Joan Biskupic of USA TODAY wrote up the interview with Justice Ginsburg. In the interview the Justice touched on the number of women on the US Supreme Court
In interviews with USA TODAY before [Justice] Souter's retirement announcement Friday, [Justice] Ginsburg said the court needs another woman. "Women belong in all places where decisions are being made. I don't say (the split) should be 50-50," Ginsburg said. "It could be 60% men, 40% women, or the other way around. It shouldn't be that women are the exception."Which leads us to the Sunday edition of The Boston Globe and the "Ideas Section." There we find an article by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, titled The female advantage / A new reason for businesses to promote women: it's more profitable."
Lets be up front about what we actually "know." We know that there is a correlation between the number of female senior executive or female board members and success in the current environment. We don't know if this correlation points to causation.
The numbers are certainly striking, but their meaning is not yet fully understood. Correlation does not equal causation: While the link between higher levels of female leadership and profits is fairly well-established, it's less clear that women are directly responsible for the success. Rather, companies of a particular kind - forward-thinking, adaptable - may both turn higher profits and promote more women. And some of the data on women's influence are mixed. One recent study, for example, found that the presence of senior women just below the CEO led to higher profits - but the effect of female CEOs was neutral or slightly negative.I figure that it just might be that good firms attract competent women, but it could be some cognitive capabilities that women have in more abundance than men. Either way, it is something to think about.
The flip side of this finding is the question of how to get more women into positions of authority within a firm. One is by giving them a chance. Last night, walking to class, I fell in with Ed, with whom I had taken a history course from Professor Russell a couple of semesters ago. He is about ten years younger than I am, and like me, was in the Air Force. We were talking about progress in equality (I had been telling him about a paper I had written in my other class) and he mentioned that when he was a young enlisted man he worked for an Hispanic Sergeant, who commented on their section head, a female Captain. The Sergeant said that no woman, no matter how well trained, could be as good as any man.
Twenty years later I got a chance to give a Colonel selectee female personnel officer a job helping to write our current military strategy—The Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan. Her boss was an Army cavalry (maybe he was armor) colonel and History PhD (MIT), who would go on to command a brigade in Operation DESERT STORM and then to be a four star general. The female, with no "operational" experience, and all that means in the macho world of the military, proved to be quite an effective strategists—and I remember the day her boss tried to explain the TPFD* process and she pointed out how it really worked—it was her area. I asked for her because my middle brother told me she was very sharp (several early selections for promotion) and a friend of mine who was teaching at the National War College told me that as a student she had shown she could do strategic thinking. She made two stars. Not bad for an Air Force personnel officer who had moved into operations and intelligence. (I know, my prejudice against "shoe clerks"** is showing.) And, for those of you who wonder if there are opportunities for the foreign born—she was born in Germany of parents who were refugees from Eastern Europe and the chaos of WWII.
Then there is the question of if a given woman wants to accept more responsibility. Senior managers have to come from somewhere. I recall encouraging a certain young woman to move from being a Program Manager to being both the Program Manager and a Section Head, leading to Department Head. (You know who you are.)
She turned me down. But, she did give it thought. The fact is, being a manager is not a guaranteed good time. It means more stress. In a family with two working spouses who are managers, that might be too much stress. I know that when my wife's music program is in high gear (e.g., Easter and Christmas) there can be a certain amount of stress in the house and there is less time and empathy for my problems.*** Being a manager means less time at home to work with the children or work on the house. Being an up and coming manager can mean having to get additional training and education, sometimes on one's own time. And, in the end, a person's got to know his or her limitations, as Inspector Harry Callahan would say.
I wonder how many women are on the board of the company in which I own stock? At least there are some women in senior management positions. Is it enough to help the stock price?
Regards — Cliff
* TPFD is Time Phased Force Deployment— the computer data that represented the best flow of forces using air and sea strategic lift.
** From the Urban Dictionary: Military insult used primarily in the Air Force to describe services, personnel, finance and other support staff. This term is primarily used by aviators. It is more limited than the Army equivalent "pogue", in that not all non-combat, non-flying airmen are labeled as shoe clerks.
*** Yes, it is about me, sadly.
When I first entered the software industry back in the early 80's, it became quickly apparent that there were far more women working there, as well as being promoted to positions of management, authority and responsibility, than in almost any other industry I knew. My immediate sense was of software companies being better meritocracies than the financial services and other companies for which I had previously worked. This had two effects: First of all, more smart, capable and ambitious women were attracted to work where their intelligence and abilities would be recognized, compensated and promoted, making the pool of female candidates within a software company inordinately rich with smarts, abilities, and talent. Second of all, there didn't seem to be much difference overall between effective men and effective women in terms of corporate success. Which is to say, often there were extreme differences in temperament and style, but in terms of outcomes, it seemed to be proved that a good leader achieves good things, regardless of their gender.
ReplyDeleteThis has left me with a very positive inclination towards observations like Ginsberg's, that it's a good thing to have more women represented on the court, and elsewhere in power in our society. For my part, I'm not sold on there being specific advantage owing to their gender, as might opine justice Ginsberg, but, given that there may be a finite number of the truly "best and the brightest" in our world, it's seems to stand to reason that a pool of talent twice as large (i.e. the whole population instead of just one gender) will yield twice the number of top-notch talent from which to staff critical areas like the Supreme Court and elsewhere.
Bigots have always astounded me. If one truly believes that some people are "better" than others, whatever that means, based on race, creed, gender, etc., then it certainly seems to me to be of extreme cowardice in ones convictions that anyone would ever object to purely merit-based and race/creed/gender-blind selection of candidates for anything. The more selections become based on qualifications, and not race/creed/gender, the more the talent pool will grow to reflect any qualitative advantages enjoyed by those rising to the top. Yes, sometimes starting-point inequties have to be addressed to ensure that there is a level playing field. But I support whatever we can do as a community to ensure that diversity is recognized for the strengths that it confers upon the society which employs it.
Otherwise, we're picking our Supreme Court from an artificially small (and therefore flawed) pool of candidates, and that's in no ones best interest, not even the tall white men who used to be our only choices. (Not every tall white man gets to be a supreme court justice, but it's guaranteed that plenty of tall white men will suffer for the shortcomings of a court not taking advantage of the smartest, most capable people in their decisions.