Business school boys - Building Gender Balanced Business

December 12th, 2008

Was invited to speak to INSEAD ‘s Executive MBA class today.

The group is dominated by men (85%) and I was invited by one of the 12 women on the programme who had heard me speak recently at a lunch of the European Professional Women’s Network , the network I founded some 12 years ago.

I think business schools play a key role in rebalancing gender in the business world, and this site will dedicate a lot of energy to tracking how the schools themselves rank on this issue. Check out our B-school gender ranking.

The guys seemed very taken with the discussion, as are so many managers when the subject is well introduced. And being INSEAD, a hugely international business school, it was a wonderful summary of where a variety of different cultures stand on the gender topic.

A Russian participant spoke out and agreed with a part of my speech where I suggest that communism really brought women fully into the economy. He said his team was 100% female and that women in Russia were fantastically well trained and experienced and in hot demand. He said the problem was that several of his women friends wanted to drop out and preferred not to work. This is something that I have been hearing in ex-Communist countries. A generation of women that saw their mothers having to work for economic reasons yearn for a time where they can have the ultimate luxury: not working. However, as the Russian woman sitting next to him reassured him, “give them a few years, they will be back, bored of leisure and ready to go.”

A Chinese man said that he had a 40 years overview of gender balance in China. That his mother was the Chief Engineer of a huge company in China overseeing thousands of engineers. And that women, in his mind, were far superior – kinder, smarter, more talented and more patient. However, he said that while the first and second generation of Mao-liberated women had these traits, he was finding that the third and fourth generation, capitalist-era women were becoming just like men, tough and hard and cut-throat. He warned other colleagues and countries of getting to the same point.

A German man spoke to me afterwards and said that he and his wife were both working part-time, facilitated by a government programme that subsidises couples who choose to stay home and take care of their children. He admitted that despite numerous discussions with his mother-in-law on this topic, however, he would much prefer to be able to work full-time and have a wife who wanted to stay home… a common yearning in Germany.

A Latin American man said that while I had said that women had often been forced to adapt to male styles in order to succeed, that was far less true in Latin American than it was in Europe and North America.

And finally, an American man walked up and asked me if I was familiar with Deborah Tannen’s seminal work on gender and communications (including the essential book Talking 9 to 5)…

So there, in a short INSEAD session, you had it. A global picture of where the world stands on gender. From the communist heritage of complete gender equality (with no recognition of differences between genders) to the celebration of difference in Latin Countries to the more conservative positioning of certain countries like Germany (and Japan) who would dearly like to hang on to already-obsolete gender roles… and Americans who are fluent in the theory (if not always the practice) of gender issues.

A delightful reminder of how culturally diverse the globe is on the gender topic. And how much we have to learn from what has worked – and not worked – in different countries around the world. That’s what we explore every day in our HOW – COUNTRIES section…

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on Japan recently. We’ll be back with more on that country soon.