A mostly not well written piece that is likely to do poorly on HN, but this one bit is good food for thought:
So it struck me as a little odd that so much of the recent debate over getting women to “lean in” has focused on getting them to adopt more of these dysfunctional leadership traits. Yes, these are the people we often choose as our leaders — but should they be?
A lot of advice given to women with ambition boils down to "behave more like men." From what I have seen, that tends to not work well for women.
Perhaps men also should be learning leadership traits from women. If you're male and competitive, consider that the male leadership traits are easily found in your peers; the female ones could give you a big advantage - if you dare.
(I'm greatly simplifying by categorizing some traits as 'male' or 'female'. To the extent there is a difference, I expect much of it is socialized. In many ways I suspect the difference is due to the expectations of the beholder.)
Better question: why do so many incompetent people become leaders. I've had the mispleasure of working under some fabulously incompetent men and women in my time (and I've worked under some brilliant people of both genders as well).
I should not expect more from a handle ButtLoad, i mean bootload. This is more of the Hillary Clinton Decade long leftist War on Men propaganda that silicone valley has eaten like a creampie.
Statistically by any measure, men are and always will be better leaders than women. This generalization has nothing to do with the fact that there are totally incompetent leaders regardless of their gender. they often rise based on their desire and windfall rather than skill or competence.
> Statistically by any measure, men are and always will be better leaders than women.
Unfortunately for your argument, the science that is very helpfully linked in the article claims otherwise. You're welcome to counter it with other studies, but they're pretty solid.
> This generalization has nothing to do with the fact that there are totally incompetent leaders regardless of their gender. they often rise based on their desire and windfall rather than skill or competence.
This part, however, is very true, and I agree with it. The article describes how this is more useful to men than for women... and instead of simply stating "we need more females as managers!" we should find ways to better evaluate managers by rigorous, scientific standards.
This is based on my experience and has no other basis; I hope it's worthwhile:
Many people overlook obvious incompetence in men. We let men off the hook too easily when they demonstrate poor judgment, ignorance, irresponsibility, or disrespect and a lack of understanding of others. It's ok as long as they do it in a hyper-masculine way, aggressively or boisterously; it's even enouraged in many situations as a byproduct and demonstration of strength. Think of Donald Trump, for example.
I think it's a result of lowered expectations: People think that it's the way men inevitably will behave; boys will be boys. Also I think people are intimidated, both by the aggression and by knowing that socially, such behavior is generally acceptable and criticizing it likely will be a losing battle and will make the critic look 'soft' for not appreciating 'strength'.
EDIT: Some of the angry rants in this thread so far in a way support my idea: Many are ignorant, poorly reasoned, and providing little value to readers. So why is that behavior acceptable? Why do we let it pass or even take it seriously?
As a counterpoint to my own question: I generally associate that behavior with men, based also on my experiences, but I don't know the gender of the commenters (though HN is likely mostly male) and I don't know that women behave differently online.
I think it's more gender-biased, in that incompetence is overlooked in areas where we expect one gender to have better skills. If a man fucks up changing a nappy, "well, he's just a man". If a woman fucks up changing a tyre, "well, she's just a woman".
When it comes to leadership, we haven't allowed women to be visible leaders for very long; there is still cultural baggage suggesting it as a male area.
> incompetence is overlooked in areas where we expect one gender to have better skills.
I agree and that's a good point. However, 1) if leadership is a male field then men should face higher standards, not lower ones; and 2) the consequences for high-level leaders can be much more serious than tires or nappies, too serious to dismiss with casual gender stereotypes.
> However, 1) if leadership is a male field then men should face higher standards, not lower ones
I suspect that anthropologists and sociologists would say that the OPPOSITE is true: that people inside peer-groups are often subject to less criticism than those out of the groups. ;-)
If anything, Trump has a demonstrated history of competence. Even right now, he's by far the most competent republican candidate (which of course doesn't mean he'd also be a competent president). Indeed, he's also "hyper-masculine" (your words - I would say hyper-idiotic), but you can't really use him as an example of someone incompetent.
Are you sure about that? He's declared bankruptcy multiple times (three?), and his net worth is either about the same as, or significantly worse than, if he had invested his wealth in index funds (depending on just when the investment would have happened). That doesn't exactly speak to a great level of competence.
"He's declared bankruptcy multiple times (three?)"
My understanding has it that he has never filed for personal bankruptcy. Corporations with his name, in which he had a non-negligible ownership stake, filed for bankruptcy. It's never been clear to me how much of a management role he had in the time leading up to those events (not that I have looked tremendously hard).
There's a lot of begging the question fallacies in this article, the most prominent being that confidence has nothing to do with leadership. Which is nonsense - confidence is a fundamental part of leadership. Leadership is definitely more than confidence (as the second-last paragraph of the article suggests), but this article makes it sound like they're orthogonal traits.
It also moves the goalposts: First up, it says that the best leaders are humble. Then it says that the best leaders, since they don't show this humility (eg Jobs), are not representative of the average manager... so now we're talking about middle managers, not 'best leaders'.
Curiously, the article makes no mention of the Peter Principle - people can be competant, and keep getting promoted until they reach a level where they can no longer perform well. While that doesn't explain the gender difference, it does somewhat answer the article title - something the article doesn't actually do.
> a quantitative review of gender differences in personality involving more than 23,000 participants in 26 cultures indicated that women are more sensitive, considerate, and humble than men
Nothing wrong with these. The (helpfully linked!) science backs them up.
> Unsurprisingly, the mythical image of a “leader” embodies many of the characteristics commonly found in personality disorders, such as narcissism (Steve Jobs or Vladimir Putin) , [...]
Hold on. Okay, the listed people may not be perfect, but why do so many people feel it is appropriate to diagnose others with some kind of mental disorder, especially without having examined them in person? Shameful, clickbait-tier stuff.
Oh, and why are those mentioned in an article that brings up gender differences? Are those supposed to claim that women lack disorders? Even if those people did actually have those disorders, is it a good idea to claim that women are better just because one or two men have disorders?
> In fact, most leaders — whether in politics or business — fail.
Doesn't answer the question, because it leaves out men, which the title raised specifically.
> There is now compelling scientific evidence for the notion that women are more likely to adopt more effective leadership strategies than do men.
Great! I'm really happy to hear that! But what does it have to do with men and their incompetence? Surely just because men are slightly less efficient, you wouldn't discard all male leaders? Where are the "incompetent men" here?
> In sum, there is no denying that women’s path to leadership positions is paved with many barriers including a very thick glass ceiling. But a much bigger problem is the lack of career obstacles for incompetent men
So there is a societal problem with women becoming leaders which I'll accept without argument. But why is the "the lack of career obstacles for incompetent men" relevant? Why should we, as a society, make it harder for men or for incompetent people to get jobs?
I don't believe an authoritarian approach to job granting will actually benefit anyone. Why would you try to stop certain people from getting jobs? Why not make it easier for other kinds of people to get jobs instead? And I have to raise the argument (as mine would not be complete without it), why not just allow people to act on their own merit and decide who is the best leader based on what they do?
The article stirs up a controversy (or whatever) but doesn't leave the reader with any actionable suggestions. Perhaps reevaluating managers more seriously for more accurate metrics could be a good idea! The author implies that we should learn to counter "our inability to discern between confidence and competence"... and I agree with that! It was simply not stated directly.
But it has nothing to do with men or women. It should be about making things more fair. Which actually has nothing to do with gender, in this case. Learning how to tell good leadership from a good show really doesn't have to do with gender.
"we (people in general) commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence... This is consistent with the finding that leaderless groups have a natural tendency to elect self-centered, overconfident and narcissistic individuals as leaders"
I've seen this happen over and over again. How do you think you can limit the damage done?
Are they incompetent, or do they just have different success criteria? In theory, managers are supposed to be dedicated to advancing the interests of the shareholders, and a board of directors supervises their managerial activity. But an individual manager may be much more interested in maximizing his own wealth, and may occupy a job only for as long as he can make a lot of money without getting into trouble, moving on to another firm as soon as he sees that his tenure is unsustainable (but before everyone else has worked out that he's a liability). I mean, why work hard at managing a widget factory if you can more profitably devote your time to learning about doohickeys and playing golf with the owners of the doohickey factory across town?
While I agree with the author's contention that businesses are bad at hiring managers and so reward pathological candidates, I disagree with his assumption that they're merely incompetent as opposed to self-serving. There's also the question of whether corporate boards are always aligned with the interests of shareholders. I know of one small-cap firm that brought in a new CEO who began alienating everyone in sight almost immediately, and whose previous appointments had generated a small forest of red flags, which would have been very obvious to the board. Not long after the new broom arrived the share price fell, the firm was de-listed...and the former founder-CEO sold his shares at a loss, lost his seat on the board, and the firm's IP and book of business were transferred for a song to another firm owned by other directors. (Writing it this way it sounds wildly illegal but my impression was that the activity fell into the unethical-but-legal grey area. Of course I am leaving out a lot of ancillary details, not least to avoid slandering anyone.)
> While I agree with the author's contention that businesses are bad at hiring managers and so reward pathological candidates, I disagree with his assumption that they're merely incompetent as opposed to self-serving ...
The author contends that businesses hire "self-centered, overconfident and narcissistic" managers. Whether that covers for incomptentence or for intentionally harming the business seems an orthogonal question.
I generally think your points are good, but I'm not sure they address this article.
> While I agree with the author's contention that businesses are bad at hiring managers
I'm not sure that's a meaningful assertion... Just a few days ago, there was a thread (or maybe on reddit/programming) about how businesses are bad at hiring programmers. Is it possible simply that businesses are bad at hiring workers in general? The badness is probably exaggerated when the workers become more skilled and when the skills become softer.
The claim is that women CEOs are likely to get hired at failing companies. Personally I bought Lucent stock and had it go down $1000 in value the next day because of an earnings statement under Carly Fioria and then later things went badly at HP under her shift.
Oddly enough, Meg Whitman presided over ebay's long decline, and then took Carly's old job. It's so amazing how small the talent pool seems to be in the U.S.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 56.7 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
I mean, if the owner thought that this would give him the highest returns, why would he care about the gender of his employees?
So it struck me as a little odd that so much of the recent debate over getting women to “lean in” has focused on getting them to adopt more of these dysfunctional leadership traits. Yes, these are the people we often choose as our leaders — but should they be?
A lot of advice given to women with ambition boils down to "behave more like men." From what I have seen, that tends to not work well for women.
(I'm greatly simplifying by categorizing some traits as 'male' or 'female'. To the extent there is a difference, I expect much of it is socialized. In many ways I suspect the difference is due to the expectations of the beholder.)
Statistically by any measure, men are and always will be better leaders than women. This generalization has nothing to do with the fact that there are totally incompetent leaders regardless of their gender. they often rise based on their desire and windfall rather than skill or competence.
Unfortunately for your argument, the science that is very helpfully linked in the article claims otherwise. You're welcome to counter it with other studies, but they're pretty solid.
> This generalization has nothing to do with the fact that there are totally incompetent leaders regardless of their gender. they often rise based on their desire and windfall rather than skill or competence.
This part, however, is very true, and I agree with it. The article describes how this is more useful to men than for women... and instead of simply stating "we need more females as managers!" we should find ways to better evaluate managers by rigorous, scientific standards.
Many people overlook obvious incompetence in men. We let men off the hook too easily when they demonstrate poor judgment, ignorance, irresponsibility, or disrespect and a lack of understanding of others. It's ok as long as they do it in a hyper-masculine way, aggressively or boisterously; it's even enouraged in many situations as a byproduct and demonstration of strength. Think of Donald Trump, for example.
I think it's a result of lowered expectations: People think that it's the way men inevitably will behave; boys will be boys. Also I think people are intimidated, both by the aggression and by knowing that socially, such behavior is generally acceptable and criticizing it likely will be a losing battle and will make the critic look 'soft' for not appreciating 'strength'.
EDIT: Some of the angry rants in this thread so far in a way support my idea: Many are ignorant, poorly reasoned, and providing little value to readers. So why is that behavior acceptable? Why do we let it pass or even take it seriously?
As a counterpoint to my own question: I generally associate that behavior with men, based also on my experiences, but I don't know the gender of the commenters (though HN is likely mostly male) and I don't know that women behave differently online.
When it comes to leadership, we haven't allowed women to be visible leaders for very long; there is still cultural baggage suggesting it as a male area.
I agree and that's a good point. However, 1) if leadership is a male field then men should face higher standards, not lower ones; and 2) the consequences for high-level leaders can be much more serious than tires or nappies, too serious to dismiss with casual gender stereotypes.
I suspect that anthropologists and sociologists would say that the OPPOSITE is true: that people inside peer-groups are often subject to less criticism than those out of the groups. ;-)
If anything, Trump has a demonstrated history of competence. Even right now, he's by far the most competent republican candidate (which of course doesn't mean he'd also be a competent president). Indeed, he's also "hyper-masculine" (your words - I would say hyper-idiotic), but you can't really use him as an example of someone incompetent.
My understanding has it that he has never filed for personal bankruptcy. Corporations with his name, in which he had a non-negligible ownership stake, filed for bankruptcy. It's never been clear to me how much of a management role he had in the time leading up to those events (not that I have looked tremendously hard).
It also moves the goalposts: First up, it says that the best leaders are humble. Then it says that the best leaders, since they don't show this humility (eg Jobs), are not representative of the average manager... so now we're talking about middle managers, not 'best leaders'.
Curiously, the article makes no mention of the Peter Principle - people can be competant, and keep getting promoted until they reach a level where they can no longer perform well. While that doesn't explain the gender difference, it does somewhat answer the article title - something the article doesn't actually do.
> women outperform men on emotional intelligence
> a quantitative review of gender differences in personality involving more than 23,000 participants in 26 cultures indicated that women are more sensitive, considerate, and humble than men
Nothing wrong with these. The (helpfully linked!) science backs them up.
> Unsurprisingly, the mythical image of a “leader” embodies many of the characteristics commonly found in personality disorders, such as narcissism (Steve Jobs or Vladimir Putin) , [...]
Hold on. Okay, the listed people may not be perfect, but why do so many people feel it is appropriate to diagnose others with some kind of mental disorder, especially without having examined them in person? Shameful, clickbait-tier stuff.
Oh, and why are those mentioned in an article that brings up gender differences? Are those supposed to claim that women lack disorders? Even if those people did actually have those disorders, is it a good idea to claim that women are better just because one or two men have disorders?
> In fact, most leaders — whether in politics or business — fail.
Doesn't answer the question, because it leaves out men, which the title raised specifically.
> There is now compelling scientific evidence for the notion that women are more likely to adopt more effective leadership strategies than do men.
Great! I'm really happy to hear that! But what does it have to do with men and their incompetence? Surely just because men are slightly less efficient, you wouldn't discard all male leaders? Where are the "incompetent men" here?
> In sum, there is no denying that women’s path to leadership positions is paved with many barriers including a very thick glass ceiling. But a much bigger problem is the lack of career obstacles for incompetent men
So there is a societal problem with women becoming leaders which I'll accept without argument. But why is the "the lack of career obstacles for incompetent men" relevant? Why should we, as a society, make it harder for men or for incompetent people to get jobs?
I don't believe an authoritarian approach to job granting will actually benefit anyone. Why would you try to stop certain people from getting jobs? Why not make it easier for other kinds of people to get jobs instead? And I have to raise the argument (as mine would not be complete without it), why not just allow people to act on their own merit and decide who is the best leader based on what they do?
The article stirs up a controversy (or whatever) but doesn't leave the reader with any actionable suggestions. Perhaps reevaluating managers more seriously for more accurate metrics could be a good idea! The author implies that we should learn to counter "our inability to discern between confidence and competence"... and I agree with that! It was simply not stated directly.
But it has nothing to do with men or women. It should be about making things more fair. Which actually has nothing to do with gender, in this case. Learning how to tell good leadership from a good show really doesn't have to do with gender.
I appreciate replies or direct emails. Fire away.
I've seen this happen over and over again. How do you think you can limit the damage done?
While I agree with the author's contention that businesses are bad at hiring managers and so reward pathological candidates, I disagree with his assumption that they're merely incompetent as opposed to self-serving. There's also the question of whether corporate boards are always aligned with the interests of shareholders. I know of one small-cap firm that brought in a new CEO who began alienating everyone in sight almost immediately, and whose previous appointments had generated a small forest of red flags, which would have been very obvious to the board. Not long after the new broom arrived the share price fell, the firm was de-listed...and the former founder-CEO sold his shares at a loss, lost his seat on the board, and the firm's IP and book of business were transferred for a song to another firm owned by other directors. (Writing it this way it sounds wildly illegal but my impression was that the activity fell into the unethical-but-legal grey area. Of course I am leaving out a lot of ancillary details, not least to avoid slandering anyone.)
The author contends that businesses hire "self-centered, overconfident and narcissistic" managers. Whether that covers for incomptentence or for intentionally harming the business seems an orthogonal question.
I generally think your points are good, but I'm not sure they address this article.
I'm not sure that's a meaningful assertion... Just a few days ago, there was a thread (or maybe on reddit/programming) about how businesses are bad at hiring programmers. Is it possible simply that businesses are bad at hiring workers in general? The badness is probably exaggerated when the workers become more skilled and when the skills become softer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
The claim is that women CEOs are likely to get hired at failing companies. Personally I bought Lucent stock and had it go down $1000 in value the next day because of an earnings statement under Carly Fioria and then later things went badly at HP under her shift.
Oddly enough, Meg Whitman presided over ebay's long decline, and then took Carly's old job. It's so amazing how small the talent pool seems to be in the U.S.