BeBoldForChange: Rethinking gender diversity

But what do we need to change? Are we looking through the wrong lens for a solution?

Through the media today, in blogs, emails, video clips and interviews, the general rhetoric will be based on calls for gender diversity. This rhetoric is underpinned by the widely-held assumption that there are profound differences between men and women: men are tough and females are tender, males are competitive and females are co-operative, males are stoic and females are emotional, males are mathematical and females are verbal (1). We assume that men and women differ significantly in terms of their abilities, personalities, attitudes, behaviours and preferences. Much activity and work on gender in business is based on this assumption.

Of course, this isn’t surprising. Men and women look different for a start. If they differ physiologically, there is logic in assuming they also differ psychologically. And our gender is also one of the simplest ways that we learn to categorise people, along with other typings such as age or race. It’s easy to create the viewpoint that men and women are different, and then use this to guide how we interpret how we work with, select, lead and develop both genders.

On the other hand, behavioural science has been testing this assumption for the last 10 years. Researchers have used a complex process looking across nearly 400 potential differences between men and women (2). They have concluded that there is significant evidence to support the notion that genders are far more similar psychologically than most people assume.