Hey, we want to get to know you! Join the TVOL Business Action Group and join our team of entrepreneurs, innovators, and researchers in transforming the business world through an evolutionary perspective.
Men and women differ physically and mentally. Whether these differences matter or even are visible depends entirely upon circumstances. For example, some sports require gender segregation at the high levels (football; swimming); others do not (bridge, horse riding) according to whether the faculties aroused by the sport confer a gendered competitive advantage (almost always men over women). Yet, many situations, including many work roles, are gender neutral, and even when they do suit the capabilities of one sex over the other, you can see many crossovers: women doing “men’s” work (e.g. on building sites in India), and men doing women’s work (e.g. nursing in hospitals). This is because a) men and women differ in degree rather than categorically in their attributes, and b) because we are highly adaptable, and structural and cultural norms and incentives control behavior. Thus one might expect, free from such pressures, men and women might exhibit different preferences. When free to organize how they wish, sex-typed preferences may reveal themselves in what evolutionists call “niche construction”: agentically created social arrangement that are conducive to their capabilities and preferences.
This can be seen in the pre-teen school yard, where boys and girls typically selfsegregate to a high degree and play types of games that reflect evolved sex-typed stable strategies. Boys are often preoccupied with action games where they can test, compare and enhance their competitive advantage in physical and imaginative games. Girls are often more absorbed with complex routines that shape and reshape cooperative alliances, and group inclusion and exclusion. Conversely, it is also known that social structures shape relationships. Studies with monkey colonies find that central resource provisioning promotes competitive intermember relations, while dispersed supply fosters a more cooperative order. An experiment with student subjects successfully replicated this relationship.
The classic pyramidal hierarchy, so beloved by men, is increasingly unfit for purpose.
Taking approximations of these two models for organizing – a) the flat, decentralized, teambased model (the operating model of huntergatherer groups), vs. b) the linear, status and authority based system (the agrarian/industrial dominance hierarchy), a Darwinian view of sex differences leads us to expect gender differences in preferences for these forms. This has been strongly confirmed by my own research. Women strongly prefer type a) and men type b) as destinations for starting a career, leading, and preferences for a same sex leader in each. Organizational designs are thus highly gendered. In lay terms, linear hierarchies allow men to play the games they like best – league table status-aspiring tournaments; while flat structures, strongly preferred by women, give more scope for the logic of inclusion and exclusion; replicating what is visible in many a junior school gender playground: a voluntary segregation where the boys mostly engage in win-lose games while the girls form elaborate membership circles.
But in the digital age the world of work is changing, and the classic pyramidal hierarchy, so beloved by men, is increasingly unfit for purpose. Many newer companies much more resemble hunter-gatherer social structures in their fluid and pragmatic functionality. But what if men won’t let go of male dominance hierarchy because they like it, especially its senior caretakers, people who have most benefitted from its payoffs? This has far-reaching implications, not least for the so-called glass ceiling, which persists largely because many women feel alienated by the model. They don’t want to play the tournament game in dominance hierarchies because they don’t like it and don’t play it with such practiced ease as the men who outnumber them.
Hey, we want to get to know you! Join the TVOL Business Action Group and join our team of entrepreneurs, innovators, and researchers in transforming the business world through an evolutionary perspective.
To get your free copy of "This View of Business" [click here]!
