Introduction
In the early 1970s an interesting book about middle-class careers appeared called Managers and Their Wives (Pahl and Pahl 63-65). Is there anything about that title that strikes you as problematic? If there is, you may be someone who sees the gendered character of management as an issue. If not, you may believe that everything has changed since the days when men managed businesses and women managed homes and families. A study of managers today, you might suggest, would show that there are just as many female managers in business as male. Gender is therefore no longer a problem for managerial careers. Alternatively you may think that it is natural and obvious that management is a masculine occupation and those managers ought to be men.
Before we explore explanations for the disparity in the numbers of men and women in management, it is important to examine its existence and extent. To do so we can draw on evidence from international labor-force surveys which has looked in some detail at the gender structure of the managerial workforce in individual countries and corporate sectors.
Although women and men are represented in almost equal proportions in the world’s population, participation in employment, or at least paid employment, is less evenly balanced. World Bank estimates show that about 59 per cent of the world’s labor-force are male and 41 per cent female (World Bank 4-7). If a person’s career chances were unrelated to their gender, then we would expect to find men and women represented in similar proportions to these across industries and occupations. This is far from being the case.
Across the world, men are over-represented in industries such as manufacturing and construction, and in many industrialized countries women are over-represented in the services sector. So, for example, in the second half of the 1990s in the UK, 86 per cent of the female labor-force worked in services compared with 60 percent of the male labor-force, whereas only 13 percent of working women were employed in the industrial sector compared with 38 percent of men. This situation is very similar to that found in the USA (World Bank 4-7).
Must men manage?
Whatever your response, it would be hard to deny that over the last thirty years or so, sex and gender have been consistently hot topics in management. The problems of sexual harassment at work, equality of opportunity and equal pay have been a focus of continuing attention. According to Dr Alan B. Thomas Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Manchester Business School, such issues are one part of a broader concern with women’s rights and roles in contemporary society. Since the 1960s in particular, that concern has produced a voluminous literature, both theoretical, empirical, policy-related, and polemical. It has spawned a political movement to advance women’s interests and has stimulated the formulation of organizational policies and national laws to promote equal opportunities and combat gender discrimination. But despite these developments the position of women in management continues to provoke considerable discussion and research. (Thomas 1-12)
The question of what is to count as controversial in this field looms large. It is not too difficult to understand why Connell observed that when writing about gender “the issues are explosive and the chances of getting wrong answers are excellent” (78). There are disagreements, for example, about the extent to which men and women are different, about the reasons for such differences, and about their consequences. With the possible exception of leadership, the ‘gender and management question’ has probably generated more debate and has certainly raised more passions than any other controversy in management. Neither one chapter nor even several books could do justice to the material available on these wide-ranging issues. It must be said immediately, then, that here we deal with just one important gender question in the context of managing organizations; why are there so many men in management, especially at the higher levels? How is this situation to be explained? Is it inevitable?
The controversy in brief
Once it was more or less taken for granted in managerial circles that management was a male occupation, and mostly it still is. The fact that women and men are differentially distributed across occupations and within organizational hierarchies in most if not all industrial societies is a well-established observation and is not seriously in dispute. Men tend to be over-represented in management occupations and to predominate at the most senior levels. What is in dispute is the explanation for this state of affairs and, in turn, what might be done about it.
One long-standing school of thought argues that women and men have different ‘human natures’ which stem from their biological constitutions and their biological roles in the reproduction of the human species. Under the rubrics of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, this school depicts humans as ‘hard-wired’, with fixed constitutions established through the evolutionary process of natural selection. Women and men are biologically programmed with separate traits which give rise to distinct temperaments, preferences and styles of action. Under the competitive conditions of free-market capitalism, these distinct traits are held to differentially advantage males in the competition for access to positions of power in organizations. The American sociologist, Steven Goldberg, has produced a theory of patriarchy which seeks to explain ‘why men rule’. He argues that men are ‘naturally’ aggressive, competitive and risk-taking whereas women are ‘naturally’ placid, collaborative and risk-avoiding. It is no surprise, on this view, that the captains of industry as well as the occupants of the other command posts in society are predominantly men, for it is men who are naturally best fitted to occupy them. Any proposals for changing this situation are therefore seen as problematic. (Goldberg 56-59)
Against this view, social constructionists, as well as many feminists, have tended to argue that although women and men play biologically separate roles in human reproduction, other significant differences, in behavior attitude and orientation, are not a direct consequence of biology but are social artifacts. Men and women learn how to think, feel and act as males and females according to the rules and expectations which prevail in their society. Much that we take for granted as essential differences between the sexes, built into each person’s biology, are, on the contrary, socially constructed, created during a person’s upbringing in a particular social context. People are born into their sex but are socialized into their gender. They are more a product of culture than of nature. However, work organizations, it is sometimes claimed, are arranged and governed largely by men and for men within a patriarchal society, with the result that women have encountered significant barriers to their progress to positions of organizational power. Once these constraints are removed, men and women will compete on a level playing field so that one day members of both sexes will be found at the top in more or less equal numbers. This will promote both justice and efficiency by making best use of the talents available in society.
From a constructionist point of view, the biologically based ideas of the evolutionists are likely to be regarded as both inadequate and as outdated. They may be seen as a flawed ideology which flourished in the pre-feminist era but which was soon overturned during the feminist resurgence of the 1960s and 1970s. But it would be a mistake to see the evolutionary perspective today as simply an obscure and outmoded branch of the sciences that is concerned with the behavioral implications of biological sex differences in animal species. On the contrary, it may have a significant impact on management. For example, Welch conducted a survey that has recently been used to account for the differential success of men and women as managers and, its critics would argue, to justify unacceptable inequalities (Welch 21). Moreover, Nigel Nicholson Professor of Organizational Behavior puts it that in the guise of evolutionary psychology it is now being used to underpin prescriptions for the management and design of organizations (Nicholson 99-101).
Men and Women in Management
As is often the case when studying the social world, getting definitive answers to the questions associated with the gender-and-management controversy has proved difficult or impossible. A recent review of the research on women in management by Alvesson and Billing has concluded that “the accumulation of studies has not so much meant convergence and agreement as increased variation and uncertainty” (223). Moreover, there does not seem to be much prospect of resolving these disputes in the foreseeable future. For example, Anne Fausto-Stirling, who is a professor of biology and medicine and also a feminist, has argued that the evolutionists’ biological theories of human development and of human society are fundamentally flawed. As with hormones, a person’s genetic makeup does not directly predict their physical characteristics nor their behavior. In short, the biological bases of human differences, including sex differences, are much more complex than the evolutionists claim. So, Fausto-Sterling concludes, “referring to a genetic ability to perform math or music or to a biological tendency toward aggressive behavior obscures rather than informs.” (78-79)
Personally I think there is good reason to be suspicious of the ‘genes with everything’ view which seems to be gaining increasing popularity as a means of explaining human behavior. We should not too readily accept the claims of those who assert that their views are based on ‘science’, for what counts as ‘science’ is now strongly questioned and scientists can no longer expect automatic deference to scientific authority. Quite apart from their scientific adequacy, the biological arguments taken by themselves are too simple. The same can be said for the more strident versions of constructionism. What is needed, of course, are approaches that transcend simplistic dichotomies but according to Shakespeare and Erickson, it seems entirely possible that controversies such as this may never achieve public resolution. (Shakespeare and Erickson 190-205)
The central source of this complexity is ourselves as persons. The androgynous or ‘cocktail’ view of gender (Alvesson and Billing 120-124) depicts men and women as being equipped with much the same capacities, but subsets of these are socially designated as more appropriate to one sex or the other. The subsets may differ from society to society and historically so that there are various kinds of femininities and masculinities, different ways of being men and women. Individuals come to largely accept these social definitions as central to their identities, and enact them in daily life. These enactments serve in turn to reproduce these social identities but they are, nonetheless, potentially open to change. But it is not only a matter of gender because we never encounter ‘men’ or ‘women’ in reality. These are abstract categories. Any real person is a complex of sex, gender, social status, age, ethnicity, nationality, experience and a host of other characteristics, any of which may be significant for behavior and all of which may affect how that person acts in particular situations. According to Giddens, a transformationalist, this controversy reminds us of the sheer variety of ways of being human. (Giddens 144-148)
Conclusion
Kingsley Browne is neither a biologist nor a social scientist but a professor of law, yet he has brought the evolutionary perspective to bear specifically on the issue of women in management. He assumes that humans are just one among many species of ‘animal’ and charge their opponents with having ‘exalted’ humans to a unique position in the animal kingdom (Browne 427-40). I do not agree. On the contrary, I would contend that there is, as Schumacher who was an economic thinker has argued, a distinct ‘ontological break’ between animals and humans, so that humans and animals are distinct types of being. (113-115). This is not to deny that humans have something in common with animals in the sense of being biological entities, but, rather, is to make the positive claim that we are much more than animals. Some animals may possess the rudiments of language or even of culture, but there does not seem to be much sign of science, music, philosophy or even of good cooking! The members of the animal kingdom still have a long way to go. Having reviewed the evidence on gender and employment in Britain, Crompton has concluded that we can expect a continuing “blurring of the stereotypical boundaries” (188) that currently divide men and women at work. That process has been under way in management for some time, but whether it will reach as far as the executive suites and corporate boardrooms of the world’s leading firms remains to be seen. Would it be controversial to suggest that the sooner management is reconstructed in the image of women; the better it will be for all of us?
Works Cited
Alvesson, Mats. and Billing, Yvonne. Understanding Gender and Organizations, London: Sage, 1997.
Billing, Yvonne. and Alvesson, Mats. Gender, Managers and Organizations, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994.
Browne, Kingsley. “An Evolutionary Account of Women’s Workplace Status”, Managerial and Decision Economics, 19, 1998, pp. 427-40.
Connell, Raewyn. Masculinities, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995.
Crompton, Rosemary. Women and Work in Modern Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Men and Women, New York: Basic Books, 1992.
Giddens, Anthony. Sociology, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001.
Goldberg, Steven. Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance, Chicago: Open Court, 1993.
Nicholson, Nigel. Managing the Human Animal, London: Texere, 2000.
Pahl, Jan. and Pahl, Ray. (1971) Managers and Their Wives: A Study of Career and Family Relationships in the Middle Class, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Schumacher, Ernst. A Guide for the Perplexed, London: Vintage, 1995.
Shakespeare, Tom. and Erickson, Mark. Different Strokes: Beyond Biological Determinism and Social Constructionism, London: Jonathan Cape, 2000.
Thomas, Alan. “Women at the Top in British Retailing: A Longitudinal Analysis”, The Service Industries Journal, 21 (3), 2001, pp. 1-12.
Welch, John. “Women ‘Not Programmed to Succeed in the Workplace’”, People Management,1998, p. 21.
World Bank. World Development Indicators 2001, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2001.