Male Ego, Female Issues, or Miscommunication?: Women, the Workplace, and Self-Employment
A large amount of literature has recently been dedicated to gender roles in the workplace, particularly focusing on discrimination against women in the form of lost employment opportunities or lower wages. Whatever causes this phenomenon must also be responsible, to some degree, for the significant trend of female entrepreneurs creating solo enterprises. While social interactions and prejudices can account for this discrepancy, the very sensitive issue of productivity can also enter the equation. Specifically relevant to our question is not whether women are more or less productive than men, but whether men working with women are more or less productive than men with men or women with women.[1]
Inter-gender issues can explain a prejudice-like barrier in choosing to work with the opposite gender. For some men, having a female superior is something that is worth forgoing some income to avoid. For some women, male gawking and awkward passes by coworkers are sometimes enough to make them pass up some income in order to work in a less uncomfortable environment. Issues like these are based on individual preference and can represent an exogenously added cost to labor (the supplier of these feelings is the agent and the consumer of the satisfaction of those feelings is the agent). Thus, the presence of these issues can raise or lower the frequency with which men choose to work with women, and vice-versa.
Differences in material well-being provide the other side of the coin. Naturally, a major factor in considering any business proposition is the expected return. Because of the differences between men and women, both innate and socially conditioned, communication problems and inter-gender issues can not only affect employment choices sometimes, but can also affect the output of a gender-diverse productive environment. This, in turn, translates into a business experience that is reflected in hiring practices, as well as in the formation of entrepreneurial founding teams. So how much of the level of gender diversity in business is accounted for by differences in productivity between inter- and intra-gender relations? The presence of an attractive female in the workplace, for example, can function both as a positive inter-gender issue for males (lowering the cost of labor by increasing willingness to work in a particular place), but a detractor from overall productivity (distraction).
Dwyer (2003) investigates the effect of gender mix in both top and middle management on firm performance. Using data from commercial banks, Dwyer examines the interaction between gender diversity, firm growth orientation, and organizational structure. He finds that gender diversity in an “adhocracy” organizational structure- in which individual firm members are informally governed and are allowed to take risks- is negatively associated with the return on equity performance measure. Of the four organizational structures used in the study, adhocracy appears to be the institutional form closest to the management organization of entrepreneurial founding teams because of its overall emphasis on individual autonomy. The study also suggests in its implications that a supportive and open-minded environment may be necessary for harnessing the gains of gender diversity, implying that stronger central management provides this.
It is clear that gender diversity has advantages and disadvantages, but that their presence depends on interaction with institutional variables, such as an organizational structure. Using these results as a starting point, we can examine the nature of how decisions are made in entrepreneurial founding teams and see if they conform to the adhocracy or any other structure. If successful, we can then conclude that lowered productivity when working with the opposite sex may be one force governing a woman’s choice to form a solo enterprise.
Citation:
“Gender diversity in management and firm performance: the influence of growth orientation and organizational culture” Journal of Business Research. Dwyer. 2003. vol:56 iss:12 pg:1009 -1019
[1] Incidentally, the productivity of women with women is a worthwhile area to explore, particularly in trying to explain why female entrepreneurs form solo enterprises, but not all-female founding teams.
“…the productivity of women with women”
that’s hot