I recently had a very interesting dinner conversation with my friend John Gehl, who edits this magazine as well Edupage, a newsletter distributed over the Internet. An incidental but popular feature of each issue of Edupage is the selection of different "honorary subscribers" (which are famous or historical persons and which include figures from science, technology, literature, sports, politics, the fine and performing arts, crime, sports, etc., etc.). When, on a slow news day during the holiday season, John published a year-end compilation of honorary subscribers, he received mail from a number of female subscribers who noticed that the large majority (but by no means all) of the honorary subscribers he'd selected were male, and they wrote to urge him to keep more of a balance in the future. At dinner, John asked me what I thought, and encouraged me to write this essay.
In the last few years, I've been part of several groups that reviewed drafts of brochures or videos that included brief sketches or biographies of leaders in information technology in higher education. In several of these, we were confronted with the same outcome: almost all males were featured. Usually the women in the group let out a howl of protest, and the drafts were revised to incorporate the good work of more women leaders. But the initial drafts were very one-sided. What's going on here?
A possible answer is that within our profession, men do inherently more important and interesting work. The uneven balance of coverage would then be an honest portrayal of the landscape of contributions. This may, indeed, be true, but before accepting that explanation, I'd like to explore another possibility.
I think that uneven representation is partly a result of the natural congruence of interests within and difference between genders. If men are selecting examples, I think they will tend to select work that is inherently interesting to them. If women are doing the selecting, they'll do the same. But usually the sets selected by each gender will be somewhat different because their underlying perspectives and values differ.
It's always dangerous to speculate too much from one's own personal experience, but I will dare to report on the list of titles of "recreational reading" found on my bedside table in comparison to what is on my husband's. Right now on my side there is Memoirs of a Geisha, Cold Mountain, Red Heart, Software Project Survival Guide, the most recent issue of Cooking Light, the most recent issue of Women's Sports + Fitness, several copies of the Harvard's Women's Health Newsletter, and several copies of Tuft's University's Your Dog newsletter. On my husband's side there is Covert Ops: The CIA's Secret War in Laos, Bolos Last Stand, Immediate Action, Practical Antenna Handbook, Software Project Survival Guide, and the magazines Discovery, Home Shop Machinist, and Fine Woodworking. My husband and I do share many interests and values, but we do also differ very significantly in many others. I'd dare to suggest that this assortment would not be atypical of the fun reading for many couples of our age and professional interests.
Not only do men and women find different recreational literature interesting, but in general they also tend to perceive and interpret the same literature in different ways. I conducted a casual experiment on this matter through a series of conversations I've had over the past couple of months with people I know who've been reading the book Cold Mountain. When I hear someone mention this book I ask, "What's it about, generally?" trying to sound like I haven't read the book.
If the reader is a male, they usually say something like, "There was this young man who went to fight in the Civil War, goes AWOL, and this is the story of his long walk through the Blue Ridge back to his sweetheart in the mountains of North Carolina."
If the reader is a female, though, it is more likely that she'll say, "It's about an aristocratic young woman living in rural North Carolina, whose father dies, leaving her with a farm and no money and no skills with which to survive. Over the next few years she finds strength within herself and learns skills with the help of another young woman that make her a strong and independent person. In the end her sweetheart walks through the mountains back from the Civil War and they find themselves both to be very different people, but still in love with each other." Or something like that.
What this has to do with the criticism of choices for inclusion in articles, videos and brochures, I think, is that in my experience at least, men and women often do have different interests. Not exclusively different or all different in the same way, but in general, "from the 30,000 ft. level" as we say. I think these different interests are not a result of overt sexism, but a product of an initial small bias in our brains initiated by whether we had high levels of testosterone circulating in our blood before we were even born, and reinforced and shaped by a lifetime of very subtly different experiences of life. (Those of you with a "prove it" mentality can read John Money and Anke Ehrhardt, Man and Woman, Boy and Girl: The Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity, 1972, for the biology lesson.)
Just as we tend to find somewhat different literature interesting and to perceive and interpret the same literature differently, I think we find different aspects of our work interesting. If you analyze the career paths of women and men in our information technology organizations quantitatively, I bet you'd find that the gender ratio in the networking and systems groups would tip in favor of males while the gender ratio in user services would tip in favor of females. It's been true in each organization I've managed and I'm pretty sure it was not because we had women sexists picking the user support staff and male sexists picking the systems programmers and engineers.
Psychologists from Freud to Piaget have tried to characterize the different psychological development of men and women. William Perry (Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years, 1968) conducted a linear study of the intellectual and ethical development of college-aged men. Twenty years later, Carol Gilligan (In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development, 1982) studied the development of similar aged young women and found striking differences in the constructs the genders employ to make ethical decisions.
In greatly oversimplified form: men are characterized as developing toward greater independence and autonomy, they see morality as mainly a matter of objective justice, are willing to sacrifice relationships for personal achievement, and focus more on outcomes than process. Women, on the other hand, develop toward continuous tension between acknowledged responsibilities to others and to themselves instead of independence. Instead of impartial justice, women see morality in terms of caring and are more willing than men to sacrifice achievement for relationships. They often focus on process, believing that with the right process, the right outcome will naturally emerge.
Now if we think about these differences in terms of management and professional work style, we can imagine that women-led organizations might take on personalities that are fairly different from those of men-led organizations. We have two very interesting examples within our own profession: Educom and CAUSE. Both are associations of higher education institutions with membership open to all. Their mission statements are almost indistinguishable. For the past decade, Educom has been led by male presidents and CAUSE has been led by a female president. All of these individuals have been outstanding leaders. The culture and style of these two organizations could hardly differ more, and they differ in ways that are amazingly consistent with the profiles of gender psychology described in the previous paragraph.
Indeed, as CAUSE and Educom have decided to merge together to create a new organization, the issue most often expressed as a concern by members is the difficulty of merging such very different cultures. As the Board of Directors of the new organization - dedicated leaders in our profession, all totally committed to creating a new organization that captures the best of both its parents - struggles with major issues such as inclusiveness versus nimbleness, technology versus service orientation, and leadership from the front versus professional development, it isn't unusual to find the male and female directors on different sides of the issues. Both genders honestly are committed to both inclusiveness and nimbleness, to technology and service orientation, and the directors all know that we must have both professional development and leadership from the front. But when choices of words in the mission statement, or procedures for election, or methods for deciding program priorities differ subtly in their implications for these basic values, the men and women often come down on different sides.
This takes me back to the dinner conversation that prompted this essay. John Gehl asked me to write a brief paper about the "status of women in the IT profession." Was there discrimination? Was there bias? Was he a sexist for his choice of "heroes" to feature?
I do think men and women experience our shared world in very different ways. I do think many men create organizations in which women succeed less well than they might in a different kind of organization, although other men may flourish in them. I do think that the special caring morality of women, and their contextual, relationship-based judgments, are often undervalued in the kinds of organizations that some men create. Of course the best leaders of both genders among us understand these dynamics and use their personal skills effectively while making room for other values and perspectives. Because in the past (and still in the present) most information technology organizations have been led by men, these differences probably have led to less opportunity, lower pay, slower advancement, and less representation among the top management team for women.
But is this what most of us mean when we apply a label of "discrimination" or "bias"? Is John Gehl a sexist? Does it necessarily mean that most of the most interesting and important work is done by men? My own opinion, as I hope is clear by now, is "no." I think the results we see come to a large degree from our subtle, small differences in interests and in experiences in the world. This problem is the best reason I know to try to achieve gender balance in the activities we structure. If we fail to do that, we shouldn't be surprised if the organizations we create, the projects we pursue, the questions we ask, and the answers we find interesting and acceptable represent a perspective more interesting and comfortable (and more "right" and "true") for some of us than others.
Let me close with a few statements that I hope will get me out of at least a little of the trouble I expect may arise in response to these opinions. I really do know that on almost any metric of behavior and performance, the scores of men and women overlap far more than they differ. I'm not in any way meaning to say that either gender's perspective is better or more right or even whether there should be differences between our perspectives. I have some opinions about the relative effects of nature and nurture based on my research experience in the general area of reproductive biology, but don't want to get that discussion going here. I also know that any one person's position on the continuum of behaviors and attitudes will vary depending on the context and specific issue, and probably over time as the context of our work evolves. I actually think that there is a special adaptive value to masculine and feminine leadership styles at different stages in the development of an organization. I think that, especially among my generation, many women have very successfully adopted "masculine" styles because it helped them to succeed in the organizations in which they worked and I see some men today doing similar things. All I'm trying to say is that in my view, nevertheless, human genders do differ in some consistent ways in how they experience the world, and those differences influence the decisions we make and the representations we create. I think it is better to understand this and take it into account as we structure our professional work than to keep our heads in the sand of political correctness and fail to take corrective actions that would make the world a better, more "right" and "true" place for all of us.
We hope you will let us know whether you agree or disagree with the ideas in this article. Please send your comments to editor@educom.edu
Polley Ann McClure is vice president for information technology and communications and chief information officer at the University of Virginia. mcclure@virginia.edu