Dialogue Q3 2016

Page 20

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Male bosses are from Mars, female bosses are from Venus… or are they? Do men and women lead differently? Four experts go head to head to debate the issue

The debate about whether differences in the male and female brain affect the way we manage is at the heart of gender psychology in the workplace. So do men and women lead differently because of their sex?

THE CASE AGAINST professor shane o’mara

What does the male brain most resemble in the universe?’ (the answer is below). ‘Gender’ is a fast and handy way of coding populations and classifying individuals: it is a widely used shortcut, because it quickly evokes all sorts of associations about males and females. It allows us to be ‘cognitive misers’ when we make decisions and choices. But that’s all that coding by gender is. There are infinite ways of coding populations: height; weight; education; nationality; food preferences; favourite football team. All fall short because all discard information about individuals in favour of group membership judgments and stereotypes. A better question than “do men and women lead differently?” is to ask “what collection of cognitive and non-cognitive traits (personality,

motivation, grit, oratory, etc.) in a given context, time and place, lead to outcomes that employees value?” This is a very different way of thinking about leadership. After all, former UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill was the supreme leader for wartime, but for peace? History has provided the answer. Elizabeth I of England, by contrast, was a leader for war and peace! To assume coding by gender reflects some unchanging and immutable underlying biological reality that describes all we need to know about an individual. That such an assumption is a basis for action is simply wrong – and self-evidently so, when you consider the complexity and variation found within, and between, human beings. It is not at all obvious that using gender as a proxy for the traits of leaders is the most useful way of ensuring the best leaders are selected. Nor is it the case that the traits of leaders are immutable qualities, independent of time and place, arising irrevocably from

Coding by gender is just cognitive miserliness

Dialogue Q3 2016

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