According to research published last week, female chief executives inspire significantly greater faith in employees than their male counterparts. The Index of Leadership Trust, compiled by the Institute of Leadership and Management in conjunction with Management Today magazine, reveals that women score an average of 68/100, five points higher than the male norm. The gap is largely attributable to women’s willingness to empathise with employees, and demonstrate an understanding of other workers’ roles. Further bolstering scores was the conviction that female bosses more often displayed integrity and honesty. These characteristics are crucial to good leadership. Empathy and integrity do not only make for nicer work environments, they contribute to well-run organizations, since respected CEOs are far more able to negotiate difficult changes without causing resentment.
So what’s the explanation for this particular gender gap? We certainly can’t put it down to some innate female capacity for empathy; leadership style is not dictated by sex. It is instead more likely that women’s greater preparation for top roles better equips them for effectively dealing with colleagues. As the institute’s chief, Penny de Valk, describes: ‘We know that women are unlikely to put themselves forward for new roles unless they feel 95% capable, whereas men will happily do so at 65%, so . . . when women are promoted, they are very familiar with the tasks their people are doing.’
Whatever the answer is, it is refreshing to see that the benefits women have brought to board rooms are being recognised. Too often, we are subjected to the same, implicitly sexist explanations for female exclusion: only two weeks ago, ukjobs.net released a ‘study’ cataloguing the reasons why women don’t make good bosses (a tendency for bitchiness and mood swings being among the reasons). Let’s just hope that employers respond to the Index of Leadership Trust findings when recruiting, acknowledging the varied and multiple attributes needed for good leadership, and recognising that these are not specific to either gender.
“We certainly can’t put it down to some innate female capacity for empathy…”
Surely the answer is that we do not know… what we must always beware of is scientifically unproven conjecture.
For example trying to suggest innate accounts that pink is more feminine, when according to Stephen Fry of QI pointed out that once pink was a male colour.
Note Deborah Cameron’s work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_Of_Mars_And_Venus:_Do_Men_and_Women_Really_Speak_Different_Languages%3F
dispelling myths about gender and innate capacity for language.
But I am basically warning against ‘certainly’.
Thanks for picking up our research. One thought to add to the comments is that there is no obvious difference between men and women in line management positions – it’s at CEO level that the higher trust levels exist. One possible explanation is that for women to break through into senior management they not only have to have confidence in their abilities (as Penny described), they also have to be more able. There are now more women entering managerial positions than men, but they move from a majority at first line level to a minority at senior levels. This is the big challenge which still needs to be overcome. What our research has done is add further weight to the argument that those women who do make the transition are probably better, on average, than men (and I’m not saying that because we have a female CEO!)