Business Wisdom: Conflict-Free Gender Balance
“I think we exaggerate the degree to which the sexes are mired in conflict.” - Nicholas D. Kristof
Americans, with help from “the media,” tend to exaggerate problems due to a) tradition – such thinking is embedded in our DNA, and/or; b) sexy “sound byte-itis” – such thinking makes for more exciting cable news watching. Gender continues to be one of those hot topics, with women’s leadership strengths currently appearing front and center. That’s why I so appreciated Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times op-ed, “Don’t Write Off Men Just Yet.” He’s read and respected by many, and he tells it like it is. It’s almost as if each of his columns could start with: “Now, let’s step back a minute…” A man after my own heart.
In this piece, he seems to be saying that while there are differences between the sexes in who pursues higher education, who does better in math versus writing, and how each sex tends to learn, the differences are not as great as they are made out to be. And, the point really is how it all balances out (a macro view vs. micro view). It’s like the gender pendulum I’ve written about lately. We may actually be heading toward the sweet spot in how various gender and individual strengths are sorting out and combining for more powerful and lasting positive outcomes all around. As Kristof puts it:
My hunch is that we’re moving into greater gender balance, not a fundamentally new imbalance in the other direction. Don’t hold your breath for “the end of men.”
There is great wisdom for businesses and organizational change therein. The key lies in celebrating the fact that women are catching up, but not pushing to “surge ahead” of men and toward imbalance in the other direction. We already know that a world where one gender is way ahead of the other in terms of education, leadership strengths or “power,” for example, doesn’t work. It is neither productive nor sustainable.
To build an economy of thriving and interconnecting systems of people, planet and profit, we’ve got to allow for and nurture an organic organizational gender balance. There is no one rule, number or linear path for how this “should” look in every case. That already shows that “women’s ways” of thinking are catching up with, and balancing out, traditional thinking. Together, we are improving collective business wisdom every single day.
