Josephine Grierson
Cover Story
View from the top
by Jane Clifton, David W Young & Nick Smith
Continued from page 4...
It’s also possible, say researchers, that a lot of women don’t want to be bosses. Why? The hours, the stress, the complexity of modern corporate life, the sacrifices typically made by top executives and community leaders. Significantly, while 76% of male CEOs have a non-working spouse, only 27% of female CEOs do.
Women are the queens of small business in New Zealand, but it’s still unusual here for women with young children to get to the top in corporate life. Jackson says a key to the future growth of women’s leadership will be the degree to which they can change the nature of the workplace, in particular the ethic, entrenched in the 1980s, equating long hours with effectiveness and success.
Carroll agrees the work-life balance issue is a driver of change, but not just for women. “In the past, work was the place where men assumed leadership, and home was a refuge, a place where they didn’t have to put energy in, or face any challenges. It’s not like that now. Men are realising, ‘I’m not the leader at home’.”
So perversely, work might be the more relaxing, restorative place for some men. Women are less likely, Carroll says, to see home and work as separate compartments. Both are places where issues must be managed, negotiated, co-ordinated.
“There may be, and I can’t prove this, a more holistic approach that women bring, as well as different skills from home, like mediation, finding ways and means of making things happen.”
A new study on women’s mayoral leadership lends weight to this theory. Marianne Tremaine, an executive of the Centre for Women and Leadership at Massey University, says her research has found distinctive differences between men and women in local-body leadership.
“A key difference was, these women were much less likely to see themselves as defined by the job. As in, ‘I am the mayor.’ They stood because they saw a lot of things that needed to be done. And they didn’t tend to stay as long as the men.”
They saw themselves less as leaders than as enablers.
“One of the things that’s come through really strongly is that you can have highly effective leadership that is not ‘heroic’. There’s been a lot of attention to the Hero Leader, and the perception people have that there’s something special inside a leader. But these women mayors were often people who didn’t have any big ideas, but they got a lot done. They asked people what they thought should happen, they got people together.”
The women mayors’ leadership didn’t always hinge on acting, but sometimes just on listening and empathising. The mayors tended to do things like help flood victims shift furniture, while admitting their inability to do anything to prevent future floods. They tended to eschew high-status occasions if they clashed with things like children’s lamb and calf days or a bowling-club tea.
Tremaine says that the practical and electoral success of these women mayors was noticed – and is now being emulated by men as well. Most mayors at least pay lip service to the kinds of things the earlier women mayors pioneered – consultation with the community, approachability, involving locals in decision-making.
But Tremaine is careful to point out that mayoral leadership, particularly of a small region, is a very different thing to corporate leadership. You could not run Telecom the way you might Ranfurly. More recent women mayors, such as Wellington’s Kerry Prendergast, have tended to take a more corporate approach, and it’s possible that because of the growing complexity of local body business, and the greater number of women in corporate life, we might not see many more of the non-hero, transformational leaders in her study.
In fact in sport, where women routinely become prominent, all the top administrators are men. There are no women CEOs of sporting bodies, says Dr Sarah Leberman, senior lecturer in sports management and coaching at Massey. Not even netball. Most of the top coaches, including of women’s sports, are men.
Women are participating in high numbers in sport-related university qualifications. But somehow they are not seeing themselves as working professionally in sport, unless they’re playing it.
“There are no role models, so that’s one factor,” says Leberman. “And then you look at the Halberg Awards. The All Blacks won the Bledisloe Cup. But then, the Silver Ferns won Commonwealth gold, and the Black Ferns are world champions three times in a row. The All Blacks got the award. Tana Umaga got the leadership award – nothing wrong with that. But Farah Palmer has led the Black Ferns to world championships three times, over 12 years. What more do you have to do?”
Leberman says she doesn’t necessarily think women make better leaders. But “the research suggests women are more concerned with people and how they work together than men”. She says sports could only benefit from their greater participation. And as to whether we could conceivably have a woman coach of the All Blacks, she says: “No reason why not.”
