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Why Gender Should Be Off The Agenda

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These days we hear a lot about businesses needing ‘more women in the board room’. We hardly need to be reminded that historically we have lived in a patriarch society where men have dominated the business world and more.

Gradually over recent years some incredible women have pioneered, cajoled and worked tirelessly to show the world that a woman is capable of whatever she puts her mind to and can achieve enormous success.

Yes we know this. What is worrying is that we may be in danger of simply replacing so-called male domination with female domination. This would not be progress but just changing a label and could quite easily emasculate our young men.  This is not payback time for all those years of female oppression, because the beginning of the 21st century should be ripe for us to achieve a balance to make real inroads for individuals and businesses to thrive and flourish like never before.

A world where we disempower either gender is short-sighted and a total waste of talent and resources and, let’s face it, both genders have a dark side. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned (abridged from The Mourning Bride by William Congreve) sends a clear message, don’t you think?

Rather than consider gender as a whole person, let’s consider gender as a series of traits. Male traits in business more often than not embrace factual spreadsheets, cutting head count and other such impersonal behaviors. Female traits in business tend to be more nurturing, looking after staff and caring about them as individuals. They recognize that everyone is driven by an emotional response, so women strive to help people feel better so that work performance improves.

The point is that women and men can use both male and female traits in business regardless of gender and to understand this we need to briefly consider the nature/nurture debate.

Neuroscientific research shows that there are a few minute anatomical differences in the male and female brain. For instance, the male brain has more grey matter and the female brain has more white matter.  So we think differently.  Grey matter is full of active neurons and white matter consists more of connections between neurons, so it is thought that the female brain is a little more complicated but they work faster.

Females have a larger limbic system in the brain. An interpretation of this is that females are better at emotional intelligence, with a downside that women are more prone to depression.

Another example of the anatomical differences is that men have larger brains, but the neurons in a female brain are more tightly packed so there is no difference in intelligence (in this case size doesn’t matter)!!

This is not an exhaustive list, but it may be a good idea to consider if anatomy causes behavioral differences? After all we often behave differently without anatomical differences.

Equally, when debating this topic we have to be mindful that we are talking about stereotypes. There are plenty of little girls who play so-called ‘Tomboy’ games and plenty of little boys who prefer to play so–called girl games.

We now know that the plasticity of the brain is quite amazing. We continually change the structure of our brain depending on our experiences. As a result regions of the female or male brain we are born with will shrink and grow depending on how they are used. Therefore, we are products of our biological genetic code, chemical make up such as hormones as well as our environmental and social upbringing. Therefore our biology is not necessarily our destiny.

It is clear that we are all perfectly capable of learning to carry out our work using both male and female traits. In fact it is wise to use both. There is nothing wrong with how men or women carry out business if there is a balance in either the way an individual works or ensuring that both genders are equally represented in the workforce.

Gender is a stereotypical smoke screen and if we’re not careful we will simply tip the balance the other way and not flourish as we could.

For further reading on gender differences: Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences by David C Geary