You Might Also Like. Dorothy Ferebee provided healthcare to the most vulnerable members of the African American community. Antonia Novello A dedicated public health advocate, Antonia Novello made history as the first female and first Hispanic U. Surgeon General in Dresser American Economic Review May Bowman, N. Beatrice Worthy, and Stephen A. Powell and D. Anthony Butterfield Sex Roles April Badaracco, Jr.
Harvard Business School Case No. Justice and Gender, Deborah L. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Women, on the other hand, historically have been viewed as having characteristics that were antithetical to modern management. This link between masculine traits and managerial abilities had become well embedded in our organizational psyches by the middle of this century.
As recently as the mids, researchers found that the traits most commonly associated with being male continue to be synonymous with the traits managers are expected to exhibit.
It was this belief that men were made for the job that greeted women managers when they first joined corporations in large numbers in the mids, and it has plagued them ever since. They dressed like men, they talked like men, they even tried to use sports analogies as men did.
The first women managers dressed like men, they talked like men, they even used sports analogies. In her best-seller, Games Mother Never Taught You, Betty Lehan Harragan argues that, in order to succeed as managers, women need to understand the elaborate sports metaphor after which business is patterned. Women would have to understand more than fourth-down plays to be successful in business.
After a decade of failing with the football paradigm and an equal number of years wearing bad clothes, women began to realize that it was impossible to disguise their essential nature in the workplace.
What women discover is that the male corporate culture sees both extremes as unacceptable. Women who want the flexibility to balance their families and their careers are not adequately committed to the organization. Women who perform as aggressively and competitively as men are abrasive and unfeminine. This simple suggestion started a heated national debate. The debate ricocheted throughout the national media for several weeks before the concept was derailed altogether. More recently, it has been in vogue to argue that women, who allegedly possess special intuitive and caring abilities, actually make better managers than men, who are now hopelessly trapped into the outdated scientific paradigm of management.
This integration of female values is already producing a more collaborative kind of leadership, and changing the very ideal of what strong leadership actually is. For authors like Helgesen, motherhood is no longer a liability; it is actually an advanced management training program. In its way, this is as simplistic as the application of sports metaphors to management.
Both the sports metaphors and the new maternal metaphor of management are elaborate extensions of prevailing sexual stereotypes, the strong beliefs we hold about the way men and women should behave, translated into a business context. Still, there exists a persistent notion that the special sensitivity of some women can lead us to a new kind of interactional leadership.
Most likely, these women lack the organizational power necessary to create change and therefore fall back on the soft skills of nurturing and feeding people to gain allegiance.
After all, women have been using food to cause groups to coalesce for years. By extolling this brand of manipulation, authors like Rosener are doing little more than making a virtue out of necessity. Despite the popularity of the idea that women bring something special to the management table, there is also a certain danger inherent in this belief.
For even as we seek to define gender roles, we perpetuate them. For it is the very definitions that authors like Helgesen suggest women cling to that have excluded women from managerial ranks in the past.
The skills Helgesen claims will make women exemplary managers are the same skills Rosabeth Moss Kanter told us were the emotional characteristics that define the other—the lesser skills that sit beside the rational manager. Women, therefore, have bought into and are currently promoting the very definitions that have been used to exclude them from the work force in the past.
Remember, as soon as Rosie got good at riveting, factory work was all about welding. Adding to the complexity of this issue is one inescapable truth: women today cannot avoid being judged as women. Take the case of Ann Hopkins, a woman who approached her job as an accountant by exhibiting a traditional male approach to authority.
It certainly reflects the remarkable contribution of women to the war effort. At the same time, her femininity is still present with her red lipstick and womanly figure. Of course, once the war concluded, women were forced out of these roles, and Rosie was largely forgotten during the baby boom years from to But by the early s, feminists were looking for images from the past that they could reclaim as a symbol of female empowerment.
They may have considered the Rockwell painting. In the post-Vietnam era, feminists wanted an image of a woman that was visually appealing but not necessarily pro-war. But because they were still grappling with widespread job and wage discrimination , feminists simply wanted to use Rosie to show that women could perform the jobs traditionally held by men just as well, if not better.
The red bandana-wearing Rosie was feminine-looking and attractive, bold but not too confrontational. In other words, the image was a safe, malleable advocate, one that continues to be deployed today. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy.
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