I will never forget the interview I had for my job in the record shop. I sat in the office with the owner as a basement full of men worked on the other side of the door. The sound of shouting and grunting interrupted our conversation. The owner sighed, “We don’t have any women working here at the minute, just 15 blokes. It’s not healthy.”
He went on to ask how I thought I’d cope in such a male-dominated environment. “Not all women would sign up for this… and I can understand why.” I was well prepared to cope with it having grown up as the only girl among 4 brothers and then attending a science university where the male to female ratio was 70:30. I’m still recovering from it all.
As far as I know my ethnicity is 100% white Irish. John’s heritage spans the globe – England, India, Portugal, Myanmar and maybe more. I’ve always joked that as a thoroughbred I’m wasted on him, but the truth is his diversity means he’s the one bringing the genetic strength to the table. At our wedding the best man showed a video where he interviewed all of John’s closest friends – when one of them was asked, “What do you think Megan sees in John?” he answered, “I figure she thinks it would be a good idea if her children had some melanin.” It got one of the biggest laughs of the day and it’s funny because it’s true.
Whether it’s genetics or workplaces, communication styles or customer sources, diversity is a good thing. Groups that lack diversity often struggle to find a healthy balance, unknowingly end up with a skewed perspective on reality, and get stuck.
I never used to give much thought to the fact that the world of business is largely a world of men, but something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is the implications of a world shaped by just one gender. In what way might that have given us a skewed perspective on reality?
BUSINESS AS WAR
I remember a few years ago hearing a very successful business owner answer a question about how she deals with competitors.
“I’m much more inclined to see other people in my market as potential collaborators rather than competitors. Being obsessed with the competition is a distraction and some of your best opportunities come from collaborating with other companies in your space.”
I hadn’t heard anyone talk like that before. Not surprising when you realise how much business strategy is based on military strategy. I’ve heard the business as war paradigm taught explicitly and implicitly over the years, and I’ve lost count of how many marketing messages I’ve read that promise to help business owners dominate, decimate and even humiliate their competitors. All messages that are likely to sell a much higher percentage of male business owners than female ones.
A 2010 study by Canadian researchers raised some big questions about the validity of psychology research done in the U.S. because the majority of the research that supposedly tells us about human nature is actually done on undergraduate college students, usually psychology students. The problem is that these students tend to be from a very narrow age group, socio-economic and cultural background. Anand Giridharadas wrote in The New York Times:
“Western psychologists routinely generalize about ‘human’ traits from data on this slender subpopulation, and psychologists elsewhere cite these papers as evidence.”
That means a lot of what we believe is human nature has only been proven to be typical of college students in America.
FIGHT OR FLIGHT?
This skewed perception of reality is not a new thing. Historically the research community studied men more than women, so we understand more about men both physically and psychologically than we do women. In her book, The Soul of Money, Lynne Twist writes:
“Recent research suggests that the ‘fight or flight’ response that has for so long been described as the normal human response to a threat or to fear actually is characteristic primarily of males. The characteristic female response to a threat is to connect and collaborate with others.”
Research shows women are more prone to the ‘tend and befriend’ response, and it’s not just in humans. Dario Maestripieri, author of Games Primates Play says, “If you put two adult male rhesus monkeys who have never met before in a small cage, they will fight and try to kill each other. In contrast, if you put two females in a cage, they will reduce the tension and awkwardness of the situation by exchanging grooming behaviour.”
I suspect that much of what is accepted as ‘just the way things are’ in business is actually ‘just the way things are’ if masculine energy is over-represented and feminine energy is under-represented. But every world, every community, every household needs a balance of both masculine and feminine energy.
THE WAR YOU DON’T KNOW YOU’RE LIVING
The business as war paradigm has always been difficult for me to digest probably because I grew up in the midst of a war… although it was hard to put my finger on it at the time. It might sound ridiculous but I simply didn’t know I was living in a war zone, and I wasn’t alone. When I was 12 or 13 a friend came to school and regaled us with tales from her family holiday to Spain. “Wait till you hear this,” she said, before telling us that when the resort staff and other tourists found out she was from Northern Ireland they were shocked. “They think it’s a war zone. Because of the Troubles, like,” she said. “They think we’re all running around in rags surrounded by rubble the whole time!” She thought it was hilarious and so did the rest of us. How naïve these foreigners were. Roadblocks, checkpoints, bombs, bomb scares, shootings, riots, fear, separation and segregation – we thought it was all normal life. Just the way things are. We thought the bad times were the things our parents and teachers told us about. Like how when they were teenagers there were city-wide curfews and they had to carefully plan a safe route home before going out on a Friday night.
Watching TV one morning when I was 14 I saw an experienced newsreader choke up as he delivered the news that three brothers, aged 9, 10 and 11 had died in their home overnight after a petrol bomb was thrown through their window because their mother was of a different religion to most people in the area. I knew something was not right about ‘the way things are.’ Sure, everyone would denounce the killing and major acts of violence on all sides, but still there was something about the accepted day-to-day ‘this is how the world works’ stuff that went unaddressed. I knew there was something not right about it, I just couldn’t say exactly what. It was on the tip of my tongue for years.
It wasn’t until I moved to London that I realised what normal life felt like. After years of living in England I saw two policemen armed with machine guns on the street one day and I was shocked. “That’s a bit much,” I thought. And then I realised I spent my entire childhood surrounded by heavily armed police and soldiers and I didn’t give it a second thought. At least not consciously.
War can so easily seem like normal life. Just the way of the world. But it isn’t.
INEZ
The politics of Northern Ireland and the Troubles was largely a world of men. The only major female figure was Margaret Thatcher, a woman who operated quite rigidly according to the masculine principles that had gone before her. The cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson says, “Those women who succeed in adopting traditional male models leave the world very much as it is.” The Iron Lady left Northern Ireland very much as it was.
Meanwhile, on the ground, there were women whose names we never heard who were taking care of people and getting things done on a day-to-day basis. Women like social justice campaigner, Inez McCormack. Inez had a sheltered upbringing before becoming active in the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland in the sixties. “I was a puzzled young Prod,” she would later say, “until I was 17 I hadn’t knowingly met a Catholic. I was a young Protestant girl who didn’t understand that there were grave issues of inequality, injustice and division in our society.”
She went on to marry a Catholic man and work as a social worker in Ballymurphy in West Belfast, which was one of the most challenging, dangerous and deprived areas of Northern Ireland at the time. When attempts were made to close the Ballymurphy Social Services office, Inez and her colleagues refused to flee. They knew they were badly needed so they banded together and succeeded in keeping the office open. That’s what Inez did – she spent her time on the ground unapologetically working for change on the things that were affecting people acutely in the moment.
She put the ‘tend and befriend’ response to powerful use, but that’s not to say she didn’t have any fight in her. One of the hundreds of disputes she helped resolve was the 1985 laundry workers strike at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. After 9 weeks of stalemate foul laundry was festering in the hospital corridors. Inez took matters into her own hands and moved the rancid laundry to the offices of the senior management where they couldn’t escape the smell. The dispute was then resolved with haste.
The 1998 Good Friday Agreement is what finally solidified the peace process in Northern Ireland and Inez McCormack played a pivotal role in it. She led a broad coalition who successfully campaigned for strong equality and human rights provisions to be included in the agreement.
MO
It was another unapologetic woman who finally created that breakthrough in the peace process. Mo Mowlam was appointed Secretary of State for Northern Ireland almost a year before the Good Friday Agreement was signed. The Guardian obituary for Mo Mowlam said her extraordinary public popularity was “won because of the way in which she handled her ministerial post in Northern Ireland, arguably one of the most difficult and dangerous jobs in government, while still undergoing treatment for a brain tumour that had been diagnosed only five months before the 1997 general election.”
Mo was known for being larger than life, uninhibited and much more touchy-feely than you’d ever expect of a politician. All key to her being able to facilitate a breakthrough in peace process talks and reinstating a ceasefire. Mo’s style was said to leave people with no option but to talk. It was impossible for even the most reluctant participants to remain silent and intractable when dealing with her.
She took unprecedented and often dangerous moves during her appointment in Northern Ireland. She visited the Maze prison to talk unaccompanied with loyalist and republican prisoners about giving the peace process another chance. (It worked.) She doled out hugs liberally to all parties whether or not they wanted it or thought it appropriate. She once famously told Ian Paisley, then leader of the DUP, to “fuck off.” And due to her cancer treatment she wore a wig, which she’d regularly take off and throw on the table during high-pressure talks.
Mo Mowlam interrupted the normal run of things for the men of the Troubles and before they knew it they were all talking and signing an agreement.
LESSONS FROM NATURE
When people talk about competition, domination and dog-eat-dog tactics in the business world they often draw parallels from nature. Survival of the fittest and all that. But what if once again our picture of reality is incomplete?
The pioneering environmental scientist, Donella Meadows was a leader in the field of systems dynamics and she highlighted the difference between how nature works and how our economics currently work. She said:
“Economics says: Compete. Only by pitting yourself against a worthy opponent will you perform efficiently. The reward for successful competition will be growth. You will eat up your opponents, one by one, and as you do, you will gain the resources to do it some more.
“The Earth says: Compete, yes, but keep your competition in bounds. Don’t annihilate. Take only what you need. Leave your competition enough to live. Whenever possible, don’t compete, cooperate. Pollinate each other, build firm structures that lift smaller species up to the light. Pass around the nutrients, share the territory. Some kinds of excellence rise out of competition; other kinds rise out of cooperation. You’re not in a war; you’re in a community.”
Another evolutionary biologist, Elisabet Sahtouris argues that ‘survival of the fittest’ competition is behaviour typical of immature systems. Mature systems operate more along the lines of ‘survival of the cooperative and collaborative.’ She says:
“Cooperation, collaboration and community empowerment are, as Nature role-models them and as I cannot repeat too often, more efficient and effective ways of doing business than living in fear of drowning in a competitive race or wasting energy and resources on beating down the competition.”
Nature in balance models competition and collaboration. How we typically do business reflects only half of that. But perhaps we’re beginning to witness the maturation to a way of doing things that more accurately reflects the reality of how our world actually works. In a business landscape where trade secrets are prized, Elon Musk made all of Tesla Motors’ patents open source in 2014. Patents these days “merely stifle progress,” he said. “Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day. We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform.”
In this realm at least, Musk clearly believes in survival of the cooperative and collaborative.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU
I think many of us have the sense that the business world is out of balance. We don’t want to play according to the rules that seem to be set out for us. We know the reductive approaches to marketing and business growth we’re bombarded with do not do justice to who we are, what we’re capable of, and what we want to stand for. The system needs to change, like so many systems in the world of today.
And talk of how systems need to change is good, but change in a system means change in the people within that system. That means you and I, and it means this change starts at home. I don’t claim to know what the solution is to this complex problem but it has to have something to do with the balancing of masculine and feminine energy, traits and thinking within the worlds we inhabit. And within ourselves. We must put all of our human capacities to work.
Writing in The Irish Times, Proinsias O’Mahoney quotes multiple studies* saying, as well as greater equality, more financial transparency, better corporate social responsibility and less litigation, “a female influence leads to more profits and better investment returns, and not just when women occupy leadership roles – you can even expect performance to improve if a male boss has more daughters than sons.”
I’ll leave you with this thought. When I recently asked an artist friend of mine what the world of business can learn from the world of art she told me about a quote that says, “Art is the hammer with which we shape the world.” Maybe business owners should think of their business and their work as having that same capacity, she suggested. Maybe that would lead us to make different decisions and so create the change we wish to see in our world.
*The Irish Times article: http://www.irishtimes.com/business/personal-finance/gender-and-businesswomen-better-bosses-for-investors-1.2657594
