The Female Vision by Sally Helgesen

Author:Sally Helgesen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2010-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

Satisfaction and Daily Experience

One of the most significant satisfaction differentials to emerge from our survey is that women are more likely to assign value to their work based on the quality of their daily experience than on what their job implies for the progression of their careers.5 The statistical evidence for this conclusion was particularly strong. For the men in our study, what a job might lead to held paramount importance. If they perceived it as a means for helping them ascend to a higher position, they were willing to sacrifice the quality of their lives; they deemed the abstract goal of future success to be “worth it.” By contrast, the women placed a higher value on work that they found enjoyable and rewarding on a daily basis. They took satisfaction from the texture of their everyday experience rather than from seeing the present as a stepping stone to the future.

This finding echoed in updated form what Sally found while doing research for The Female Advantage.6 In benchmarking her study of female leaders against Henry Mintzberg’s classic survey of male executives, Sally noted that Mintzberg’s men in that earlier study paid little attention to the quality of their daily experience.7 As she observed, “Mintzberg’s managers were focused on the completion of tasks and the achievement of goals, rather than on the actual doing of the tasks themselves.” As a result, they barely noticed the texture of their lives.8

Mintzberg believed that the single-minded pursuit of what came next made it difficult for the men he studied to live in the present moment. Their eyes were trained on the heights they hoped to achieve or the depths they hoped to avoid. He also found that his subjects’ instrumental view of work and relationships deprived their lives of richness and depth. Finally, he felt their emphasis on what came next—what a job would lead to rather than the rewards it offered—made them prone to feeling empty and futile if their hopes did not materialize.9

The women in our survey were more likely than the men to take satisfaction in the performance of their daily tasks. They were therefore less likely to see these activities as instrumental; they viewed them as having value in and of themselves. Again, this is contrary to the culture of most organizations. Most companies operate on the presumption that people will ignore the quality of their daily lives in exchange for the promise of future achievement. The future is presumed to provide the carrot, as it did for Mintzberg’s men, while the fear of failure is presumed to provide the stick. But our research suggests that this may be a poor way to engage the passions and loyalty of many talented women.

Julie’s client, Jennifer, gives a clear demonstration of how the future fallacy can work differently with women. Jennifer had been with her company, one of the world’s largest consumer products firms, for twenty years and considered herself fiercely loyal. She had climbed the ranks because she was trusted, well-liked, unusually smart, and was considered a tireless worker.

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