WOMEN TO WOMEN: HELPING HANDS OR COMPETITIVE JERKS?

GENDER ISSUES

INTRODUCTION

More employees than ever before have had a female boss.  Many studies have looked at women and their leadership behaviors.  For each study that says women make more effective leaders, another says that they do not.

Many employees have become accustomed to working for a woman, having had two or more female bosses in their careers.  Nonetheless, when people state a preference, they still tend to prefer a male manager over a female manager.  When asked the question, “If you were taking a new job and had your choice of a boss, would you prefer to work for a man or a woman?”  All over the globe, respondents have consistently expressed a preference for a male boss even though they could also state that the sex of their new boss would make no difference to them.

 

The preference of a male boss is due to several possible explanations:

1.	Stereotypes suggesting that leaders are more effective if they display personal characteristics associated with men rather than those associated with women.
2.	Prejudice directed toward female leaders may make it difficult for women to be as effective in the leader role and reduce their desirability as leaders
3.	Women and men may differ in their actual behaviors in the leader role, with the behaviors exhibited by male leaders yielding better financial results for the organization and more satisfied subordinates, contributing to a preference for male leaders.

WOMEN AND MENTORING

Mentoring relationships assist junior employees in an organization.  Some research suggests that women should choose other women as mentors.  Choosing female mentors will:

• Help sidestep the potentially damaging possibility of sexual impropriety that is possible in a cross-sex mentoring relationship.
• Serve as role models for their female protégé’s.
• Avoid distractions like gossip and chit-chat when meeting with the mentors.

Findings suggest that women may be better served by male mentors than female mentors.

The purpose of mentoring is to learn from the experience of others and, as a means of providing training.  Mentoring may be jeopardized because of inexpert or untrained mentors, social distance and a mismatch between the values of mentor and mentee, inadequate definition of roles and ground rules, relationship difficulties (broken promises, lack of commitment, gender issues), and poor recruitment.  Mentors are more important than hard work, talent and intelligence if such mentors are carefully recruited, chosen, trained and monitored.

WOMEN AND LEADERSHIP

Both leadership and power have been defined similarly; the ability of a person to influence another toward a goal, to influence decision-making, to get things done the way a person wants them to be done.  Being assertive, controlling, and task-oriented has been viewed as male leadership characteristics; showing consideration and being relationship-oriented as female.  A leader must be assertive and take-charge; therefore, for a woman to be leader, she must also be assertive.  But if she is assertive, she will be “devalued” by both men and women because she is acting out of her role.

Males and females do employ different leadership models.  While male leaders are competitive, maintaining high control, with a goal of winning, female leaders are cooperative, using low control, with a goal of high quality.  Different leadership styles may relate to differences in power rather than in gender.  That is, those in power (whether male or female) tend to use a certain style of communicating and decision- making.

Gender differences in leadership continue to evolve.  Women and men differ in the way they exercise power in their leadership.  There are differences in how power was perceived by women and men.  Women viewed their authority in a more complex and interconnected way, seeking to build consensus in their decision-making process.  Research results suggest that leadership style may be more a matter of choice following assessment of a situation rather than an inherent gender characteristic.

Historically, men have been perceived as being better suited to become leaders than women.  Some research has also shown that organizational members view female leadership negatively.  Prejudiced attitudes towards female supervisors include the belief that women do not make good leaders.  Female subordinates perceive their female bosses as either dominant or bossy.  They show more optimism concerning future goals and take the goals of their co-workers more strongly into consideration.

Studies that directly measure leader effectiveness, however, rate women as no more or less effective than men.  The literature and research on leadership and gender provides evidence that women demonstrate certain behaviors more often than do men.  These behaviors include: communication, vision, caring, collaboration, trust, democratic and participative decision making, and follower-centeredness.

WOMEN AND EMOTIONS

Emotions are a product of a dynamic relationship with the social system and are created and recreated throughout the interaction.  Emotion has often been considered irrelevant to the important work of logic and the scientific method.

Leaders consistently need to balance their emotional needs and health with the needs of the organization.  Female leaders were usually described as being better at understanding the needs and abilities of each follower and responding to individual needs.  It is found that women with high employment commitments were more vulnerable to distress.  Women still do much more housework and family care than men, adding more emotions into their life.

CONCLUSION

Effective leadership today requires a combination of behaviors that are masculine (e.g. contingent reward) and feminine (e.g. individualized consideration).  Women have been found to exhibit more of behaviors that contribute to leader effectiveness than do men.  However, situations differ in whether they favor women or men as leaders.  The six different ways of “seeing the elephant” tell us about the nature of the intersection of sex, gender, and leadership:

1.	According to the proportions of women in positions of power and authority, women still hold only a small minority of the corporate positions with the greatest power and authority.
2.	According to research on leader preferences, a male boss is still preferred over a female boss.
3.	According to research on leader stereotypes, men are still believed to be better managers and better managers are still believed to be masculine.
4.	According to research on attitudes toward women as leaders, women are still subjected to hostility and prejudice when they are considered in relation to a leader role.
5.	According to theories of leadership in relation to gender stereotypes, neither masculine nor feminine behaviors are the key to leader effectiveness.
6.	According to research on sex differences in leader behavior and effectiveness, actual female leaders exhibit a greater amount of behaviors that are positively associated with effectiveness and a lesser amount of behaviors that are negatively associated with effectiveness than actual male leaders.

There is little reason to believe that future changes will ever completely eradicate the workplace disparities that place female leaders at a disadvantage.  Leader behavior should have no gender.  The sex of individuals who hold leader roles should be of little concern.  What should matter is how well individuals, male and female, respond to the demands of the particular leader role that they occupy.

Understanding how women lead – and what factors influence their leadership style – can be useful.  As the leadership role of women continues to grow, it becomes an important economic factor.  Cultivating effective women leaders can then support the success of current and future.

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