Why women don’t make better product managers
Bias sometimes manifests itself in the most unexpected way — implying that women’s innate qualities allow them to be better PMs does a disservice to both men and women
‘Do women make better product managers than men?’ — this question was asked by one of the participants of a meetup that I attended several months ago. It was one of those “ask me anything” events, during which a senior product manager was sharing her professional experiences with other PMs, as well as people who were looking to start their careers in product management. Notably, the question came from a woman in the audience. Once asked, the question hung there for a few long seconds, clearly making both the AMA guest (at whom the question was directed), and the event host (who happened to be a man AND a successful product manager), visibly uncomfortable. The rationale behind the question, which came with an implicit, though a pretty obvious thesis, was that women tend to have better communication skills. At the time I didn’t speak up and challenge this thesis, which is something that I’ve been mulling over since then.
Even if you put aside its bad rap, political correctness doesn’t even begin to address the issue of bias — it tells us what is not ok to say but doesn’t explain what constitutes bias in the first place. In the past decades we’ve learned and generally accepted the fact that attributing certain personal characteristics to race, ethnicity or gender is not socially acceptable, even more so in public discourse . What makes the issue so complex is that those rules don’t seem to apply to all qualities that we are born with. Take height for example — I probably wouldn’t make anything of it if I was 6.5ft tall, and someone told me that, given the generally tiny size of space shuttles, I’m not a good candidate for a space program, right? (Although, as Wally Funk’s story shows, even if your physique predisposes you for space travel, there was a time you could still lose against a larger fellow, just because you lacked Y chromosome). Yet, the idea that I may be good at my job simply because I’m a woman didn’t sit well with me — somehow it felt like it invalidated all the hard work I’d been doing for the past 10 years.
When I landed my first job in IT, I was straight out of college and with my Master’s degree in English philology I was better equipped to read untranslated Beowulf or converse on cognitive linguistics, rather than lead software development projects. I was lucky enough to start out with a group of programmers (all men — not that it matters), with whose amazing support and friendship I learned about software development enough to be a competent project manager and a discussion partner to both tech teams and business reps — something that came in handy once I decided to transition from project to product management. It doesn’t mean that it’s always been easy — over the years I worked on a number of projects and with a number of teams. Some of the wonderful people that I worked with kept me on my toes and helped me get where I am today, while others challenged me to prove my value and competence over and over again. No one ever openly said it was because of my sex, but somehow I often felt compelled to work twice as hard and to be twice as tough just to be seen as someone who should be respected and who deserves her place on the team. Looking back, I think that in some cases the need to prove myself stemmed probably from my own insecurities rather than other people’s actions. It was only a few years ago that I stopped feeling the need to prove my professional credibility.
My experience is not isolated — whenever I talk to other women in tech, especially to those women in non-programming roles such as project and product managers, Scrum Masters, UX designers, testers, etc. they often say they need to ‘work harder’ and ‘learn more’ because they worry they are less competent than their colleagues, who (more often than not) happen to be men. According to WomenTech Network, 17% of IT specialists are women. PwC prepared a report that shows that only 5% of leadership positions in the technology sector are held by women, and for only 3% of women a career in technology is their first choice. We may wonder why women are more likely to pursue a product manager or a UX designer position, rather than an engineering role but the fact is that, as far as the tech industry goes, we are a minority. Many of us have probably experienced bias at some point, but we often don’t need other people to put us down — we tend to do a pretty good job at downplaying our accomplishments ourselves. There are so few of us in tech, that even if we happen to work in a supportive environment, our insecurities resurface in how we perceive our skills, what kind of jobs we apply for, and how we negotiate our salaries.
So no, I don’t believe that women make better product managers — that would imply that whatever success women achieve in this role is not so much a result of our determination and hard work in a (still) very masculinized industry, but a result of some innate abilities that somehow make the job easier for us. I’m also not comfortable with the reverse sexism undertones of such a statement, which hints that men in product management roles generally deliver subpar work. Had the question been ‘do men make better programmers?’ and had it been asked by a man, we’d never hear the end of the uproar in the community about how inappropriate it was. And yet, at the time, no one (including me) found it in themselves to challenge it openly — a few women agreed, while the male host smiled uneasily.
We may have come a long way from the times when people like Wally Funk were denied a fighting chance to pursue their passion and the career of their choosing because of their sex, but we still seem to have a lot to learn when it comes to acknowledging someone’s merit as a product of the opportunities they create for themselves, rather than the supposed qualities they are born with — and that goes for men and women alike.
