It’s official.
Men are, on average, more systems-oriented than women.
Women, on average, have higher empathy levels than men.
These were the not-very-startling conclusions to emerge, last week, from a Cambridge University report into gender differences, based on a study of over 700,000 people.
The report’s author, Simon Baron-Cohen, is a professor of developmental psychopathology and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
He is also, more intriguingly, the cousin of comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, whose best-known creation, Borat, was funny because of his unreconstructed attitudes to gender, race and sexual orientation.
In Borat’s world view, a woman was for cooking and children and ‘sexy time’ – and quite specifically not for any position of responsibility, such as presenting a television programme or running a corporation.
The odd thing is that, if you peek inside the boardroom of almost any FTSE 100 business today, you might be forgiven for thinking Borat’s world view isn’t quite so comical after all.
Of the hundred Chief Executives in those companies, only six are women.
Yet, when you look at the trajectory of the businesses, most of them are having to adapt their model rapidly, to survive in a world where customer experience and reputation are becoming the only measures that count.
It’s a world where empathy is an increasingly important skill. Where humanity trumps efficiency. And where agility trumps process.
And yet it’s also a world where the people setting the cultural agenda are men.
Now, I’m not naïve enough to suggest the only way to make a process-driven business more human is to hire a female chief executive. It’s obviously not that binary. There are plenty of male executives whose empathy levels are well above average (and plenty of female executives who are more at home with a spreadsheet than a friendly chat).
I’m also aware that this may sound like virtue-signalling from a middle-aged white man.
So let me get to the point.
The pace of technological change is getting faster and faster. The life-span of businesses is getting shorter and shorter. Customer relationships are getting more and more important. The only way to succeed in the long-term is to have a business that connects with people in a meaningful way. The only way to do that is by building a culture based on empathy. And women are, on average, more empathetic than men.
So you don’t need to be a feminist to think there should be more women setting the agenda at our biggest companies.
You just need to do the maths.
Matt is the author of tribe: 66 ideas for building a winning culture, which explores the characteristics that contribute to a winning workplace culture. He’s also written inside: the 10 communication secrets that will transform your business.
If you’d like a free copy of either book, pop in to The Forge (we might even make you a coffee…)
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