Patriarchy is bad for productivity
I am a male manager in the tech industry. And a feminist. The reasons are obvious.
Management is increasingly about getting the most out of people. Release the potential of individuals. Build trust, culture and knowledge dynamics within your organisation. Why? Because it increases productivity, end user value and innovation. We are a part of the knowledge economy. Business development is about attracting talent and optimizing the ability to learn, develop new solutions, collaborate. Any organisation is a group of human beings. Half of which happen to be born with two X cromosomes.
In other words: They are women.
Feminism is not radical. It is rational. The definition of feminism is “the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities”. Every manager should believe this, and embrace it in their everyday decisions.
I seriously don’t understand how anyone could take on a leadership position without actively lifting female employees into more important positions, breaking glass ceilings and building self confidence.
I am writing this post because I recently saw the Michelle Obama speech on Trump and women. Both as a man and a manager I was touched by this speech. She describes how gender specific bad experiences aggregates to form structures in the lives of women. Because there are so many of these experiences, they shape women’s identities. They create cooling effects on individual ambitions. They deflate self-esteem and often also a introduces feelings of fear.
Michelle told the story of a reality I, due to my gender, cannot directly experience. But she also described a reality I, due to my role as a manager, neither can or should dismiss. A great company culture has to be built on a grounding of fairness and equality. It should embrace diversity, as a resource. It should be built on a foundation of mutual trust and respect. And every individual should be considered a unique, complex human being, not a stereotype “representing” a gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation.
The double challenge of embracing both equality and diversity is not a paradox. It is a moral obligation and a managerial imperative. It is crucial for the development of smarter businesses and societies. An organization’s performance is determined by the human capital that it possesses and its ability to use this resource efficiently. Do you want to build long term competitive power? Find a patriarchal structure, and tear it apart. Gender equality is fundamental for thriving societies. The reasons are obvious.
- Getting more female students in educational programmes, will double the number of potential employees in many sectors.
- Pushing girls to grab the mic and have a their say, increases the spectrum of perspectives in any process.
- Challenging gender stereotypes creates space for a broader diversity of interesting personalities and interests.
- Avoiding sexual harassment increases the mutual trust needed for any collaborative process.
And so forth.
Added up: Better, more inclusive organisations. Improved competitive power. Better yield on human assets. Smarter resource allocation (which is what modern management theory is basically about).
Most importantly, the experience of equal worth lays the foundation for people to live richer, more interesting lives. That should be a high level purpose for any organisastion.
A business leader that does not support liberation from the culturally constructed, historical chains that tie down women, is either stupid or ignorant or born in the wrong millennium. What is the rationale of a reality where 50 percent of the population has to climb harder than the other 50 percent to reach the summit of their own life? What gains do we get from letting half of the population experience more fear and uncertainty than the other half? What good do we get from stigma and narrow ideals that lead to serial production of low self esteem, both in men and women?
Both in my current position (a creative director in a UX agency) and in former positions, I have had responsibility for hiring talent. I have interviewed many people, and even in Norway (one of the most gender neutral countries in the world) I see a pattern: There are way too many smart, skillful female candidates that have everything they need but self-confidence. They feel some sort of performance pressure that I, as a man, does not quite understand. And they don’t really acknowledge their own talent. They have been given too little responsibility, trust and experiences for it to flourish.
We carry a heavy legacy of suppressive structures. Many of these structures live in our cultural and mental models, not necessarily in the formal structures. They are invisible to us, because they are a part of the default discourse we take for given. It requires more from managers than neutrality and defensive measures.
You may call it activism.
Gender stigma is a cultural problem, and is maintained and reinforced in upbringing, education and worklife. You see the imbalance everywhere. In the toy store. In media framing. It manifests itself in crucial small moments, and in structures of emergence along the timeline of an individual’s lifespan. The stigma constrains both men and women. In most western countries, the most important judicial battles have been won. But there are still attitudes and mental models that need to be challenged. Seen from Norway, Donald Trump seems to be the punch drunk fighter, in the last round, in a desperate fight for lost privileges. Men without the ability to change their perspective, tend to respond with bitterness when the world moves ahead. The aggression is like pressure building up in a derailed steam locomotive.
The patriarchy must die. It holds women back, and makes a lot of men sad and confused. Work is an arena for personal formation and growth. The culture of business lives in a mutual interplay with the culture of society. Thus it becomes a managerial challenge to help this anachronism out of the world, and into the history books. A manager should strive to create a framework where people develop robustness, trustworthiness and compassion. Grow the good stuff, challenge the bad stuff and create space for indivdual employees to develop their potential.
As a man I have had social conventions and societal structures backing me up. Most of this tail wind I haven’t even noticed. So, I can’t say that I truly understand the experiences of being a woman. But i am also an unconventional strategist, a system thinker, overly philosophical, more oriented towards relations than roles. These features have more than one time in my career made me clash with dominant alpha males and macho culture. I have been navigating hierarchies of power where I found no room for my own vulnerability and insecurity. I have experienced how attitudes, small events and even unspoken words can drain the self esteem and motivation needed to fulfill my own potential.
There are still managers (statistically often men) that build their greatness on making the people around them (including men) feeling small.
Feminism in its modern form is not only a question of lifting women. It should be measured beyond statistical gender shares in formal positions. My feminism is about equality as the foundation, and then increasing the yield from diversity as a resource. A manager should create a culture that lifts the people that make up the culture.
We could of course call feminism something else. The fight for equal value, or whatever. The struggle for formal, universal rights is to a large extent won in western democracies. That makes the incremental work of changing attitudes and culture even more important. The term “feminism” is in my eyes a fair reminder of where this productivity revolution started. Brave women have been fighting this battle for all of us, through countless generations.
We are hopefully in the last round of this match. Male leaders need to support the right team. And work really hard out on the field to see that we now score the final goals for everyone to win.
