Why We Should Stop Asking if Women Make Better Managers

Earlier this week The New York Times asked “Do Women Make Better Managers?”  The piece suggests that women mange more effectively than men by virtue of being women.  There has been a spate of these articles lately (see Daily News, ABC News, and the Cafferty File for a sampling) — many touched off by the Times interview with Elle Group CEO Carol Smith.  Katty Kay and Claire Shipman of Womenomics have also joined the fray, saying that women “manage differently…we are more cautious and inclusive, while men are more competitive and prone to risk-taking.”

I’m uneasy with the idea that women are “born to be” better managers.  First, of all, the claim is thin.  While Kay and Shipman cite a number of studies that suggest that having women in leadership positions is correlated with financial success, no one has yet been able to figure out exactly why this is.  A recent Pew study suggests that employees rank female leaders high on traits like compassion, intelligence and honesty, and consider them as hard-working and ambitious as their male counterparts.  But this was a poll, unconnected to actual business outcomes.

If we suggest that women are better managers because they are women, the opposite can also be true — what makes a good manager is subjective.  The same qualities that are lauded today, may be less in vogue tomorrow.  Suggesting that female managers are effective because they posses these “soft” skills will backfire in environments where those skills are less valued.

When we claim that women or men are “better” in the workplace, we invite people to refute that assertion with personal experience.  That does us a disservice because it allows disgruntled employees to make sweeping assertions about women in management based on individual anecdotes.  Consider the comments on the Times article, many of which draw on personal experience to counter the idea that women are better bosses:

I’ve had three women and four men as bosses. Of the three women, none of them was really a good boss. Two were ineffectual and one was basically a dishonest, manipulative control freak…This is a small sample, but it does serve to show that women are not necessarily all that good.

I have had more female bosses than male bosses, and, in my opinion, when a male boss is not the greatest, it is tolerable. However, when a female boss is not the greatest, it is REAL bad.

Somehow the majority of female managers I have had have been pretty cold and aggressive. The claws definitely come out when no one is looking.

If the question were whether people with X years of training, had advanced degrees, or spent a certain amount of time in the industry were better managers, I think the responses would have been different and the outcome far better for women who attained those special skills.

Nature over nurture thinking in the workplace is dangerous, even if it appears to help women in the short-run.  When we encourage corporate infrastructure to see one group as inherently having more potential than another, we open the door to all kinds of discrimination.  Women have been long been affected by institutional sexism that assumed men were superior managers; now it appears that some are looking the other way.

Asking whether women or men make better managers is the wrong question.  Asking how we can collectively improve corporate governance and oversight by training, educating and retaining hard-working and ethical employees is a much more important issue.  Some of these workers will be women and some will be men, but their efficacy will be determined by their professional background and skills, not their gender.

Related links:

• An interesting perspective from Lori at Feministing: The Devil Wears Prada, Women Make Better Bosses, and Other Generalizations That Generally Piss Me Off.
• Paula Gregorowicz responds to the Times articles in “Are Women Better Bosses” on Blogher.
• An article in Psychology Matters on the differences between men and women in the workplace; “all things being equal,” the article says, “men and women are equally effective.”
• Anna N. at Jezebel comments on Carol Smith’s Times interview.