When women lead
Leadership in today¡¦s world is changing, with the information revolution and
democratization demanding more participatory leadership in the ¡¥feminine¡¦ style,
which may lead to a more peaceful world
By Joseph S. Nye
Illustration: June Hsu
Would the world be more peaceful if women
were in charge? A challenging new book by the Harvard University psychologist
Steven Pinker says that the answer is ¡§yes.¡¨
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker presents data showing that human
violence, while still very much with us today, has been gradually declining.
Moreover, he says: ¡§Over the long sweep of history, women have been and will be
a pacifying force. Traditional war is a man¡¦s game: Tribal women never band
together to raid neighboring villages.¡¨
As mothers, women have evolutionary incentives to maintain peaceful conditions
in which to nurture their offspring and ensure that their genes survive into the
next generation.
Skeptics immediately reply that women have not made war simply because they have
rarely been in power. If they were empowered as leaders, the conditions of an
anarchic world would force them to make the same bellicose decisions that men
do. Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, former Israeli prime
minister Golda Meir and former Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi were powerful
women; all of them led their countries to war.
However, it is also true that these women rose to leadership by playing
according to the political rules of ¡§a man¡¦s world.¡¨ It was their success in
conforming to male values that enabled their rise to leadership in the first
place. In a world in which women held a proportionate share (one-half) of
leadership positions, they might behave differently in power.
So we are left with the broader question: Does gender really matter in
leadership? In terms of stereotypes, various psychological studies show that men
gravitate to the hard power of command, while women are collaborative and
intuitively understand the soft power of attraction and persuasion. Americans
tend to describe leadership with tough male stereotypes, but recent leadership
studies show increased success for what was once considered a ¡§feminine style.¡¨
In information-based societies, networks are replacing hierarchies, and
knowledge workers are less deferential. Management in a wide range of
organizations is changing in the direction of ¡§shared leadership¡¨ and
¡§distributed leadership,¡¨ with leaders in the center of a circle rather than
atop a pyramid.
Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said that he had to ¡§coddle¡¨ his
employees.
Even the military faces these changes.
In the US, the Pentagon says that army drillmasters do ¡§less shouting at
everyone,¡¨ because today¡¦s generation responds better to instructors who play ¡§a
more counseling-type role.¡¨
Military success against terrorists and counterinsurgents requires soldiers to
win hearts and minds, not just break buildings and bodies.
Former US president George W. Bush once described his role as ¡§the decider,¡¨ but
there is much more to modern leadership than that. Modern leaders must be able
to use networks, to collaborate and to encourage participation. Women¡¦s
non-hierarchical style and relational skills fit a leadership need in the new
world of knowledge-based organizations and groups that men, on average, are less
well prepared to meet.
In the past, when women fought their way to the top of organizations, they often
had to adopt a ¡§masculine style,¡¨ violating the broader social norm of female
¡§niceness.¡¨ Now, however, with the information revolution and democratization
demanding more participatory leadership, the ¡§feminine style¡¨ is becoming a path
to more effective leadership. To lead successfully, men will not only have to
value this style in their women colleagues, but will also have to master the
same skills.
That is a trend, not (yet) a fact. Women still lag in leadership positions,
holding only 5 percent of top corporate positions and a minority of positions in
elected legislatures (just 16 percent in the US, for example, compared with 45
percent in Sweden). One study of the 1,941 rulers of independent countries
during the 20th century found only 27 women, roughly half of whom came to power
as widows or daughters of a male ruler. Less than 1 percent of 20th century
rulers were women who gained power on their own.
So, given the new conventional wisdom in leadership studies that entering the
information age means entering a woman¡¦s world, why are women not doing better?
Lack of experience, primary caregiver responsibilities, bargaining style and
plain old discrimination all help to explain the gender gap. Traditional career
paths, and the cultural norms that constructed and reinforced them, simply have
not enabled women to gain the skills required for top leadership positions in
many organizational contexts.
Research shows that even in democratic societies, women face a higher social
risk than men when attempting to negotiate for career-related resources such as
compensation. Women are generally not well integrated into male networks that
dominate organizations, and gender stereotypes still hamper women who try to
overcome such barriers.
This bias is beginning to break down in information-based societies, but it is a
mistake to identify the new type of leadership we need in an information age
simply as ¡§a woman¡¦s world.¡¨ Even positive stereotypes are bad for women, men
and effective leadership.
Leaders should be viewed less in terms of heroic command than as encouraging
participation throughout an organization, group, country or network. Questions
of appropriate style ¡X when to use hard and soft skills ¡X are equally relevant
for men and women, and should not be clouded by traditional gender stereotypes.
In some circumstances, men will need to act more ¡§like women;¡¨ in others, women
will need to be more ¡§like men.¡¨
The key choices about war and peace in our future will depend not on gender, but
on how leaders combine hard and soft-power skills to produce smart strategies.
Both men and women will make those decisions.
However, Pinker is probably correct when he says that the parts of the world
that lag in the decline of violence are also the parts that lag in the
empowerment of women.
Joseph S. Nye, Jr, a former US assistant secretary of defense, is a professor
at Harvard.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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