and male behaviors, to detect external and internal subtle signals that the company needs to detect and respond to.  BUT THESE ARE NOT THE SAME OLD LEGACY DECISION-MAKING defined-by-males-for-males "roles".    These would be roles designed by women exquisitely taking advantage of female strengths,   roles at which males would be very hard pressed to do well at, or, in the limiting case in theory,  roles at which males were 100% incapable of doing, because, frankly, they were EXACTLY along female natural behavior lines, which is EXACTLY NOT male behavior lines.

So, we are doing a great disservice, not only to women, but to our stakeholders, by trying to force women to "behave like men" in "a man's world."    That's a no-win situation, and, in my mind,  it will never work and shouldn't be even on the table.   Women are quite capable of running businesses, but they will not run them in a way that MEN feel comfortable with, if they retain what I think are some of the true values of being female.    Women can ALSO abandon their gender and do well, often quite well, acting as men do in corporate roles -- but I don't see why that is something to aspire to. The costs seem too high.

What we need is not more "evidence" that women can "do men's work" -- we need evidence that women can do WOMEN's work, ALONG WITH THE FACT that there is a combination of women doing different roles of women's work that is AT LEAST AS POWERFUL as the combination of men's roles doing men's work.

It is, in my mind, based on system dynamics principles and on what I understand of business WRONG to assert that the classic structures that males built as economic enterprises are the ONLY WAY such living entities could possibly be structured -- or even GOOD ways to structure them.  They don't, in fact, really seem to be working very well in the long run.

A business entity needs to have the ability to sense external reality,  to sense internal reality,  and to take action which utilizes external resources to accomplish external goals in such a way that the goals are met and there is a significant profit left over as well to use to grow and repeat the cycle.  This is a cybernetic definition of a feedback loop, or of any living thing,   and can apply equally well to a female-designed organizational structure of relationships and activity as to a male-designed one.

However, there is nothing in that definition that requires executive board meetings, or PowerPoint slides,   or weekly performance reports,  or setting goals and objectives, or any of the behaviors we associate with "business enterprises."    The key point is to get a wide-ranging SENSE of IMPORTANT FACTORS in the environment and internally, and to TAKE ACTION to deal with those factors.    Nothing requires that there be analytical studies or data-crunching or computers.  ANY way of sifting through the ocean of signals to find the key things to respond to is sufficient.  If women, say, want to put much more emphasis on looking for "soft" issues such as relationships, feelings,  intuition, etc than men do,  fine, but it's an INTERNAL VARIABLE that is meaningless to measure.  The EXTERNAL behavior of the organization, the ACTION it takes,  is what matters.   How it came up with that action and mobilized it is not visible to the outside world.

  At a minimum, this will or could provide jobs to millions of women who could easily "GET IT" and work in THAT kind of female-gender-friendly environment, but who are totally TURNED OFF by the way MALES attempt to get work done with endless reports,  meetings that focus on charts of data, powerpoint slides,  rabid competition with each other or to make each other look bad, etc.


If the economy were booming, this would not be necessary, and women could leave men to do their thing and fine.  But the economy is NOT booming, and the "side effects" of male-role-dominated corporate life are destroying the planet.   It's time for a good alternative, and then for a GREAT duet.

As McGregor's "theory X" of management (Bossy, top-down, information driven competitive dog-eat-dog roles) is increasingly replaced by "theory Y" management (Collegial,  bottom-up,  emotionally supportive collaborative teams) it may be that females can find a style that works for them at last, and a style that all the new literature is showing, gasp, turns out to be far MORE productive in a dynamic environment than the legacy top-down style of management.

Let me zero in on this more.   BUSINESS, or any cybernetic organism,  is NOT about "information" and is not about "information processing" -- it is about RELATIONSHIPS, and RESPONSE TO massively ambiguous flood of signals from outside and within, only some of which are worth paying attention to.    Males and females will, I affirm,  be intrinsically good at DETECTING and responding to DIFFERENT SIGNALS, and responding to them in DIFFERENT WAYS.

These signals and behaviors are COMPLEMENTARY. They are not identical and should not be MADE identical.  That wastes the whole capacity of the organization to go BEYOND a flat, boring, uniform method of operation. That destroys the whole source of creativity.

There's a lot of loose talk of "energy" and organizations. 

=== science digression ====

Let me share a basic fact from physics (I was a physics undergraduate major)   about propagating energy waves, such as radio or TV or microwaves.    These waves, key to our power and communication technologies,   are what is known as "Electromagnetic waves" or "EM waves"  Ok -- Why are they called that? They are called that because they have TWO COMPONENTS - an "electrical" one and a "magnetic" one, and they store energy dynamically by continually tossing it back and forth between the two, at some rate or frequency that defines the "wavelength" of the "radiation".     There is no such thing as a STATIC EM Wave. The wave only makes sense in a dynamic universe.   No one comes along and says it would be more "fair" if there were equal amounts of magnetic and electrical energy here -- the mathematics says you simply need equal amounts (over time) to make it work.  Period.  Nothing about "fairness".

=== end of science digression

I see the role of females and males in possible organizations,  (not the ones we have now that were defined by males to do about as much as can be done with a single-sign structure).

I'm saying that if we stand back, figure out how women and men PREFER to operate,  and redesign the organizational roles to exquisitely fit that method of operating,  we will discover two things.  One,  the male and female roles in the sensor and feedback and relationship structures are NOT IDENTICAL and not plug-compatible, and Two,   males will do very poorly at the female roles, and females will do very poorly at the male roles.   In fact, in the limit of perfectly defined roles,  males will be completely at a loss to do ANYTHING in the female roles, and females would be completely at a loss at doing anything in a male role, because the role and function woudn't even make any intrinsic SENSE to them.   But so what? That's GOOD.  We don't want homogenization.

Let me repeat that. We are not after homogenization.  We are not after total uniformity.   We are after SPECTACULAR DIFFERENCES which, in combination with each other, played against each other, allow us VASTLY more capacity to store energy than the legacy male-defined and male-dominated model of operation that we call "corporations" or "agencies."

I realize how this will sound, but I suggest it is a total misdirection of effort to attempt to figure out how to get "more women" into "executive roles"   when the roles themselves have been defined to be offensive to women and suitable for the way MEN deal with information and relationships.

What we should be doing instead is two things:

1)  Experiment with and design many more female-only structures,  such as perhaps Nurse Managed Centers of health care,    explicitly and blatantly and brashly designed to suit the way WOMEN prefer to operate, capitalizing on their natural frequencies and harmonics and behaviors.    We need more information on that, and I feel confident that there are as many solid ways for females in large groups to coordinate and cooperate as there are for males.


THEN, we also need

2)   To put our heads together and say, given we have MALE roles, that are good at X and lousy at Y, and female roles, that are good at XNTT and lousy at X,  How can we use BOTH of them, simultaneously, to accomplish what neither one, it it's wildest dreams, could accomplish alone?

This is NOT about "fairness".  It is about making good use of the intrinsic preferences and strengths of males and females that are, I affirm,  conspicuously DIFFERENT.  It is about EXULTING the difference.

Women,  I would affirm, are not incapable of economic activity -- far from it.  But they ARE almost incapable of carrying out such activity IN THE WAY MALES HAVE HISTORICALLY DONE IT. They would (and will) break down the larger cybernetic loops of SENSING the environment and REACTING TO IT in very different ways, across different lines, across different time scales.

The END RESULT, viewed from outside the corporate entity, will be the same -- they will create a living, active,  cybernetic animal capable of detecting social needs,  detecting potentially available resources,  detecting pathways to get from point A to point B with side effects C,  and closing the loop of solving problems and what Peter Drucker would say are "solving external problems using external  resources" for which they are handsomely paid a percentage of the social benefit so produced.

They just won't do it the way MEN would do it

Which is fine.

Speaking as one from the United States -- New Zealand has a world-leadership position in getting women into roles and jobs (pilot, doctor, etc.) that had often been reserved for males in other societies.  New Zealand has a head-start on this, and can take a world-leadership role on this NEXT stage of the evolution of the role of women in social thriving of our planet.    But I think the legacy models of how to structure work to accomplish that are broken, and NOT good guides to the future. Women need to find their own voice, their own models, their own ways of doing things to have a "fair go" at it.  Women in New Zealand have a track record of being able to do this It's in the genes literally. Please, I beg of you from afar -- don't discard this fantastic treasure because you don't see how to use it!



Please comment pro or con or with your own insights!

Wade