Once upon a time, in the late sixties of the last century, a young girl was breaking down gender barriers, when she decided to take physics and advanced algebra classes. She was one of only two girls in her school to go for an area that was before a male domain. Her name is Carol Bartz.
Today you may know her as the bold and down-to-earth CEO of Yahoo! Inc. The self-made entrepreneur came a long way, struggling with breast cancer and several situations of gender discrimination. When Bartz joined 3M in 1972 she was the only woman professional in a division of 300 men. After repeated acts of discrimination and being refused a transfer to headquarters with the words “Women don’t do this job”, she quit. But not because she agreed with those words, no, just to prove otherwise.
And she did. In the early 90s, she became the CEO of Autodesk, a software design company. During her impressive 14-year reign as CEO, she turned Autodesk into a software giant earning more than $1.5 billion in annual revenue in 2008.
Success Stories of female entrepreneurs like the story of Carol Bartz are rare. Although women won ground in a lot of business sectors, in the Silicon Valleys of our times they are still rare to find in the top positions.
The proportion of women decreases with each rank level that you go up in the hierarchy. This graphic shows the percentages of women in the different management positions for sectors with generally low participation of women, like for example the high-tech sector.
Let’s make it concrete and look at the top management in some Sillicon-Valley companies. The darling of the electro consumers, APPLE, women account only for 5.9 % of the top management. The biggest sinners are McAfee, Cypress Semiconductor and JDS Uniphase, their percentage? ZERO. Best performers are: HP (21.7 percent) and Google with 15.8 percent of top management being women.
Now the big question is: Why do we have so few women in the top management positions of high-tech companies? Three common sense reasons come usually to our mind:
- (1) women are in general no good entrepreneurs.
- (2) Women don’t have the specific competences to lead high-tech companies.
- (3) Women are not interested in high-tech.
Let’s look at each of these three reasons in more detail.
Could it be that, women are just no good entrepreneurs? As women usually have less ambition for power and risk taking than men it could be that women are less good at powerful jobs. But this is not true. In fact, it is the opposite: women are very good managers. Have a look at these results from a McKinsey study conducted in 2007.
Ok, now you say: Yes fine, these are exactly the things women are typically good at. Everything that is connected to interrelationships, caring about others, understanding the team members. But what enterprises are really interested in are numbers. Companies want higher turnovers. Yes, you are right. And studies prove that companies with the highest gender variety in the top management levels have higher Return on Equities, higher EBIT (Equity before income tax) and higher stock price growth. So, women have everything to lead a company to success. They are good entrepreneurs. So reason number one is out.
So, what about reason number 2? Women don’t have the specific competences to lead high-tech companies. First of all let’s ask what high-tech companies need to be successful in their highly competitive environment. They need to be always up-to-date, they have to be creative and innovative and bring the latest discovery to the market before anybody else. What they need is an “innovation intense strategy”.
In 2008, researchers at Columbia Business School and the University of Maryland analyzed data on the top 1,500 U.S. companies from 1992 to 2006 to determine the relationship between firm performance and female participation in senior management. They confirmed what we just heard already from the McKinsey study: firms that had women in top positions performed better. But then they found something else: this was especially true if for the firm “creativity and collaboration was especially important”. Companies who have women on board perform better especially when those companies pursue an innovation intense strategy.
So, reason number two is also not supportable.
Let’s look at common sense reason number three. Women are not interested in the direct products of the information age. They are less prone to high-tech than men. Could be. At least we find women represented in higher numbers in the social, health care and service sectors. Right? And the evolutionary theory delivers also the explanation for it: our genes are still marked by our ancestors from millions and millions of years ago when we were still cave men. In that era men would go hunting and women would stay in the cave with the children and taking care of the home. They would mingle with all the other women, going to the nearby forest and gathering berries and mushrooms. The social interaction with the other women and the children would be their day-filling program. So, could it be that women still carry those genes in them and just cannot get interested in high-tech products, because they have nothing to do with social interaction?
Studies with monkeys seem to prove the theory of genetic determined preferences.
Monkeys are considered a good research subject concerning this question of gene influence because (1) they are genetically our closest relatives and (2) they are not influenced by social norms and the ideas that society has about gender appropriate behaviour. So they are unbiased, neutral research subjects.
In an experiment on vervet monkeys, researchers presented male and female monkeys with a choice of toys—wheeled vehicles, plush toys such as dolls. The researchers did find that females were more likely to pick up dolls. And the male monkeys were more likely to handle toy cars (Alexander and Hines 2002).
This study seems to prove that males are more interested in objects with function and females are more interested in objects related to social interaction. So, is our common sense reason number three proven? Come on! Monkeys?!
All the tree common sense reasons don’t apply. They don’t explain why we find only few women in the top management positions of high-tech companies.
There is another fact that explains better why we find fewer and fewer women the further we go to the top of the tech-pyramid: That is the absence of role models.
Initiatives and mentoring programs for technical women all around the globe have proven already first results. For example the Distributed Mentoring Program by the University of British Columbia matches undergraduate technical women with female mentors during one summer research experience. The measurement of effectiveness of this mentoring program shows that 50% of mentored women go on to graduate school compared to about 3 percent of all women who earn undergraduate degrees in computer science.
Canadian programs for teenage girls show that computer classes lead by female teachers and full-female classes raise the participation of girls from 10 % to 40 %. (canadawomenincs)
With those initiatives, that provide women with female tech role models, we are already on a good way to get actively more women into the tech sector and eventually to tech leadership.
And what else has future to offer to women?
If Dan Pink, former speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore, is right, we are moving right now from the information age to the conceptual age. This means a shift from an economy built on the logical, sequential abilities of the Information Age to an economy built on inventive, empathic abilities—the Conceptual Age. Or in other words, we are shifting from high-tech to high touch. And this move could mean a benefit for women.
To make it more striking Pink calls the information age the left brain era and the conceptual age the right brain era. Everything what was characteristic for the working style of the last century, linear processes, logical and analytical talents (the left brain domain and typically men’s strong points) are still necessary, but they’re no longer sufficient. Instead, in the 21st century the abilities that matter most are closer in spirit to the specialties of the right hemisphere – artistry, creativity and empathy. Pink explains that in times when you can download expert knowledge from the internet abilities that can’t be digitalized – empathizing with a client or understanding the subtleties of a negotiation (typically more the strengths of women) become more valuable.
It might be that women relate better to the requirements of this new era.
But whatever the future for women looks like, it can only be inspiring if you take it with the spirit of Carol Bartz: “Most people assume that because I’m a woman, I’m someone who’s standing behind a leader, a man. The fact that they’re unenlightened is their problem, not mine.”
