The Prattle of the Sexes

When Jennifer Cliff interviewed 141 male and 88 female small-business owners in Vancouver in the spring of 1995, she heard a lot of what she calls standard-issue “gender stereotypic” talk. The men would tell her they want employees to see them as The Boss, and that they expect workers to do what I say. The women would emphasize teamwork, explaining that they didn’t want to be perceived as above their employees, but rather as working „alongside“ them. None of this gave Cliff pause, since a popular theory in gender studies is that men and women have fundamentally different ways of approaching work relationships and, thus, business management. Since what she was hearing fit that theory, Cliff fully expected these different managerial archetypes to show up in more objective measures – the hierarchical structures, policies, and procedures in place at each business. But they didn‘t. Instead, Cliff found that despite the difference in how these men and women talked about their work, when it came to the details, there were no differences in how men and women operated their respective businesses. Says Cliff: It was very shocking to me to discover that. Now, the paper based on this research and written by Cliff and two co-authors has won the Best Women’s Entrepreneurship Paper award from the Center for Women’s Business Research and will soon hit print in the journal Organization Studies. The study, though small and narrowly focused, is a provocative piece of a puzzle that has intrigued researchers for decades: How much of what seems typically male or typically female behavior is really about gender, and how much is simply associated with gender? Answering that question requires dexterous thinking by researchers if they are going to finally disentangle gender from myriad other factors, Cliff says. For example, some theorists offer as proof that women are by nature more egalitarian than men the fact that outfits headed by females tend to be less hierarchical. But this ignores another crucial fact: At present, women typically run smaller business than their male counterparts. In other words, women-led outfits can get by with fewer formal structures and policies. By contrast, large companies can’t function that way – unless they are broken into small departments or subsidiaries. As long as women primarily head smaller outfits, studies that focus only on their management style will send misleading signals to researchers. Cliff, an assistant professor at the University of Alberta’s business school, makes this point in the paper, noting that while their research found no correlation between an entrepreneur’s gender and his or her business practices, there was a clear correlation between those practices and the differing sizes of the outfits studied. What’s strange about that outcome is not that it will unsettle gender theorists, but that it might startle a few business people. While almost half the entrepreneurs Cliff interviewed talked as if they managed in stereotypically masculine or feminine ways, a hard look at their actual operations made hash of those claims. A team-talking woman might prove to have some very authoritarian practices in place, and an authoritarian-sounding man might run a fairly informal, team-focused shop. I think there are very strong societal pressures for women and men to talk in these gender-stereotypic ways, says Cliff. Men don’t want to sound touchy-feely, while women aren’t supposed to be aggressive, ambitious power-seekers. But in practice, she adds, managers of each gender operate with a mix of styles. Cliff hopes her study will push researchers to reconsider the validity of some stereotypes, but she isn’t ready to suggest that her peers totally renounce the idea that men and women have fundamentally different ways of relating to employees and workmates. Other research indicates that male leaders do tend to use command and control approaches, while women prefer a „transformational“ leadership style, using personal charisma and inclusive decision-making processes to engage subordinates intellectually and emotionally, Cliff says. Even more intriguing, some studies suggest that the transformational approach may be better for the bottom line. In the end, gender watchers might well find that women’s typical ways of relating aren‘t quite as obvious as anatomical differences. Instead of being part of the physical-psychological package, those distinctions may simply reflect women‘s historical answers to the kinds of management challenges they were traditionally expected to tackle: the day-in, day-out direction of large groups of small children, pulling off collaborative projects with other homemakers, and managing their families’ social schedules. These are all people-intensive, cooperative enterprises. Is it any wonder women might conclude that while command-and-control authoritarianism has its place, it also has its limits? While Cliff and her colleagues labor to separate gender from all the other elements affecting management choices, the business world might want to do a little disentangling of its own. Bosses who talk feminine but manage masculine are only going to alienate their workers – not because of gender, but because of the gap between what they say and what they do. Likewise, assuming a woman will manage one way and a man another may lead to poor hiring and recruitment polices and flawed decisions about who to promote. Academics take a lot of flack from business for being remote from the real world. What Cliff’s work shows is that thinking in stereotypes can lead businesses to stray just as far from reality. From “BusinessWeek”

The Prattle of the Sexes

Male and famale management styles seem to be more similar than expected

Südtiroler Wirtschaftszeitung

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The Prattle of the Sexes

Male and famale management styles seem to be more similar than expected

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