Wednesday For Women: Are Women Better Leaders Than Men?

~ Live & Learn

From HBR Blog Network:

“…survey of 7,280 leaders… confirms some seemingly eternal truths about men and women leaders in the workplace but also holds some surprises.

“…the women’s advantages were not at all confined to traditionally women’s strengths. In fact at every level, more women were rated by their peers, their bosses, their direct reports, and their other associates as better overall leaders than their male counterparts — and the higher the level, the wider that gap grows…”

“…When we shared our findings with a group of women outside this particular survey and asked them to suggest why they thought their colleagues had been rated so highly…

“We need to work harder than men to prove ourselves.”

“We feel the constant pressure to never make a mistake, and to continually prove our value to the organization.”

“That is, anecdotally, at least, the women we queried don’t feel their appointments are safe. They’re afraid to rest on their laurels. Feeling the need (often keenly) to take initiative, they are more highly motivated to take feedback to heart.”

“The irony is that these are fundamental behaviors that drive the success of every leader, whether woman or man.”

23 thoughts on “Wednesday For Women: Are Women Better Leaders Than Men?”

  6. I’m not surprised by this. Women bring all the skills and aptitudes necessary to succeed — we need to be given (or to claim) the opportunities to use them in senior leadership roles. That’s the much harder challenge.

    And, yes, many women work twice as hard as men (because we’re so overlooked), so no wonder we rock.

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  8. In the 70’s-80’s (when terrorists were more open to equal opportunities) the received wisdom amongst special forces / counter-terrorist units was to “Shoot the women first”. This is because, to succeed in a male dominated environment (such as international terrorism) they had to work harder to prove themselves and were therefore frequently better than the men around them, simply because they tried harder, trained harder and had to be better to even get a foot in. I’m being a little frivolous, perhaps, but the principle is the same.

    What makes the numbers up there interesting is that there is no indication of sample sizes. I’m asuming the women make up less than half the men? I’d be interested in seeing the box & whisker charts for the data. My intuition suggests that the whiskers for the men would go out further – that men are at both the best and worst extremes – but that the averages for the men are more spread out, and slightly below the womens. When you look at things such as incidences of genuis, and extreme stupidity, men dominate both. I believe that women are far more stable, as a gender, whilst men have an increased capacity for both exellence and mediocrity…

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  11. Thank you for the statistics, I will pass this information on, and I do agree with the comment above, that most of the time men do still get paid more and it is more difficult for woman to get into high management positions

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  13. Pingback: Are Women Better Leaders Than Men? | Straight Out The Gate

  14. Thanks David. Its a shame we have to get into the male/female debate, I agree with the comment from Diana, its definitely about the person for me. I like to think that the reason that there are more men in top positions than women, despite the obvious equality in skillset is because women generally have more rounded lives and are not so career dominated! Ha.. I might get shot for that and it’s a whole different debate :).

    Have a great day!!

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