The value women place on relationships has increasing marketplace value. Changes in the nature of technology have made relationships — with customers, clients, suppliers, competitors, shareholders, and the community as well as within the organization itself — a far more vital resource for organizations than in years past. Twenty years ago, relationships were considered the soft stuff, dismissed as the province of “human resource weenies” by those who valued strategic toughness. Today, they are more likely to be seen as essential to innovation, teamwork, customer satisfaction, talent retention, and the transmission of embodied wisdom. Continue reading » »

Why do women place so much value on relationships?

Recent advances in neuroscience suggest some answers. A UCLA lab team using functional MRIs found that humans register the social pain of isolation and rejection in the same areas of the brain and with the same intensity as they register physical pain. Further investigation revealed that women experience social pain more acutely than men and in more parts of the brain simultaneously. Another study using similar methodology revealed that the hippocampus, which constitutes the major memory center in the brain, is more active in women when they are interacting with others. This makes women more likely to remember the details of emotional exchanges and personal conversations. Continue reading » »

What accounts for differences in how men and women notice? Why have we evolved in complementary ways? Are divergencesonly the result of socialization, or of something more fundamental? Recent evidence from the fields of cognitive and social psychology suggests that our different noticing styles have a biological as well as a cultural basis. For example, functional MRIs reveal that men (on average) have more “grey matter” in their brains than women, while women have more “white matter” than men. Continue reading » »

Women’s career decisions are more likely to be motivated by what psychologist Steven Pinker calls “intrinsic rewards” — those they find personally meaningful — than by money or status. Family concerns may play a part in their decisions to stay with or leave a job because family is part of how women perceive intrinsic rewards. But the [...]

The “female brain drain,” as it is popularly known, presents particular problems at senior and leadership levels. When women fill the ranks but don’t make it to the top, those who hold less senior positions are likely to become discouraged about their prospects within the company. A paucity of senior women also strengthens the impression that the organization is run by an old boys network. This in turn creates negative perceptions among female clients and customers, who increas-ingly prefer to do business with companies they view as women-friendly. For all these reasons, companies that lose top women tend to get caught in a self-reinforcing cycle: women leave, which makes more women consider leaving. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Up until the mid-1990s, expectations for women as leaders were very high. Women flooded business and professional schools and began surpassing men in educational achievement in almost every field except engineering. Women also began starting their own businesses at a higher rate than men. These demographic trends put pressure on organizations to invest resources in developing and promoting women, and many made a commitment to do so. The effort received an impetus when several influential studies documented a correlation between the number of women in senior positions and superior overall performance.

Yet even as the case for developing women leaders grew stronger, women’s progress as leaders slowed. Continue reading » »