Corporate Women Are Writing Off the Myths : Gender as a Non-Issue Surprises Consultant Probing Executives’ Perceptions

SAN FRANCISCO — Quite honestly, and with not a small amount of embarrassment, Jeanie Duck had to admit that she had bought into certain myths about women in top corporate management. Said Duck: “I think it’s part of the fact that men have defined the reality for so long.”

She had expected, for example, that these high-ranking women would be faulted for not being team players. It was a common enough perception, after all: Women don’t play on the football team, so how can they expect to play on the executive team? “It didn’t jibe with my experience,” Duck said, “but I expected everyone else to believe it. Especially to hear men not believe it, that was what surprised me.”

Facing Up to the Hard Issues

She figured that women in key positions might be seen as soft on hard issues, as being too concerned with niceness, perhaps, to lop off the personnel deadwood or go head-to-head with an employee’s drinking problem.

Most of all, in researching the role of gender in issues in organizations, Duck was prepared for a definite dichotomy in how men and women perceived their respective roles at the top.

“I was shocked,” Duck said. “Over and over, men and women said the same thing.”

In fact, said Minneapolis management consultant Duck, in interviewing 26 high-ranking business women and 12 executive-level men in banking, health care, manufacturing and retail businesses in five different states, “the thing that surprised me most was how consistent the data was.”

With increasing numbers of women rising nationally in the corporate structure, Duck’s original target, she told a seminar of the International Transactional Analysis Assn. Inc. here last weekend, was to explore how executive women top out, or plateau. A corollary goal was to examine if women executives “derail,” as Duck put it, differently from men in comparable positions.

Duck’s surprises started with the first question she presented to her subjects, all holding a minimum rank of vice president. When she asked them, men and women alike, if they perceived a difference between the way men and women in management conducted business, “everybody I talked to said they could make no distinctions based on gender.”

Duck swiftly dropped that question. Instead she came up with a query list that ran along the lines of “Do you see differences between the ways males and females in organizations understand/accumulate and/or use power?,” “Compare men and women as team players,” or “In facing difficult organizational problems, do you perceive any differences in the willingness or the way women and men approach these problems?”

Answers on the Wall

Briefing the psychotherapists attending her seminar, Duck also drew them into the process. Since the theme of their conference was “Transactional Analysis Looks at Gender Issues,” Duck soon had her audience wielding brightly colored Magic Markers as they eagerly scribbled their own answers to these and other questions on huge sheets that covered whole walls of the hotel conference room.

“Women do not necessarily use a win/lose metaphor in their cooperative behavior,” one therapist answered in response to the second question. “For women,” another agreed, “it’s what we do as a team, rather than are we going to beat the other team.”

“It’s the quilting bee, rather than the football team,” Emily Hunter Ruppert, a psychotherapist in the Boston area, elaborated.

Among her interview subjects, Duck said she encountered more than mere willingness to discuss the view from the top. “What I found was that people were excited to be able to talk about these things,” she said. “It was a chance for them to lift some of the barriers.”

As to the matter of gender differences in organizing, accumulating and using power, Duck said many of the executives she interviewed “felt that women were naive about power, especially in organizational situations.” Less likely than men “to realize that power is relationship-based,” women, Duck found, “seemed to have the idea that ‘if I am good, that ought to be enough.’ ” With such a purist perspective, Duck said the women “saw no need to market themselves” and thus were less skilled at self-promotion, “especially overtly.”

Both men and women saw women as “good at reading people,” Duck went on, “but not really catching on as to how to use it.”

In turn, said Duck, that discrepancy presented another dilemma. “If relationships are critical to getting power and to getting things done,” she said, “oftentimes women don’t get the data about how they are coming across.” Men, she said, “are more likely to give tough feedback and perception feedback to other men than they are to women.”

What happens, Duck concluded, is that “when a woman joins a group, it changes the dynamics.” In the presence of a female peer, said Duck, “the men said they didn’t feel as comfortable to be silly or to be rude and crude.”

‘Cellophane Ceiling’

It was an invisible barrier, Duck said, but an important one. As one female executive in Duck’s study commented, “It’s like a cellophane ceiling that I have hit. I can feel it, but I can’t see it, and nobody will acknowledge that it is there.”

“In getting power and using it,” Duck said of her prototype corporate woman, “she may not first of all get the information about how she is doing, and that’s precluded because she doesn’t completely fit in.”

A further complication, in Duck’s view, was that around this issue, anyway, certain stereotypical perceptions did persist. Women’s abilities to play on “the team” were not disputed, she said, but the presence of women on the team was nonetheless seen as a disrupting factor.

Addressing the way she sometimes felt excluded, the odd person out, one of Duck’s female subjects remarked, “The very things that helped me become an executive are things that are held against me now.” Toughness, tenacity and persistence had helped her rise, this woman said. “But now,” said Duck, “she was caught in the double bind: Either you are a tomato--too soft--or you are a bitch, too tough.”

Teamwork and Toughies

Still, Duck said, “no one I interviewed, men or women, saw women as not being team players.” On the contrary, “several men who have worked directly for women said they never knew what it was, being on a team, until they worked for a woman.”

To Duck’s amazement--”this was a real shocker,” she said--”almost everybody I talked to saw women as more willing to take on tough problems than men.” Women, Duck’s respondents said almost universally, “are more likely to consider human factors” in difficult situations within the organization.

For that matter, Duck said, “the very common perception was that women look at more factors” in approaching any problem. Confronting a touchy problem, “men sort of see it as a stop-action, isolated event,” Duck said, “whereas women look at whether it is symptomatic of the entire organization.”

But would a man want to work for a woman? “What it ends up,” Duck said, “is that they want to work for someone who is going to keep moving, and that is not necessarily a woman.”

More Leeway for Men

Women in Duck’s study were “amazed,” she said, by the leeway men were given to make errors. “Women saw themselves as having to work harder, and being watched more,” while with men, said Duck, “it was as if you had to goof up so hugely and so publicly before anything happened. If you were merely incompetent, you could get by.”

To balance the perception with the reality, some women Duck interviewed deliberately emulated certain male behavior patterns. “A lot of the women said they did things like learn to fish, learn to play golf, drive a sports car, so they would have something to talk about with the men.” Not that the absurdity eluded those who took up such behavior. “The women said it was sort of boring,” Duck said, “but at least it gave them a jumping-off spot.”

In the end, Duck said of her investigation of real and perceived gender differences, “I sort of saw it as a good news/bad news thing. The good news is that women are doing well and living up to their own expectations. The bad news is that cultural scriptwriting and corporate scriptwriting is still going on.”