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Received feminist wisdom tells us that the number of women in top business positions remains stubbornly low – despite the best efforts of legions of advocates – because there is a conspiracy among men to exclude them, and because subtle forms of discrimination pervade the upper echelons of management. There is some truth in this, but we need to look deeper at the choices women make and why.
How about the idea that organisations are designed according to the needs and desires of men, following deep and unobserved biological motives, resulting in leadership roles, behaviours and relationships that are often extremely uncongenial to women? As a woman leader said to me, at a largely male leaders’ cocktail party, when I asked her thoughts about why there were so few women in the room, “Because they don’t want to come in to the room”. And, I, looking round had to agree. One can hardly blame them.
Here’s the logic of the modern corporation – reaching its apogee in Jack Welch’s “rank and yank” system of up or out. We create pyramidal hierarchies with tournaments at each level to determine who advances and who does not, against clear performance criteria, to ensure that we have a steady flow of the best to the top, with periodic clearing out of the dross at the bottom. It is market economics applied to humans.
What’s wrong with it? Lots. It measures people on past performance not future potential. It reduces people to a single mythical merit quota. It ignores context (merit depends on circumstances). And nobody ever goes down. Worse is the irony that this fake meritocracy is serviced largely by women in the HR department whilst men game the system. Carly Fiorina in her memoir writes despairingly of how the guys cynically did this at AT&T, a classic corporate bureaucracy. Sadder is her fervent wish that it would operate as it should. It cannot.
Here’s why. All primate societies are organised around male dominance hierarchies. Males slug it out for resources and mating opportunities, with females helping along the coalitional politics to advance their own interests. Men in organisations will accept a man they consider to be their inferior as a boss without an eye-blink – they will bide their time and play the game to get what they can out of it, often quite amicably. Women, like Fiorina, are typically more idealistic and outraged by status injustice. Their biology dislikes false signalling of merit – they have too much to lose from it.
Result: women who enter the game do so at a multiple disadvantage. In their hearts they believe it to be wrong, they dislike the way it is played, and they are at a disadvantage in terms of their coalitional networks to play the game. And the prize for winners at the end of it is huge rewards, a model of individualistic and focused leadership that many women dislike, and a work-life balance that is shot to hell. And we ask why the glass ceiling!
We will never get more women into leadership so long as we persist in organising in ways that suit the biases of the competitive boys currently gaming the system, even when it’s not the best way to run things. Never before have we more needed more dispersed, networked, non-hierarchical ways of organising, in which women are often superior to men in relational leadership. But the game is designed by the winners. It’s time we spoke truth to power.
Nigel Nicholson, is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School and author of The ‘I’ of Leadership: Strategies for seeing, being and doing (Jossey-Bass, 2013). To read more about these ideas check out www.iofleadership.com
