The First, The Only…
Today the U.S. senate will continue the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Nominee Elena Kagan. Should Kagan be appointed to the high court it will mark only the fourth time in this country’s history that a woman will be appointed to the Court, and will mark the first time that the Court will simultaneously hold three women judges, representing a third of the Court. This fairly dramatic shift in the demographic make-up of the Court comes on the heels of a number of remarkable accomplishments by women in the public and private sector, including the 15 women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Interestingly at least two of those former CEOs, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina are poised to enter the public sector themselves as they run for governor and senator, respectively, in California. Regardless of one’s political affiliation, their success, and the success of other women leaders is a cause for celebration! At the same time I am deeply saddened by the fact that we are still at the point where there is a need to call attention to women’s success. That, in and of itself, implies that the achievements of talented women are an anomaly.
I have always been compelled to investigate the answers to interesting questions, unusual phenomena, or other enigmas. I currently find myself curious about how women like Kagan and others succeed in environments where there is very little precedent of women doing so. To that end, several colleagues and I have recently embarked on a research study of women executives. Our study was motivated by a 2009 study of French companies that found that firms with more women managers (e.g., Hermes, Sanofi, Sodexo, Danone) fared better during the global recession than firms with mostly male management teams (e.g., Alcatel-Lucent, Renault, Arcelor Mittal). Similarly, among small- and medium-sized Finnish businesses those firms managed by women were found to be 10% more efficient than those run by men. Since the U.S. is in an economic recession of its own, we wanted to see if we could replicate those findings with firms based in this country. Do women managers perform better than men during recessionary periods, and if so why? We speculated that the process of decision making may differ for men and women and that those differences matter in terms of the choices that are made and the outcomes produced by those choices.
At the heart of our argument was that women may be more inclined to approach managerial decisions in a way that highlights concern/interest for others (we called this other-orientation), whereas men may be more inclined to approach managerial decisions in a way that highlights concern/interest for self (i.e., self-orientation). Both orientations are important so we are not assigning value judgments to either one. Rather, we suggest that gender roles in which women have traditionally assumed the majority of familial care-taking responsibilities are arguably an important (albeit not the only) contributing factor to why men and women may carry these different orientations into decision making.
In our study we argued that because women are more likely than men to have the other-orientation approach to decision making they are more inclined to make conservative financial decisions in order to limit the organization’s exposure to risk. Doing so would be consistent with women’s general tendency toward care-taking. In the context of an economic downturn, the need for such conservatism may be heightened relative to times of growth and prosperity. So we tested the notion that during recessionary periods firms with more women in executive positions will outperform firms that have fewer women in key decision making roles. And our data produced results that supported this idea.
This study helps to clarify the value of diversity in organizations. All too often I believe that we get caught up in whether one group is better or worse than another. It cannot continue to be an “either / or” discussion. We need both women and men in top leadership positions in our companies and in our government. Both men and women bring a set of perspectives and talents that organizations and institutions benefit from. As our study shows, for example, women’s orientation toward decision-making can prove especially valuable in ways that we may not have expected. If they are not at the table to make those decisions, though, the entire organization potentially misses out.
It is not that diversity itself creates problems for organizations, but rather our inability to appreciate the value of that diversity, or to take a chance on diversity and the change that it inevitably brings. My hat is off to the trailblazing women that have shouldered the burden of being the “first,” the “only,” or even “one of a few,” and I look forward to the day when the achievements of women are commonplace rather than newsworthy.