Are Women Better Leaders Than Men

An outsider, studying our culture from the headlines on business and news magazines, might wonder what all the fuss is about. Women wanted the top jobs, then they got them, then they didn’t want them anymore. Men wanted to keep women out, then they thought that becoming more feminine would give them a competitive advantage, then they got tough and ruthless all over again. Now women are nearly as ubiquitous as men in the middle management ranks, and there are enough women making an impact at the “C” level that no one can label them token representatives anymore. But while things may look slightly better in terms of numbers, something is still not quite right below the surface. Male or female, gender isn’t supposed to matter in the corporate setting anymore. So how come the bulk of the research out there points to the same ugly problems concerning women in leadership?

You see, ever since the industrial revolution — or at least the 1930s — the organization had been markedly masculine. The dominant “mechanical school” of organizational theory, for example, was founded on such ideas as centralized authority, specialization and expertise, division of labor, principles, rules, and regulations. The emerging organization, however, was more feminine in gender because it was characterized by collaboration, the delegation of authority, empowerment, trust, openness, concern for the whole person, an emphasis on interpersonal relations, and the inevitability of interdependence. The type of organization that would appear to be the perfect platform for what Dr. Lois Frankel calls the “feminization of leadership”. In her instructive book, See Jane Lead (2007), Frankel states that women have always lead, but not in ways that were valued or recognized in the old, mechanical school. Women, it would seem, were finally in the right place at the right time

So Soft It’s Hard

With a flattened organizational structure, and a knowledge economy that put a premium on such feminine