Survey of 500 business leaders finds “women know more than men” and are key to post-pandemic economic growth
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Research conducted by Clearly is likely to stoke the roaring fires of the women in leadership debate. In a study of 503 business leaders across the UK, female executives were found to proactively consume 25 per cent more thought leadership content each week than their male counterparts.
On average, women business leaders read, watch or listen to articles, blogs, whitepapers, videos and podcasts for an average of 87 minutes over the course of seven days, while men invested just 67 minutes of their time performing the same activity.
For some, remonstrating over 20 minutes may seem futile but there is more than meets the eye. So, what does this significant gap between men’s and women’s dedication to leadership literature mean?
The search for answers
Since March 2020, there has been a spike in the amount of thought leadership content being produced. This has being fuelled by the growing demand among business leaders in search of answers, guidance or to simply make sense of what is happening and the implications this may have for their organisations in a bid to help them make better informed, often critical, decisions.
If women have more knowledge and insights upon which to draw upon, surely the argument for more women in senior roles is a no-brainer?
Indeed, many of the challenges facing organisational leaders can be addressed using the expertise and knowledge that is readily available within their executive teams. Some, however, cannot. So, to find new ways of better navigating the move from the economic stalemate of the last two years to post-pandemic growth business leaders and key decision makers will likely seek possible solutions from those held up as ‘experts’ in their industry – so-called ‘thought leaders’.
According to our research, female business leaders will spend 10.7 days working days a year consuming thought leadership content. For male leaders, this number stands at 8.2 days. It therefore follows that if women are accessing (and processing) more information than men, they have a greater breadth of knowledge and insight that can be drawn upon when it comes to decision making. In other words, they know more than men because they consume more than men.
Of course, we’re not positing that women are ‘better’ at leading than men simply because they have more information in their mental locker – that would be over-simplifying things. Nor are we looking to debate which of the sexes is better or stronger than the other. Rather, we are seeking to broaden the scope of the current campaign for greater gender representation at senior and leadership level.
Companies are once again stagnating
To date, the campaign for greater gender parity has centred largely on the moral imperative and the overwhelming evidence which supports the fact that organisations organised along these lines financially outperform those that are not.
Indeed, in an article for The Guardian, figures from McKinsey shows that “companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 25 per cent more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the bottom.”
This is to be welcomed, as is the fact that 40 per cent of FTSE100 board positions are now held by women. In 2012, this figure stood at a lowly 15.6 per cent. Yet there are just eight female CEOs in the FTSE100 – up from four in a decade. This is, frankly, pi*s poor.
Is the problem is apathy over empathy?
The gender debate has been at the top of the organisational agenda since the Lord Davies Review was published in 2011, and the amount of progress that has been made to address the lack of female representation at senior level is to be applauded.
However, while the media have done a great job in banging the drum for greater equality, I feel there has been a degree of over-communication to the extent that business leaders are simply not listening or reacting to the call as much as they did.
Yes, the message about achieving greater gender parity in the boardroom is clearly being received and understood. But the issue is no longer being acted upon; apathy has set in.
When we were young, our parents would tell us not to eat all the sweets because children that do will see their teeth will fall out. And we all did as we were told, didn’t we? Of course not, we did the opposite.
By drawing attention to the consequences of eating too many sweets, our parents were inadvertently implying that although it was probably wrong for us to do so, other children just like us ate the sweets too. The consequences of our actions were deemed less severe because they affected everyone we knew, not just ourselves individually.
Marketing communications works in the same way. By giving greater visibility to an issue (i.e. “Women are poorly represented in the C-suite among the UK’s biggest companies”) you actually give affirmation (‘social proof’) that the problem not only exists, it is commonplace and more worrying it is then perceived as the ‘norm’ for most people.
This creates a safety-in-numbers mentality: the more you see that others are experiencing the same challenges as you, the less inclined you become to change what you are doing. It’s rather like bystander apathy, where you hear a person screaming on a busy street but don’t rush to help because no one else is.
So, rather than highlighting what everyone else is doing (i.e. “Businesses are not doing enough to address the gender imbalance in their organisations”) focus on the positive effects associated with such action (“At a time of great complexity and economic uncertainty precipitated by the coronavirus pandemic, organisations can emerge from the crisis in better shape with a greater diversity across their leadership teams.”).
New messages are needed
Awareness of the lack of diversity has never been an issue. However, the messaging we have seen over the last few years would appear to have run out of steam in terms of increasing female representation at the very top of the organogram. The movement for change needs its fire to be relit and that can only be done by a shift in the messaging being communicated.
As we edge further into the post-pandemic era and focus once more in business growth, brands can either continue in the same vein as they did before the pandemic changed everything, or they can take on board some of the leanings of our whitepaper and consider: ‘Does our predominantly male-led organisation have all the answers we need to position us from which we can begin to re-grow? Or could we benefit from bringing more women into key leadership roles and tap into the additional knowledge they have acquired over and above their male counterparts?’