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.

Fortunately Luxembourg is big enough to fit us all

I guess by now most of the 6.999 million people will have heard the news: we've hit the 7 million mark! But should we congratulate ourselves, or rather feel sorry for overcrowding our planet? Well, the thing is not that we're too many to fit - it would take an area smaller than Luxembourg to fit us all, shoulder to shoulder. Nor is the problem how to feed the whole population - there's plenty of scope to increase yield per ha in vast parts of the globe. Just consider, for example, that many farms in sub-Saharan Africa yield only 10% of their north-American peers.

Part of the problem, as I see it, is that our patterns of production and consumption are simply not sustainable. Period. This is all because of the technological advances we have made over the past centuries, which made man redundant in many aspects of what is supposed to be his productive life. And let's face it: why pay someone who's prone to failure and fatigue, when a machine can perform the same job at a fraction of the cost and without nasty labour unions nagging about physical and psychological well-being?

The demand for educated labour is being reconfigured by technology, in much the same way that the demand for agricultural labour was reconfigured in the 19th century and that for factory labour in the 20th. Computers can not only perform repetitive mental tasks much faster than human beings. They can also empower amateurs to do what professionals once did: why hire a flesh-and-blood accountant to complete your tax return when Turbotax (a software package) will do the job at a fraction of the cost? And the variety of jobs that computers can do is multiplying as programmers teach them to deal with tone and linguistic ambiguity.

Now, you cannot simply have 6 million bums while the remaining 1 million are working, can you? So we simply had to come up with unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, which would require people to staff repair offices, call centres and other customer services, while keeping factory workers happy with supplying the ever-continuing demand of unsustainable products, invented by engineers to last as long as not to upset customers (too much), but as short as to keep them buying the gimmicks they invent every other year or two.

Because of this problematic situation - a growing (skilled) workforce and a general lack of labour demand for basic products and services - jobs have always been a sword of Damocles hanging over politicians' heads, especially in periods of economic downturn. Heck, even the weapons industry, to name but one, gets away with crying foul when governments dare not to approve a murky deal with a semi-friendly autocrat - while in reality they only employ a few hundred people and represent (in most cases) less than one percent of GDP. I don't know the solution to this problem, but maybe it's time for more ideas to have sex?

No, my (Polish) mum wasn't cleaning my dad's office when they met

A few years ago, I was taking up French evening classes. The audience consisted mainly of working people, with just a few students like me. After a few classes a pretty, shy girl in her early twenties joins in. She introduces herself briefly, saying her name and that she comes from Romania. My first thought was: how good of her, she's spiking up her French to improve her work prospects - in the informal cleaning industry, that is. Dutch being nearly impossible, she should get around well with French. Never mind that the language school was in Leuven, a major university city in Belgium. Never mind that if she didn't know Dutch, and really wanted to find such a job, she probably would have been gone straight to Brussels in the first place.

It's the perfect, yet very embarrassing, illustration of what the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie talks about in her TED-talk: it is easy to judge people by their nationality, rather than as the person who they are by their own right. It is dangerously easy to forget that everybody has his or her own story about who s/he is as a person. Yes, nationality can play a role in it, but it's not because you're from an African country that you listen to tribal music every single minute of the day, or that you don't know what an electric cooking stove is. It's not because you have a cleaning lady from a poor family, that they aren't capable of being creative, of producing quality products they can sell to generate an income.

When I walk on the street, when I sit on the train, or when I am traveling in far-away countries, I always wonder what people's story is. Especially with those old people whose wrinkled faces vividly tell you that they've gone through quite some history. Even though I die to hear their stories, I'm often too embarrassed to ask. I envy people who have this natural flair and get all these stories out of people. Like this guy who has walked from his home in Belgium to Santiago de Compostela with a camera on his shoulder, meeting the most random people on his way, who tell him their deepest life stories.

The more people I meet, the less I associate them with countries. Rather, I start associating countries with those people. Myself, I've given up trying to hide my true story. You never know who it is you're meeting, if you're going to see him or her ever again, and, most importantly, how impacting the real story of yourself can be on that person. I'm always surprised by the amount of goodness that I find in people. It often makes me wonder - where is it, then, all this negativity I hear about in the media? What stops us from a peaceful society, where people actually enjoy living together and embrace diversity?

I guess it's just that much easier to hide in your own shell, keep that hostile - because unknown - outside world far away, prey to your prejudices. I am guilty, too. Aren't we all, sometimes? But then I think of all the missed opportunities to share a positive view on our society with others, all the fascinating people that are walking around there, bringing hope by being the persons they are, instead of the negative people take them for. It could be the beginning of wonderful friendship with a talented exchange student seeking opportunities she doesn't get back home to put her great talents to practice, I can tell you that!