The Leadership Illusion by Tony Hall & Karen Janman

Author:Tony Hall & Karen Janman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2009-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT; THE FUTURE IS FEMALE?

After announcing his engagement to friends and family in 2003, a colleague received an unusual present from a family friend to celebrate the event. The friend was Professor Brian Sykes, a geneticist from Oxford University, and the present was a signed copy of his latest book, entitled: Adam’s Curse: A Future without Men.2 Inside there was a small, wry inscription which said, “Congratulations! And don’t worry, it won’t happen for another 125,000 years!” The essential argument in this provocative book is that the Y chromosome is decaying at the rate of knots, with the continuing loss of hundreds of genes. This inexorable tide of chromosomal erosion will have one result: men will eventually become extinct. Now, we are not necessarily advocating such a dystopian view of the future for men, but during the course of our research over the last few years there does appear to be at least a few advantages that women have over men in a networked world – advantages which may result in a more diminished role for those of us who lack the XX edge.

Are men and women really different? Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New York, believes that they are.3 Men, she maintains, focus on one thing at a time, always moving in a “straightforward, linear, causal path towards a specific goal: the solution.” Fisher calls this “step thinking.” Women, in contrast, are able to distribute their attention across a number of tasks and issues, avoiding the sharp compartmentalization of the male mind. She calls this “web thinking.” Web thinking results is the capacity to see “the whole versus a focus on the parts; multi-tasking versus one thing at a time.”

Professor Kathy Sykes, is a living, breathing example of a woman’s proposed advantage for seeing the bigger picture. She simultaneously fills the roles of an academic, broadcaster and government advisor. In an interview with the BBC on the topic of science generally, she had this to say,

I think in science it’s really important to try to have a holistic approach. I think it’s one of the problems in science today that people are really in these narrow channels and fields, and the more that you can talk with people in different disciplines you know the better you do. And it is, I think, a treat here because you’ve got different kinds of scientists; and so actually to solve any particular problem bringing all of those things together can be much more powerful than just, you know, say having a physicist.

It’s an intriguing quote because it hints at a slightly different stance on the male-female divide. Rather than it being a question of problem analysis versus synthesis, her emphasis on the importance of people and discussion suggests the source of the gap may be more about a difference in the sort of outcomes on which men and women tend to focus. In the words of Simon Baron-Cohen, a professor in the fields of psychology and

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