The Majority-Female US Workforce: Victory of Brain over Brawn - Building Gender Balanced Business

• There are a lot of reasons women are now the majority of the US paid workers, a shift already the case in Canada and probably soon to happen in much of the developed world. But a Peter Drucker scholar says the business guru saw this coming a long time ago, because it is the result of the shift to knowledge economies.

• Rick Wartzman, executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University in California, writes that Drucker would have seen the January 2010 labour data as “the latest evidence of the momentous movement to the kinds of jobs—ones in which brains beat brawn—that have dramatically altered the traditional relationship between the sexes.”

• Wartzman notes that Drucker examined the history of job segregation across centuries, in which any skilled occupation tended to be divided by gender. “Knowledge work, however, is different,” Wartzman says, summarising Drucker’s view. “Such occupations — which Drucker first identified in the late 1950s and now, according to various estimates, account for anywhere from a quarter to a half of all jobs in this country — are ‘equally accessible to both sexes’.”

• His article pays homage to 20-first CEO Avivah Wittenberg-Cox as well, as he quotes her as asking, “Are women the managers Drucker was waiting for?” Wartzman answers, “Drucker himself seemed to think so. Many of today’s jobs, he told an audience in 1986, depend on a person’s ‘willingness to work with other people’. Then Drucker added, ‘Let’s face it, women are usually better at that than men.’ “

• But more remains to be done, Wartzman adds. Not just recruiting and promoting women, but also “a fundamental shift in attitude—the realization that men and women tend to have different strengths and that the smartest strategy is to achieve a balance among them”.

• Wartzman concludes: “[T]he need for companies to recognize, as Drucker did, that ‘knowledge is gender-neutral’ without homogenizing men and women in the workplace couldn’t be more real.”

Wartzman’s commentary in Business Week