Gender Differences In The Workplace

February 9, 2010

Interview with Alice Adams, author of the book Playing to Strength: Leveraging Gender at Work

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Mike Carruthers:
A common belief (in the workplace anyway) is that men and women have very different strengths that they bring to the table.

Alice Adams:
"Men are more analytical, have higher intensity leadership qualities, women are more empathetic they’re better at collaborating..."

Alice Adams, author of the book Playing to Strength, says these perceptions about gender differences in the workplace are actually completely false.

Women actually aren’t better communicators than men they’re not more emotional and they’re not more empathetic. Men are not more competitive than women; they’re not better at analyzing problems. So all of those strengths we’ve been attributing on a gender basis don’t turn out to be true.

But this flies in the face of some pretty conventional wisdom. So how does Alice know this?

There’s a very good study by Janet Shipley Hyde where she took well over a hundred of the various studies that have been done about all of these qualities where men and women are supposed to be very different. And what she found was that in 78% of the differences that people have tried to study there’s no difference.

Just to be clear obviously men and women are different it’s just in the workplace men and women don’t perform all that differently simply because of their gender.

That’s great news. It means that you’re not going to have to worry if women have leadership abilities. And you’re not going to really have to worry if men as a whole are going to be able to collaborate on a team – of course they can.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here