Glass Ceilings And Glass Cliffs

Alpha female

A quick scroll through the business networking site LinkedIn showcases the alpha female mimicking an old man’s world, a scrap heap of refugees and, of course, the fragility of the male ego. The phenomenal culture of waste and posturing is arguably rooted in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith’s treatise of modern economics predicated on self-interest.

In her book, Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?, Katrine Marcal, makes the point that the division between what we do out of self-interest in the marketplace, on the one hand, and the kind of benevolent work that primarily women have done in the home, on the other, has not been taken into account by economists. In fact, given that none of the GDP figures take into account unpaid work as part of the economic calculus, it’s probably fair to say that the discipline has been totally inadequate in looking at this latter sector.

Marcal explains:

“The invisible hand is the famous concept in economics which is the idea that our individual actions we take out of self-interest will automatically be aggregated into what’s best for all of us. But in feminist economics, we also talk about the invisible heart, namely, that just as importantly, a functioning economy needs the invisible hand of altruism, care, love, family and trust.”

It’s this feminist perspective, along with banks, debt money and land, that have been woefully neglected by neoliberal or neoclassical economists in their modelling of the economy. Insofar as the foremost characteristic of standard economic theory that underpins the dismal science is one that excludes these aspects, it’s hardly surprising that many women reject it and the misogynistic and chauvinistic culture upon which it is based.

Marcal, however, resists the temptation to redress the issue in terms of a gender war:

“I don’t think it’s about replacing economic man with economic woman. I think somehow economics needs to change. You need to start looking at real markets, real people, real situations, instead of staying in this real male fantasy world.”

Shifting

Pegram Harrison agrees and says that the conventional man’s world notion of entrepreneurial endeavour and rigid theoretical thinking, is shifting to a more creative and innovative female understanding of gender balance and what it means to be an entrepreneur. This is reflected in the fact that the majority of entrepreneurs are women. Also, in certain people’s estimation, women tend to be less of a credit risk than men, be more socially embedded and thus less motivated by self-interest.

“There’s a lot of dispute”, says Harrison, “whether it’s about their gender or it’s about the circumstances of their gender. And so when people try to extrapolate and say okay, well, we should always lend to the women anywhere, that’s assuming that every woman has more credit worthiness than every man and that’s probably too much of a leap in the opposite direction.”

Indeed, the danger in sanctifying women as the ultimate pillars of fiscal rectitude, has resulted in the potential for corporations to pander to a form of economic and gender reductionism. This has been the point of contention for Katrine Marcal who has been critical, for example, of Goldman Sachs’ ‘investment in women as growth’ strategy.

How gender-based injustice is best overcome, is arguably through a positive discrimination quota system. But critics point out that this kind of attempt at redressing gender imbalance is merely an exercise in ‘box ticking’.

This is not an argument that Harrison is persuaded by:

“Discrimination is discrimination and to assume that it’s a problem just because you have to hire a woman, is a limited way of thinking. It’s not like there’s a shortage of capable women. And if you’re hiring people who don’t add anything, the problem’s with your hiring, not with the gender of the person you’re hiring. There are huge amounts of evidence that show that a gender balanced workforce at every level from bottom to top is more productive”, says Harrison.

Social, economic & political forces

It’s nevertheless important to highlight the fact that it’s economic, social and political forms of domination that underpin gender inequality in the workplace. In his classic work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire points to the strong link between social inequality and education and argues that the ignorance and lethargy of the poor is the direct result of economic, social and political subjugation.

When Freire’s timeless ideas are seen in a wider context of a crushing oppressive system like neoliberalism and the sociopathic approach to leadership that this system embodies, we begin to see the universal patterns that all oppressor’s continue to use today to maintain control.

Since late 2008, the shift to a more balanced gender environment has helped rein in the kind of excesses famously depicted by the Michael Douglas character in Wall Street. But Harrison says that people in positions of power will still find ways of expressing that power.

“The way to mitigate it, if not eliminate it,” says Harrison, “is to take away the circumstances where it’s favoured.”

Citing the positive behavioural changes made by Lehman Brothers after the corporation collapsed under the weight of its own phallocracy, Harrison argues that the way to control the ‘greed is good’ culture is to better understand the kinds of incentives that give rise to it.

“They haven’t changed 100 percent but I think things are a little better. There are some indications, for example, of efforts to create boards of gender diversity. This is a nice compromise between bad and ideal, and is largely proving successful”, says Harrison.

The real world

What needs to be happening in the real world, according to Katrine Marcal, is for people to look at the culture of companies instead of applying fake models from above and merely looking at the numbers.

Harrison argues that this is already partially happening:

“We extrapolate upward to corporations. It’s a lot harder to really get the measure of a culture because it’s not unitary. So in a small entrepreneurial start up, investment decisions are generally made on cultural factors. Investors will often make decisions to invest in a start-up on those basis. If you are trying to make a decision about the culture of a huge corporation on too simplistic a basis, you’re going to fail”, says Harrison.

However, the downside is that, ideologically, the system continues to be dominated by neoliberalism and the kind of economic man values of greed and self-interest that guide human beings. These are precisely the kinds of principles that are turning women away from the workforce in droves. They’re looking at these boards and thinking I don’t really want to serve on that or play politics because I’ve got better things to do. So they’re redefining success and organizations are losing talent.

However, Harrison remarks that the flip side of the coin is that talented women are going off and starting organizations like the bank in Iceland which operate with different values. “The more we know about other ways of doing it, the more likely that they will be repeated”, says Harrison.

In the final analysis, we have to consider whether it should be the guiding aspiration of both men and women to climb the greasy pole of the corporation? Is it about getting to the top or about actually side-stepping the glass ceiling idea and taking a different route?:

“That’s certainly the entrepreneurial approach to an obstacle. If something’s broken, fix it. If you can’t get over it, get around. And I think it happens in vast abundance, but we are less aware of it than we should be”, says Harrison.