Analysis: More women in political leadership will mean better government

By JOSEPH NYE
Published on Thursday 9 February 2012 01:22

Would the world be more peaceful if women were in charge? A challenging new book by the Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker says that the answer is “yes”.

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker presents data showing that human violence, while still very much with us today, has been gradually declining. Moreover, he says, “over the long sweep of history, women have been and will be a pacifying force. Traditional war is a man’s game: tribal women never band together to raid neighbouring villages.” As mothers, women have evolutionary incentives to maintain peaceful conditions in which to nurture their offspring. Sceptics immediately reply that women have not made war simply because they have rarely been in power.

If they were empowered as leaders, the conditions of an anarchic world would force them to make the same bellicose decisions that men do. Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, and Indira Gandhi were powerful women; all led their countries to war.

However, it is also true that these women rose to leadership by playing according to the political rules of “a man’s world”. It was their success in conforming to male values that enabled their rise to leadership. In a world in which women held a proportionate share of leadership positions, they might behave differently in power.

So, we are left with the broader question: does gender really matter in leadership? In terms of stereotypes, various studies show that men gravitate to the hard power of command, while women are collaborative and intuitively understand the power of attraction and persuasion.

In information-based societies, networks are replacing hierarchies, and knowledge workers are less deferential. Management in a wide range of organisations is changing in the direction of “shared leadership” and “distributed leadership”, with leaders in the centre of a circle rather than atop a pyramid. Modern leaders must be able to use networks, to collaborate, and to encourage participation.

Women’s non-hierarchical style and relational skills fit a leadership need in the new world of knowledge-based organisations and groups that men, on average, are less well prepared to meet.

Yet women still lag in leadership positions, holding only five per cent of top corporate positions and a minority of positions in elected legislatures. Less than one per cent of 20th-century rulers were women who gained power on their own.

So, given the new conventional wisdom in leadership studies that entering the information age means entering a woman’s world, why are women not doing better?

Lack of experience, primary care-giver responsibilities, bargaining style, and plain old discrimination all help to explain the gender gap.

It is a mistake to identify the new type of leadership we need in an information age simply as “a woman’s world.” Even positive stereotypes are bad for women, men, and effective leadership.

The key choices about war and peace will depend not on gender, but on how leaders combine hard and soft-power skills.

However, Pinker is probably correct when he notes that the parts of the world that lag in the decline of violence are also the parts that lag in the empowerment of women.

• Joseph Nye, a former US assistant secretary of defence, is a professor at Harvard University and the author of The Future of Power