Working Women

Here is an article that touches on something I think about a lot: gender in the executive workplace...

Starting Up Women

By Alana Conner

Hidden inside most people’s minds is the belief that Warren and Bill should start businesses, but Oprah and Martha should not. This subtle, yet culture-wide association between maleness and entrepreneurship discourages women from launching their own start-ups, research shows.

Yet a new psychological study finds that “we can encourage more women to open businesses just by changing the way we talk about entrepreneurship,” says Vishal K. Gupta, an assistant professor at the Binghamton University School of Management and the study’s lead author. “You don’t have to do anything dramatic. Just make sure that the message you are sending is that entrepreneurship is gender neutral.”

For the study, Gupta and colleagues asked 469 undergraduate business students to read one of several articles about the qualities of successful entrepreneurs. In the control condition, the participants read a story that made no mention of gender. In the female stereotype condition, they discovered that humble, social, and caring people make good entrepreneurs. And in the gender-neutral condition, they learned that successful entrepreneurs show characteristics of both men and women, such as being creative, well-informed, and generous.

The researchers found that for women, entrepreneurial aspirations were highest after reading the gender-neutral story, which explicitly affirmed that gender does not matter in entrepreneurship. In contrast, women in the gender-free control condition had weaker intentions. “Even when you don’t say anything about gender, the first connection people make in their heads is with masculine characteristics,” Gupta explains. Women in the female stereotype condition had similarly lukewarm ambitions: “It may be that redefinition of a masculine stereotype as feminine is only possible when the alternative stereotype actually exists in society,” the authors write.

Although popular culture overwhelmingly depicts entrepreneurs as aggressive, risk-taking men, “it’s a myth that stereotypically male characteristics make you succeed,” says Gupta. To counteract these powerful messages, “we need to reach kids when they’re young and tell them that entrepreneurship is a good profession that men and women can do equally well. By the time they reach 19 or 20,” he adds, “it becomes more difficult to change their ideas about who can be an entrepreneur.”

From "Stanford Social Innovation Review", Winter 2009, Volume 7, Number 1.

Relatedness

"Our relatedness brings us into reality, provided we are open to it.  For instance, we prefer to avoid those people who annoy us, upset us, rub us the wrong way, push our buttons.  Yet these are precisely the people who can help us grow.  Our reaction to them exposes the egoism we try to hide, the fear we suppress, the spite we pretend isn't there.  Let's ask ourselves, 'Who is the person I most hate to be around?'  We need that very person in order to be real.

"Relationships show us what's truly happening in our life, if we have the courage to face it.  They reveal this separate, unreal self of ours who wants to isolate us from the rest of the human race...There is no such thing as a solitary Christian."

- Terence Grant, The Silence of Unknowing

I am pleased to announce....

...Teldon's newest magazine: Blush.

Now available at all Please Mum stores. For my lovely mom-friends: