Women are better at many things like communication, goal-setting, and other aspects like understanding an employee's needs.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on January 25, 2021. It has since been updated.
There are certain perks that come with working with female bosses even though there aren't many female leaders in the world. A survey reveals that those who work with female bosses are luckier than those working with male bosses. According to BI Norwegian Business School, women are better suited to leadership than their male counterparts in most areas, said Professor Øyvind L. Martinsen, head of Leadership and Organisational Behavior.
The research by the institution studied the personality traits of more than 2,900 managers, which included more than 900 women, more than 900 in senior management, and nearly 900 from the public sector, and found that female leaders score higher than men in four of the five categories measured. They scored higher in initiative and clear communication, openness and ability to innovate, sociability and supportiveness as well as methodical management and goal setting.
"Our results indicate that women naturally rank higher, in general, than men in their abilities to innovate and lead with clarity and impact. These findings pose a legitimate question about the construction of management hierarchy and the current dispensation of women in these roles," said Martinsen. As per 2019 statistics, women hold 30 (6%) of CEO positions at those S&P 500 companies, reported by Catalyst.
There are other things women are better at, which makes them good leaders. Of course, it goes without saying that there are terrible bosses of both genders in our workplaces, but here are four reasons why working with female bosses is better than working with male bosses:
It comes as no surprise that women are "stronger communicators and better connectors than men." Jay Forte, author of Fire Up! Your Employees and Smoke Your Competition, was quoted in the New York Daily News as saying, "They're more astute about knowing how to activate passion in their employees. They watch the 43 muscles in your face and see how your emotions change." He added that employees perform better when they feel connected.
"Women are community builders and consensus builders, which is important," he explains. "So we have what I call the feminization of management."
Researchers at the University of Georgia and Columbia University found that girls do better in classroom learning and earn higher grades in elementary school. This likely translates to later in life as well. "The skill that matters the most in regards to how teachers graded their students is what we refer to as 'approaches toward learning,'" said Christopher Cornwell, Ph.D., head of economics in the UGA Terry College of Business, as per PsychCentral.
This shows the attitude kids have towards learning. For their research, they measured the child’s attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility, and organization. "I think that anybody who’s a parent of boys and girls can tell you that girls are more of all of that," said Cornwell.
Unlike male bosses, female leaders are more likely to be tolerant of people attending to personal chores during work hours. And, that's because women appreciate the need for work-life balance. In contrast, male bosses are likely to lose their temper when they see an employee attend to personal phone calls or checking social media. The research was commissioned by Vodafone and was released in 2011, as per Daily Mail.
That's not all, female bosses are more likely to take an employee's personal situation into account when it comes to managing them. Female bosses are more aware of and sympathetic to people's problems in their personal life.
Most people believe that women are good at performing multiple tasks simultaneously but now there is data to prove that. A study published in BMC Psychology revealed that women are better at multi-tasking than men. "Women outperform men in these multi-tasking paradigms, but the near lack of empirical studies on gender differences in multitasking should caution against making strong generalizations," said the authors.
References:
https://www.catalyst.org/research/women-ceos-of-the-sp-500/
https://psychcentral.com/news/2013/01/05/why-girls-do-better-in-school#1
https://bmcpsychology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2050-7283-1-18
