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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

I like working with women.

When I treat men as equals and respect them as professionals, it’s routine and unnoticed. When I work with women and treat them the same way, a common response is relief, perhaps appreciation, and usually cooperation.

This is, of course, a gross generality. The worst corporate backstabber I ever ran afoul of was a woman. Or, rather, the best — she was a very talented backstabber.

Two recent Advice Lines came from women who have experienced sexism in the workplace throughout their successful careers (“Does gender matter?” 4/12/2008 and “Gender does matter, and it doesn’t matter,” 4/30/2008).

As usual, most of the comments posted in response were interesting, relevant, and perceptive. Then there were the other kind — the ones that worried most about “reverse sexism” and “playing the gender card.”

It is true that in some companies and some situations, less competent women are promoted over more competent men. In my experience it’s more common that men assume a woman has achieved her position because of reverse sexism … or worse … and not because she is very good at her job.

Sexism has always been a more difficult subject than racism. Here’s how far we’ve come when it comes to race: When, in 1967, Sidney Poitier dated a white woman in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the controversy was huge and enduring. When, in 1998 … just thirty years later … Wesley Snipes dated a white woman in U.S. Marshals, nobody even noticed.

Yes, there are still some antediluvians who think African Americans are genetically inferior. There are also some who think the earth is flat. (A different question for a different time: Whether American society continues to suffer the social residues of past racism. It does, creating serious challenges for us all.)

In 1967, many men considered feminism to be disturbing and unnatural. Forty years later this has changed much less. Example: Last year, when MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson said of Hillary Clinton, “[T]here’s just something about her that feels castrating, overbearing, and scary … I cross my legs involuntarily every time she comes on the air,” it barely created a stir.

Had he made an equivalent comment about Barack Obama (what would it be? Perhaps, “His ties look like gang colors — they make me want to hand over my wallet,”) it’s safe to say it wouldn’t have gone unnoticed.

Sexism is a more difficult subject than racism for several reasons, among them:

  • The racial differences between people are, almost literally, skin deep and little more. The gender differences between people are inescapably profound and extend far beyond both appearance and anatomy.
  • Women have babies. Men don’t. So while it is possible to insist that society treat people of different ethnicities exactly the same, the same insistence applied to men and women isn’t entirely meaningful.
  • Women are more likely to take time away from their careers while their children are young than men. As a result, the statistical demonstration of sexism is a more complex task than the statistical demonstration of racism.
  • Amateur biologists commonly engage in junk science, overstating the cognitive and behavioral impacts of estrogen and testosterone, based on third-hand accounts of research whose interpretation is not yet certain.

As a manager, start by paying attention to what the women actually said in Advice Line. Two snapshots:

“My problem is, I’m not “one of the boys,” and don’t want to be one of the boys. Throughout my career, though, being one of the boys has been at least as important as my actual performance.”

And,

“Most male managers are not sexist, at least not consciously. There are many, however, who do discriminate without even realizing it. The interesting or prestigious project usually goes to a male employee who is most like the manager, or plays golf with the manager …”

I’ll add to this a sadly common experience for women: The boss invites his cronies, including many direct reports, to a local strip joint. Anyone is welcome to join them, of course.

This leaves the women with no good choices. They either don’t join the guys, which increases the extent to which they are outsiders; they do, which gives their tacit approval and which some men might interpret as an invitation to make a pass; or they complain, which creates friction, tension, and hostility.

Why is this okay?

Leaders are responsible for building team identity.

Those who equate a sense of team identity with “being one of the boys” do discriminate against those who aren’t boys.

By definition.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

One of the dumbest bits of political commentary in the past several years came from Jonah Goldberg. Commenting on somebody-or-other’s accusation that somebody else … somebody else Goldberg happens to like … was a hypocrite, Goldberg said, approvingly, that in order to be a hypocrite you first have to have principles.

Readers of Keep the Joint Running, being more sophisticated than readers of Jonah Goldberg, recognize the difference between having principles and espousing them. Some, concerned that I might be on the wrong side of this distinction, asked how I could have spent more than a month touting the advantages of de-regulating the PC, and then written a column that used fairly harsh language to describe governmental deregulation and its consequences.

The reason starts with the Economist‘s delicious phrase, “An analogy isn’t the same thing as being the same thing.” Here, the offending analogy is that a business is like a marketplace.

Some business leaders do run their companies as marketplaces (instituting, for example, charge-backs instead of effective governance). I’m sure this must be a good idea in some situations. I don’t know what they are, but in an infinite universe everything allowed by physical law must occur somewhere.

Mostly, marketplaces and businesses have only this in common: Absolutely nothing.

Businesses … well-run businesses, at least … have a purpose. Three purposes, really.

They are (1) organized to achieve their mission (which rarely has much in common with their mission statement, but that’s a different topic. They are (2) concerned with survival and self-perpetuation, although less so than you might think: Boards of directors have no compunction about selling the companies they govern should that seem more lucrative for shareholders than continuing to operate independently.

And, (3) the best companies regularly reevaluate their mission (and strategy, and vision, and “theory of the business” to use Peter Drucker’s term) making adjustments to ensure continuing relevance within the marketplace in which they operate.

Well-run companies coach, redirect, or terminate those individuals, supervisors, managers and executives who set their own direction, ignoring the company’s purposes.

All of this is the opposite of a marketplace. Marketplaces are inanimate spaces where businesses with independent purposes and direction interact. If the Cubs were a professional baseball team (we can only wish), Wrigley Field would be its marketplace — the space where it interacts with its competitors.

In baseball the need to regulate the marketplace is clear. Baseball needs rules, and has them. For example, the third baseman isn’t allowed to clothesline a runner to prevent him from scoring.

The rules need enforcement or they would be meaningless, hence the presence of umpires. Very important: The enforcers don’t consider the enforced to be their customers. Were they to consider anyone to be their customer their role would be at risk. (No one team is their customer, for obvious reasons; the fans likewise. Neither is Major League Baseball. If it were, and if those running MLB were to decide they would make more money if the season were scripted, pro wrestling style, then umpires would be paid to rig outcomes.)

Umpires, to be effective, must be loyal only to the principle of fair enforcement of the rules.

In professional sports we expect playing fields to be fair, level and impartial. If one of the officiators violates that expectation, he or she quickly becomes an ex-officiator.

Americans expect business marketplaces to be fair, level and impartial as well. We expect rules to be written so as to favor no one competitor over the rest. We expect enforcement of the rules to be fair and equitable as well.

Well, no, actually we don’t. Not anymore. Now we expect businesses to back up their ability to lobby for rules favorable to themselves with large campaign contributions. We worry about regulators viewing those they regulate as their customers. And, we are told on a regular basis that regulation never works anyway, due to the cleverness of the regulated.

It’s nonsense. Were that the case, top executives would consider insider trading laws to be a joke, the power industry would pollute with impunity, and we’d have experienced one Enron each year since Sarbanes-Oxley took effect.

We haven’t.

The impact on you: You’re regulating a business, not a marketplace. That implies alignment to a common purpose, which leads to a different level of trust, which in turn should result in much less regulation than what’s needed in a marketplace.

If this description doesn’t fit your company, there’s something seriously wrong with your company.

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