'TMTM - Think Manager, Think Male' is the title of the report I'm holding in my hand. It's from the CORE faculty (Centre for Organizational Renewal and Evolution) at Aarhus University in Denmark. Hmmm, very evolutionary! You'd think it was from the beginning of the last century, but it is actually from December 2007. The title refers to the stereotypes of managers - and it sets out to test whether they still exist today. Alas, they do!Last night I attended a meeting in the K2 network for female managers in the media industry. It was a lecture by the editor of the managerial magazine of ledelseidag.dk, Lene Bechsgaard, who is a journalist and teacher at one of the Danish schools of journalism. And she referred to the above report. Her lecture was mostly about making 'the narrative' of your own curriculum to boost your career. How to make your résumé come to life, as it were. Very inspiring story and two by two coaching, by the way.
But the real 'narrative' here lies not in the coaching sessions. The real narrative lies in this paradox: How can it be that the report - from 2007! - still claims that male managers are considered to be most successful? Haven't we moved past that? You see, as the report goes, values such as persistance, impact, determination, competence, energy, and ambition are considered by both male and female managers to be the mark of successful managers. According to the questionnaires 229 of them answered in a survey. Whereas values such as kindness, safety, indecision, and anxiousness are considered to be the mark of unsuccessful managers. And, hey, those last values are considered to be female by nature! You see where this is going...? Presto - successful managers are of course male! And reversely, unsuccessful managers are female.
What could be the explanation for this rigid perception of female managers, one wonders. The report tries to explain it this way: managers with values such as patience and consensus thinking are often female. And they are often used in companies in crisis. For that reason a crisis manager is often a woman, shows another survey from 2003 (A.H. Eagly & L.L. Carli, The Female Leadership Advantage) - therefore they will often be associated with 'unsuccessful' companies. Whether they are put there because of these force values or simply because they are there to take the heat, instead of men, if it all goes really bad, there is no sure way of saying. But the conclusion of the 2007 report remains the same: Think Manager, Think Male! Isn't that a paradox in the 21st century? How about changing that way of thinking: Think Manager - Think Female!
Whoops! I just read the small print in the beginning of the report: the survey is based on a respondent group of 83 percent male managers - and 17 percent female managers...
For more information about the K2 network, please see:
http://paradoxicalnews.blogspot.com/2008/10/surrounded-by-women.html
For more information about ledelseidag.dk, please see:
For more information about ledelseidag.dk, please see: