In my prior post, Dangerous Categories: Diversity and Stereotypes in the Boardroom, I posed the question of whether the business case for board diversity depends on uncomfortable race and gender stereotypes, noting that for our respondents, at least, the answer appeared to be “yes.” While extolling the benefits of board diversity in the abstract, their narratives demonstrate that diversity is an elusive and even dangerous subject to talk about concretely. I promised to bring you a few illustrations in this post.
As Lissa Broome, John Conley, and I discuss more fully in our forthcoming paper, in explaining their own support of diversity, our respondents most often advanced functional arguments. Prominent among them was the contention that demographic diversity yields a diversity of perspectives, which in turn leads to more productive boardroom discussion.
A specific instance of the different perspectives argument focuses on the benefits of gender diversity (although it also has a race and ethnicity variant). This rationale invokes the allegedly different sensibilities, reasoning processes, and interpersonal skills of men and women. Several respondents generalized about women and the ethic of care in ways that were strongly reminiscent of Carol Gilligan’s feminist classic, In A Different Voice. A white man with years of experience as both an executive and a director made the point in especially colorful terms:
[W]omen are a lot better dealing with egos of other people than men are and they’re a lot more patient and they’re a lot more team oriented and they’re a lot about let’s do this together. Men are, the New York Times article said and I happen to believe this; just because it’s in the New York Times doesn’t make it true but the average male in America according to this in depth research is lucky to have one and a half friends and the average woman in America typically will have nine to ten to eleven friends because men are so competitive and they’re so blustery and they don’t stay until the diapers are pinned down. They just have a tendency just to go flying off and so there’s a huge personality difference and it worked at [names company]. The women were extremely good in human relation issues . . . . (emphasis mine)
Another white male respondent, who has been a director, an executive, and an academic, made explicit reference to men being from Mars and women from Venus, arguing:
There are other instances where in that spirit of men are from Mars and women are from Venus that and probably after we’re all dead it will be accepted and okay to talk about the differences between the sexes and not pretend that everybody is exactly alike but there will be discussions about how do the typical employees feel or react in the organization and I don’t know that may be slightly more than average, women will comment on issues of culture and staff acceptance or staff issues and by staff I mean at all levels
But, like many respondents, he backed away from those generalizations when pressed for specifics. When asked to elaborate on the extent to which “somebody’s race or somebody’s gender predicts a different kind of point of view,” he admitted that he could not go beyond stereotyping. By doing so, he seemed to be acknowledging the “dangerousness” of the gender and race categories:
Well you can’t other than to say stereotypically you might see some of that fulfilled but when people of color are on a board, part of the reason they’re on a board is to represent the point of view of people of color so I don’t know whether that’s stereotyping. I mean that’s why they’re there. You know? You don’t want me to represent them. I can’t. So I’m not sure quite how to answer your question.
Another subject, a white female lawyer with extensive board service, also suggested that there might be gender-based sensitivity differences that derive from different experiences. She mentioned—echoing Gilligan–a specifically feminine approach to problem-solving. She backtracked immediately, however, and wondered whether this was more of a legal skill than a gender-based attribute. In another demonstration of how dangerous a category gender can be, she characterized her initial suggestion as “really terrible to say”:
I think sometimes women bring a different way of solving problems, a different, I think sometimes what I bring, I mean it’s really terrible to say, but it’s sort of their motherly skills in a way, you know, they’re sort of trying to get people to figure out how to agree and how to find a common solution, and how to cut through all the arguments and synthesize. I mean they may really be lawyer skills rather than motherly.
These are just a few of many examples from the paper (which, in turn, contains just a few examples from many hours of interview transcripts). But hopefully it gives some flavor of our respondents’ struggles with the dangerous categories of diversity–gender, race, and ethnicity. Their argument for diversity requires the assumption that people of diverse demographic backgrounds really are different in some meaningful way—but difference is a concept that must be handled with great delicacy.
In my next post, I’ll wrap up with some concluding thoughts.
Related Posts:
Dangerous Categories: Diversity and Stereotypes in the Boardroom
Duke-UNC-Duke Energy Board Diversity Conference Today
Quotas, Board Diversity, and Corporate Performance
“Meddling Women” In The Boardroom
Sotomayor, Diversity, And Group Dynamics: Why Do We Care? What Do We Know?
Do The Right Thing – So Long As It’s Free
Money Is Diversity, Or Diversity Is Money?
What Corporate Insiders Say About Why Diversity Matters
Wrapping It Up: The Struggle To Explain Why Difference Makes a Difference