Forster N. - Maximum performance (2005)(en)

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Wave’ of women have made into traditional male occupations in more recent times, as illustrated below.

The military

As noted earlier, and in spite of continuing problems with sexual harassment, increasing numbers of young women are entering the military in North America, Europe and Australasia. True to form, the initial response of men in the military to the presence of women was that they were not suited to be warriors, usually accompanied by the following statements: ‘women are not strong enough’, ‘women don’t have a strong enough instinct to kill’ and so forth. In reality, many of these claims turned out to be specious or based upon tests that have been rigged against women. Bogus data are also a culprit. For example, after the first Gulf War, some senior men in the US military claimed that ‘large numbers’ of women had been withdrawn from the battlefront because they had ‘fallen pregnant’. The army actually sent home 81 women for ‘pregnancy-associated diagnoses’ but evacuated 207 for ‘other injuries’. More than 400 men were also evacuated as a result of non-combat injuries, out of a total deployment of more than 20 000 troops. The Navy sent 72 women home out of a total of 2600 women personnel. In one study, Francke has shown that many training courses, designed for men, ended up breaking many women. When these were changed to suit women’s learning and physical development needs, most women were able to get up to the same level as men (Francke, 2001).

Many of the old justifications for excluding women from military service no longer hold water. The trend towards smart weapons and engagement at a distance means that, for most roles, men’s superior strength and stamina are no longer relevant criteria. Women are as capable as men of dealing with the increasingly complex weapons systems and technologies that the military now use. Indeed, Francke provides evidence that women are better at some of these roles, because of their ability to multi-task and they are also scoring higher than men on aptitude and achievement tests. Significantly, the number of women employed in both support and front-line combat roles increased during the 2003 Gulf War. However, because men have, on average, a 50 per cent advantage over women in upper-body strength and a 30 per cent advantage in lower-body strength, they will still be the first choice for hand-to-hand combat roles for the foreseeable future (Garran, 2001b).4

Another sign of the changing role of women in armed conflicts was highlighted during the perpetual Israeli–Palestinian conflict. While women have played a role in the Israeli military since the 1950s, the

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cultural restrictions of Islam had kept women out of the firing line in Muslim states. However, in more recent times, several women suicide bombers have gone voluntarily to their deaths. It was revealed that the militant Palestinian group Hamas had allowed this only as a means of ‘purifying’ women who had ‘desecrated family honour’ – a euphemism for having extramarital sex. The former leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, had long resisted the use of women suicide bombers, while most other Palestinian groups allowed it. While male suicide bombers are promised eternity in paradise alongside 72 virgins, it was deemed to be unseemly for female martyrs to receive a comparable reward. Instead, they are promised eternal life with the fiancé or husband they left behind (Rabanovich, 2004).

Astronauts

History tells us that the Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman into space during the 1960s and Dr Sally Ride was the first American woman in orbit in 1983. However, in 2002, newly released NASA documents from the 1950s and 1960s revealed that the women who had been accepted for Phase I of astronaut training in 1959 were soon achieving the same results as men in physical, psychological and aptitude tests. By July 1961 a group of women who had become known as the ‘Mercury 13’ had been selected for Phase II of astronaut training. Then, without warning, notice or explanation, NASA cancelled their training, even though these women had proved themselves to be more suitable for space than many men in Phase I of the program. They were not chosen for space missions in the 1960s and 1970s because it was believed that the general public would find this unacceptable. Even though women clearly had the ‘Right Stuff’, they were not perceived to have it (NASA website, March 2002). In the Soviet Union, a few more women did manage to get into space, but this was driven in part by the ideological battle raging between the former Soviet Union and the West at that time.

Women were not readmitted to the NASA astronaut-training programme until 1973. Up to December 2003, ten women had flown on shuttle missions (and two had lost their lives in the Shuttle crashes). On 21 July 1999, Eileen Collins became the first woman to captain a shuttle mission (Reuters, 1999b). Within the next 100 years it is possible that humanity will embark on journeys to the nearest stars. A number of presenters, at the 2002 American Association for the Advancement of Science Conference in Boston, believe that the first flights to the stars will consist of women-only crews. Men need not apply because the allfemale crews would probably have to take a sperm bank for reproductive purposes, rather than male astronauts, in order to save weight (whether this was the weight of male egos was not specified). In a

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keynote presentation to the conference, Geoff Landis, the head of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio, commented ‘After the long voyage without any men present, they may discover that humanity doesn’t actually need men after all and they’ll engineer a society without them. But, then, maybe, that will be better anyway. It certainly might be worth a try’ (cited by Henderson, 2002a).

Firefighting and rescue services

Increasing numbers of women have been entering these occupations. Thirty years ago, there were only a few women fire-fighters, ambulance drivers or paramedics employed in North America, the UK and Australasia; now there are thousands. Women did of course work in these jobs during most military conflicts of the 20th century.

The Mafia

In the mid-1990s, the combination of a shortage of male heirs and the imprisonment of a number of male Dons led to the emergence of a new generation of ‘Mafia Matrons’. By all accounts they are just as incisive, ferocious and cold-blooded as their menfolk when it comes to settling scores, taking out the competition and looking after their families’ businesses. In May 2002, a 30-year-old rivalry between the Cava and Graziano families, in the southern Italian town of Lauro, exploded in a gunfight and the deaths of eight people. All the participants in this shoot-out were women (Phillips, 2002). It will be interesting to see what happens when their menfolk are released from prison.

Bullfighting

The first top-ranked woman matador in the world, Christina Sanchez, was admitted to the Spanish professional ranks in 1996. However, three years later, she had been hounded out of bullfighting because of the refusal of male matadors to appear on the same billings with her. Male matadors, and traditional bullfighting fans who were interviewed about this, said that she did not have the cojones to risk her life in front of an angry wounded bull, even though her ‘kill record’ was as good as that of most of the men. The inbred machismo of Spanish bullfighting continues to be a resistant barrier to women, but dozens of young Spanish girls have since enrolled at bullfighting schools hoping to emulate Sanchez’s early success (Reuters, 1999a).

Boxing, wrestling and kickboxing

The daughters of both Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier have been boxers on the women’s professional boxing circuit. More than 100 women now fight on the professional boxing, wrestling and kickboxing circuits.

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Wood-chopping

In 2001, the Australian men’s junior wood chopping team consisted of seven men and one woman (Janell Foster, aged 19).

Car, bike racing, football, rugby and golf

Leanna Ferrier is another woman carving a career in a traditionally male world. She was placed seventh overall in the Australian Formula Ford championships in 2001 (Bryan, 2001). There are two professional women motorbike riders on the professional circuit. Thousands of women, in more than 50 countries around the world, now play Rugby Union or Association Football. Although a few golf clubs still bar women from membership (for example, St. Andrew’s in Scotland and Augusta National in the USA), there is a thriving women’s professional circuit. Annika Sorenstam was the first woman since 1945 to be invited to play in a PGA event in May 2003 (at the Bank of America tournament) and Suzy Whaley became the first woman to qualify for a men’s US PGA Tour event since 1945. She teed off in the Greater Hartford Open in July 2003.

Extreme sports

Twenty years ago you would have found hardly any women going base-jumping or cliff-diving, few female mountaineers and no women competing in extreme skiing competitions. Now there are hundreds. The story of one of the pioneers of women’s extreme skiing is described in the next example.

‘She’s one of the boys’

A story that passed round the world’s skiing community in the late 1980s was one about Kim Reichelm. A former member of the Canadian Alpine Race Squad in the 1980s, she had retired from full-time racing and decided to hitch up with some of the first generation of extreme skiers in Squaw Valley in the USA. At the time, this was an exclusive ‘boys only’ club, which included skiing legends like Scott Schmidt, Mike Hattrup and Kevin Andrews. On the fateful day the boys went off a high cornice (a wind lip of snow), down into an almost sheer 100 metre long, rock-flanked gully and all landed successfully. Kim, however, got her weight on the back of her skis and fell, spun several times and cracked her head on a rock. This injury required eight stitches.

The same afternoon, she was out again with the group skiing through some large pine trees in an out-of-bounds ski area. In one turn she pushed her shoulder into a tree (a movement that racers perform automatically when skiing through giant slalom courses) and dislocated it. She had this popped back in and was out again the very next day free-skiing, and tore her anterior cruciate ligament in yet another fall. Scott Schmidt who was interviewed at the time commented, ‘She’s a fantastic skier, real strong and real aggressive. We’re going to hang out together until she gets better. She can come skiing with us any time.’ Since this time, many more women have become extreme skiers, and now compete on the international circuit.

(Abridged from License to Thrill, Delamo Films, 1989)

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Rock and pop music

Twenty years ago women made up less than 3 per cent of the top selling solo artists and bands in the world. There were hardly any women roadies working for groups, and no female security officers at gigs. Now, one-fifth of the top performers are women, ranging from Madonna, Bjork, Norah Jones, Sade and Dido to bands such as Destiny’s Child. By 2010, more than one-third of the entire personnel working in rock and pop music will be women. The British band Bush insists that at least ten of the bouncers on duty at their gigs are women (Harlow, 2002).

What is most interesting and revealing about all the arguments that continue to be put forward by men to prevent women from becoming boxers or bullfighters or fire-fighters or front-line fighter pilots is that they are exactly the same as those that have been put forward to prevent women from entering every profession and occupation over the last 100 years. Examples of this include forcing their way into academia, then being ‘allowed’ to become professors; getting the vote, then being ‘allowed’ to stand for political office (and later on becoming ministers); becoming doctors (and after that hurdle was overcome, becoming surgeons); being admitted to study as lawyers (and then becoming partners in law firms or judges); becoming accountants (and then partners) and so on, like a stuck record for more than a century. Every single time that women have tried to enter male-dominated professions and occupations they have been told that they are too weak, too fragile, too emotional, not as intelligent or rational as men or just innately inferior to men and, therefore, not capable of doing the job. Another example, cited earlier, is the very long-standing prejudice during the 20th century about the entrepreneurial instincts and abilities of women. An often-cited story is that of Anita Roddick’s struggle to get funding for the nascent Body Shop in the early 1970s. She had a desperate struggle to convince (male) bank managers that, not only did she have a good business plan, but she and her husband were capable of seeing it through (Roddick, 2000). It seems laughable to apply these arguments to the occupations described above now, and yet a lot of men (and a few women) still express them.

In fact, all the available evidence shows that career-minded women have the same ambitions, drives and abilities as men. And, as we saw earlier in this chapter, women are now outperforming men as entrepreneurs. When women are presented with a level playing field and the same opportunities, they perform just as well as men and, in some cases, better. Women are getting there in organizations because they

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continue to prove themselves to be just as capable of doing a good job as their male colleagues. So, if many of the attitudes men in particular still have about the ‘nature’ of women rest on shaky foundations, the most important question in this chapter now needs to be addressed: do the leadership and people management styles of men and women differ in any significant ways?

A raft of academic and popular publications that appeared in the 1980s and 1990s made a number of suggestions about women leader/managers. First, that they placed less emphasis on hierarchies and status, preferred flatter management structures and put a greater emphasis on teamwork and cooperation. Second, they were generally better communicators, put more time into listening to and talking with their employees, and were more concerned with building consensual agreement rather than political point scoring. Third, ‘feminine’ leadership and management skills were coming of age, and would eventually supersede the autocratic command-and-control style of male leaders (for example, Kirner and Rayner, 1999; Moskal, 1997; Fisher, 1992). An example of this was Elizabeth Bryan’s approach when she took over at the helm of the giant twenty billion dollar Morgan Grenfell Asset Management In Australia:

It seemed natural that she should occupy her predecessor’s prestigious office, with its panoramic views over Sydney harbour and its own executive bathroom. But, when her investment staff began to complain that the office was too remote and isolated, Bryan found the logical solution. She swapped her spacious top floor office for a more accessible – albeit cramped cubbyhole – that kept her close to her staff. The logical solution? For a female executive, maybe. But, how many men would be prepared to give up such a potent symbol of their position at the top of the organizational hierarchy in order to increase their accessibility?

(Cited by Maley, 1998)

Some commentators would suggest that Bryan’s response to this situation reveals some fundamental differences between the leadership and management styles of men and women. How true might this be, and how much evidence is there to support the view that the styles of men and women are fundamentally different? Some women highflyers do believe that women and men have different approaches. For example, Louise McBride, a partner at Deloite Touche Tohmatsu in 1998, had no doubt that female executives were more team-oriented and cooperative than their male counterparts:

Women have less of an ego. They’re happy to be part of a team. Men are more individualistic, less collectivist. They like to do it themselves. And if they do work in a team, they don’t want to credit anyone else. They like to claim all the glory for themselves. Women tend to talk things through and to listen. Men are quick to jump in and tell you that this is the right answer,

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She has the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe. She is formidable opponent.

(Francois Mitterrand, then President of France, commenting on Mrs T’s negotiation skills during discussions on the future of the EEC, 1985)

More recently, a series of books have suggested that we are seeing the emergence of a group of ‘Alpha Women’ (replacing the older and scarcer ‘Queen Bee’ of the 1980s and 1990s). The common theme running through these books is that women can be just as ruthless, competitive and aggressive as men, rather than being sweet, placid and harmonious (for example, Simmons, 2002). It is argued this has come about not only because of the radical changes in women’s aspirations over the last 30 years, but because women are hard-wired to compete in this way. It is only their upbringing and socialization that has dictated they should adopt a ‘softer’ female style of management. Rosalind Wiseman, author of Queen Bees and Wannabies, suggests that this truly is a revolution in thinking, with feminist thinkers traditionally attributing aggressive behaviour to men, when in reality women can be just as nasty as men, given the power, money and opportunities to behave in this way. A review of one survey of workplace bullying in the UK made these comments, ‘Women bully in more or less the same way as men, with the exception that females are actually much better at it. They’re much more devious, much more manipulative, much more subtle about it, and they leave a lot less evidence as well – and they often do it with a smile’ (Sutherland, 1999).

In the USA there is an organization that helps bullying managers to come to terms with and deal with their aggressive behaviour towards their colleagues and junior staff. Its name is ‘Bullying Broads’, managed by the Silicon Valley Growth and Leadership Center. Jean Holland, a trainer at the centre, estimates that 20–50 per cent of the women she has counselled would qualify as bullies, although she does highlight a double standard being applied here. When men engage in these behaviours, this is often interpreted as ‘tough’ or ‘solid’ leadership; in women it can be seen as ‘overbearing’ and ‘bitchy’ (Sutherland, 1999). Robert Spillane, of the Macquarie Graduate School of Management at the University of Sydney, is also sceptical about the ‘feminization’ of leadership and management. He believes that the whole debate about any supposed differences between men and women rests on the very stereotypes that women are often so critical of: that women are all cooperative, consensual, emotionally intelligent team-players and men are individualistic, rational, conflictual and emotionally stunted. He argues that career women can be just as manipulative and Machiavellian as men and, if they are to succeed in many organizations, they must adopt these management styles (cited in Fox, 2001).

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While researching this topic during 2001–3, I came across more than a hundred academic studies that have been conducted over the last 20 years, which have tried to answer the question, ‘Do successful female and male leaders differ in any significant ways?’ However, we still do not know if there are any fundamental or consistent differences in the leadership and management styles of men and women. Some research studies show that there are no real differences, others show that there are fundamental differences and some show that men and women exhibit a mixture of masculine and feminine leadership/management styles. These contradictory results lead us to our next question: can men and women learn from each other and develop a more effective, hybrid style of leadership and people management? With this question in mind, please complete Exercise 6.4.

Exercise 6.4

Please look through these three lists of personality traits and behavioural characteristics. Then circle the twelve items that best describe you and your personality:

Source: Adapted from Wilson (1995: 171); used with permission.

Did you choose traits and attributes that came from all three columns, or did you have a preference for one of these? If you picked traits predominantly from column 1, you have many ‘male’ qualities; from column 2, predominantly ‘female’ qualities; and from column 3, predominantly ‘neutral’ qualities. If you selected traits from all three columns, you have what can be accurately described as ‘hybrid’ qualities. Whenever I use this exercise with MBA classes there is always a spread across the three groupings, amongst both men and women. It may not be a coincidence that most MBAs, men and women, are extremely successful in their chosen careers and professions, or as entrepreneurs (and this contention might merit some research in the future).

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Looking at the traits in Exercise 6.4 dispassionately and objectively, it would appear that many men and women exhibit leadership and management styles that combine all three groupings. In Chapter 1, we observed that successful leader/managers have a chameleon-like quality, that enables them to subtly alter their leadership styles to reflect the situation they are in, the people they are managing and the issues that they are dealing with. This indicates that an ability to shift between these three groupings is likely to have a strong influence on a leader/manager’s effectiveness. It also means that which blend of these ‘male’, ‘female’ and ‘neutral styles’ is used will be influenced by the situation and the nature of the problem that is being dealt with (the contingent nature of leadership reviewed in Chapter 1). For example, a woman police officer dealing with a murder may need to be forceful and dominant when arresting and dealing with a violent suspect, but gentle, nurturing and caring when dealing with the victim’s family. She will then have to be rational, analytical and systematic when writing up the report on the incident and, perhaps, empathic and supportive with a young male colleague who had not dealt with this kind of situation before.

There is ample evidence to show that, as more women enter organizations, both men and women exhibit more hybrid leadership styles. For example, one study of law firms revealed that, where women were in small minorities, they exhibited very masculine management styles. In more integrated law firms, with a more equal balance between men and women, feminine leadership and management qualities became more prevalent and, significantly, became regarded more favourably by both women and men (Ely, 1995). In other words, within genderbalanced groups both men and women feel less constrained by culturally proscribed stereotypes about masculinity and femininity. There is freedom in these groups for both men and women to drop stereotyped behaviours and attitudes, and just be themselves. In my experience of teaching more than more than 1000 MBA students over the last ten years, the number of women in a group has a profound impact on group dynamics and the ‘feel’ of sessions. In male-dominated groups, the focus is often on the practicalities and ‘hard’ aspects of leadership and management. The more women there are present, the more men are willing to talk about issues like emotional intelligence, self-aware- ness, their uncertainties and frailties, equal opportunities and so forth.

Helen Nugent, former Director of Strategy at Westpac and Deputy Chair of the Australian Council, is one high-flyer who is wary of adopting a simplistic male versus female dichotomy. She believes that many of the attributes associated with ‘female’ management, such as good communications skills and teamwork, have increasingly gained recognition as