Wanted: men to stand behind their powerful women

Several magazines have been publishing special reports about women on the workplace, as of late. As The Economist reports in depth, women are closing the gap with men on the work floor. Not surprising, considering the increasing share of women in tertiary education, certainly in many Western countries. For some reason, however, few women really crack the glass ceiling into the top echelon of businesses. Some of the most common arguments to explain this phenomenon are the incompatibility of such time-consuming jobs and having a family, a lack of interest in such positions (admittedly, a controversial argument) and a work atmosphere unkind to women.

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Why would that be? Is there some deeper motive that could explain why, when they are in the driver's seat, we are somehow much more intolerant for their mistakes or shortcomings than we are with those of their male peers? As for the incompatibility-with-a-family-argument, we could probably go back into the stone ages, when women were gathering the low-hanging fruits and men were hunting sabletooth-tigers. Yet, it still requires a society to conform these roles and pass them on from generation to generation. And, lest we forget, not all societies were/are patriarchal. Just think back to the early period of the Mesopotamians, worshipping the 'all-powerful mother goddesses'.

But, at a certain point, the Mesopotamians started using the plough in their food production. This heavy instrument thus became the tool par excellence to be used by men, causing a paradigm shift towards a patriarchal society. It seems that the technique used for farming has influenced many societies all over the world, determining the division of men and women at the work place or in politics, researchers at Harvard University argue. How, then, to break these paradigms? It is not easy, that's for sure. Even the most ardent promotors of women at the work place still suffer from subconscious behavioural stereotypes that keep women in men's shadows, as Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg illustrates very pointedly.




It is clear that we, as a society, have to be aware of the images and roles we convey on men and women. As Tony Porter says very poignantly: when a boy says that it would 'destroy' him if he were told that he plays football "like a girl", what does that say about the image, role and value of girls that we pass onto them?

In the meantime, it won't hurt to make sure that everybody, men and women alike, is given the opportunity to unleash their potential. At the very least, there's an interesting business case to make in favour of inviting more skirts to the boardroom:

McKinsey in 2007 studied over 230 public and private companies and non-profit organisations with a total of 115,000 employees worldwide and found that those with significant numbers of women in senior management did better on a range of criteria, including leadership, accountability and innovation, that were strongly associated with higher operating margins and market capitalisation. It also looked at 89 large listed European companies with high proportions of women in top management posts and found that their financial performance was well above the average for their sector. Other studies have come up with similar findings. Nobody is claiming evidence of a causal link, merely of an association, but the results are so consistent that promoting women seems like a good idea, just in case.