Recently, The Economist ran an article on the emergence of feminism within management theory:
But some of today’s most influential feminists contend that women will never fulfill their potential if they play by men’s rules. According to Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Alison Maitland, two of the most prominent exponents of this position, it is not enough to smash the glass ceiling. You need to audit the entire building for “gender asbestos”—in other words, root out the inherent sexism built into corporate structures and processes.
The new feminism contends that women are wired differently from men, and not just in trivial ways. They are less aggressive and more consensus-seeking, less competitive and more collaborative, less power-obsessed and more group-oriented. Judy Rosener, of the University of California, Irvine, argues that women excel at “transformational” and “interactive” management. Peninah Thomson and Jacey Graham, the authors of “A Woman’s Place is in the Boardroom”, assert that women are “better lateral thinkers than men” and “more idealistic” into the bargain. Feminist texts are suddenly full of references to tribes of monkeys, with their aggressive males and nurturing females.
What is more, the argument runs, these supposedly womanly qualities are becoming ever more valuable in business. The recent financial crisis proved that the sort of qualities that men pride themselves on, such as risk-taking and bare-knuckle competition, can lead to disaster. Lehman Brothers would never have happened if it had been Lehman Sisters, according to this theory. Even before the financial disaster struck, the new feminists also claim, the best companies had been abandoning “patriarchal” hierarchies in favour of “collaboration” and “networking”, skills in which women have an inherent advantage.
Not surprisingly, the gals at Feministing had a few issues with this article, which puts them at odds with other feminist teachings from waves past.
Um, wait — what?? I don’t know about y’all, but I don’t think I have read one book in the last 10 years or have talked to one feminist who has contended that women are “wired” differently than men when it comes to work.
And as for the few examples of these “new feminists” that the author directs us to, here’s a tip: Just because someone has written about gender issues in the workplace doesn’t make them representative of today’s feminism. In fact, after some online research, I couldn’t find really any history where these folks even identified themselves as feminists.
Now if you’re like me and had read through The Economist article twice to understand the gibberish going on, this article hits on a few squishy issues that the feminist movement is now facing.
Vanessa at Feministing admonishes The Economist for, “contending that women are ‘wired’ different than men when it comes to work.” For starters, I didn’t realize that anyone was “wired” for work. Humans were not created to drive to the office every day and sit in front of little machines known as computers. There isn’t a part of our brain labeled “work.”
Since neither men nor women are wired for work, doesn’t it make sense that there would be difference in our styles and performance? Oh wait, what Vanessa is getting at is the larger, nature vs. nuture and “gender is socially constructed” fallacies that those on the left like to pretentiously trot out.
Recently, I finished reading The Female Brain by Dr. Louann Brizendine, which focuses on how modern medicine has found vast differences in the brains of men and women. Starting in utero, our brains are triggered by different hormones, which produce a multitude of differences from our physical appearance to our emotions to how we respond to situations. Even male babies and toddlers respond differently than their female counterparts.
While Brizendine refrains for writing anything political, you can tell that she is hesitant to show that men and women are different. She writes, “In writing this book I have struggled with two voices in my head–one is the scientific truth, the other is political correctness. I have chosen to emphasize scientific truth over political correctness even though scientific truths may not always be welcome.”
Earlier she explains the political settings in which her training and research were conducted:
There are those who wish there were no differences between men and women. In the 1970s at the University of California, Berkeley, the buzzword among young women was “mandatory unisex,” which meant that it was still politically incorrect even to mention sex difference. There are still those who believe that for women to become equal, unisex must be the norm. The biological reality, is that there is no unisex brain. The fear of discrimination based on differences runs deep, and for many years assumptions about sex differences went scientifically unexamined for fear that women wouldn’t be able to claim equality with men. But pretended that women and men are the same, while doing a disservice to both men and women, ultimately hurts women.
As I’ve written before, there are numerous types of feminism. That’s the problem when a philosophy emerges after the activist movement. In the 60s/70s when women were fighting real discrimination in the workplace, they branched out and began searching for an academic angle and philosophy. They essentially combined pop psychology (Betty Friedan) with actual philosophy (Simone de Beauvoir) with the suffragist movement (First Wave Feminists) and established a framework that was largely piecemeal. This is why feminism is broken into waves. Second wave feminists wanted to eliminate the concept of gender and were the hardened activists. As The Economist notes:
The first generations of successful women insisted on being judged by the same standards as men. They had nothing but contempt for the notion of special treatment for “the sisters”, and instead insisted on getting ahead by dint of working harder and thinking smarter. Margaret Thatcher made no secret of her contempt for the wimpish men around her. (There is a joke about her going out to dinner with her cabinet. “Steak or fish?” asks the waiter. “Steak, of course,” she replies. “And for the vegetables?” “They’ll have steak as well.”) During America’s most recent presidential election Hillary Clinton taunted Barack Obama with an advertisement that implied that he, unlike she, was not up to the challenge of answering the red phone at 3am.
The third wave realized that de-feminizing women wasn’t working, so another theory emerged: men and women are different, and women are superior. This is most evident in Women’s Ways of Knowing, an important text in academia, that has now infiltrated management. The book essentially teaches that all knowledge and education is misogynistic because the patriarchy (men) were the ones in control:
Along with other academic feminists, we believe that conceptions of knowledge and truth that are accepted and articulated today have been shaped by the male-dominated majority culture. Drawing on their own perspectives and visions, men have constructed the prevailing theories, written history, and set values that have become the guiding principles for men and women alike.
Thus, all knowledge, even the hard sciences, discriminates against women. Contrast what Christina Hoff Sommers writes in Who Stole Feminism? with The Economist article:
The authors of Women’s Ways of Knowing…define “separate knowing” as “the game of impersonal reason,” a game that has “belonged traditionally to boys.” “Separate knowers are tough-minded. They are like doormen at exclusive clubs. they do not want to let anything in unless they are pretty sure it is good….Presented with a proposition, separate knowers immediately look for something wrong–a loophole, a factual error, a logical contradiction, the omission of contrary evidence.”
Separate knowers–mainly men–play the “doubting game.” The authors of Women’s Ways of Knowing contrasts separate knowing with a higher state of “connected knowing” that they view as more feminine. In place of the “doubting game,” connected knowers play the “believing game.” This is more congenial for women because “many women find it easier to believe than to doubt.”
Again read the maligned paragraphs from The Economist article:
The new feminism contends that women are wired differently from men, and not just in trivial ways. They are less aggressive and more consensus-seeking, less competitive and more collaborative, less power-obsessed and more group-oriented. Judy Rosener, of the University of California, Irvine, argues that women excel at “transformational” and “interactive” management. Peninah Thomson and Jacey Graham, the authors of “A Woman’s Place is in the Boardroom”, assert that women are “better lateral thinkers than men” and “more idealistic” into the bargain. Feminist texts are suddenly full of references to tribes of monkeys, with their aggressive males and nurturing females.
What is more, the argument runs, these supposedly womanly qualities are becoming ever more valuable in business. The recent financial crisis proved that the sort of qualities that men pride themselves on, such as risk-taking and bare-knuckle competition, can lead to disaster. Lehman Brothers would never have happened if it had been Lehman Sisters, according to this theory. Even before the financial disaster struck, the new feminists also claim, the best companies had been abandoning “patriarchal” hierarchies in favour of “collaboration” and “networking”, skills in which women have an inherent advantage.
While proponents of this “feminized” management style may not be card-carrying feminists, this philosophy has its roots in Women’s Ways of Knowing and other transformationalist studies that attempt to break down the very foundations of education and learning and run them through a gender filter before being rebuilt the politically correct way.
This is hardly surprising. Peruse the business or management section at any bookstore. Has there every been a field more given to fads or philosophies-of-the-month? In grad school, I tried to write a satirical paper for my management class on how the cartoon strip Dilbert has influenced corporate management. I didn’t get very far with the satire because the research and academic papers were very real and very serious.
Anytime there is a problem in the workplace or a crisis, the business world will try some new technique or philsophy. Since we’re in a mancession, why not try feminism? Women are apparently successful and have reached parity with men in the workplace, so we need to re-teach men to be more “connected” and “transformational” in their professional approaches.
Cross-posted at Fourth Wave Woman
