Alpha Females

For John, BLUF:  It isn't at all clear that Women can have it all and in fact evidence suggests women must make choices as to what is most important to them and then follow that line.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

Back when I was managing a Business Unit of about 66 people I had a very competent woman first level manager, who I tried to convinced to take the next step toward being, eventually, a major manager in the Company, perhaps even a Vice President.  She demurred and I told her that she would end up working for one of her contemporaries.  Wednesday she wryly noted she now did work for one such person.  Smart and competent, she didn't have the fire in the belly to be the top dog.  She had children, on the one hand, and on the other she didn't want the responsibility for picking people to be laid off.

So, from City Journal we have an examination of "The Plight of the Alpha Female", by Kay S Hymowitz.

Kay S. Hymowitz is a contributing editor of City Journal, the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of Manning Up:  How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys.

The subtitle of Ms Hymowitz's article is "Women remain scarce in the most elite positions.  And it’s by choice."  I believe it is by choice.  Being a top performer takes time and effort and sacrifice.  A small example was the 22nd Tactical Fighter Squadron in about 1968.  Then Major Robert "Boom-Boom" Smith did a "safety survey" for the wing, of which the Big 22 was a part, trying to assess how people were doing.  One of the things the survey found was that those who were only away from home 80 hours a week were not pulling their fair share of the load.  The norm was about 100 hours and some of us, going to night school on top of everything else, were gone about 120 hours a week.  For those of you wondering, a week is 168 hours.  Part of it was 24 hours on alert every fourth day and part of it was two weeks in Libya every three months.  It all counted, because it was all time away from home.  And time away from home is a big factor in Ms Hymowitz's article.

Here is the lede:

Are we witnessing “the end of men”?  You can see why the idea—also the title of a new book by journalist Hanna Rosin—makes sense.  Women obtain the majority of college and graduate-school degrees.  In their twenties, if they don’t have children, they outearn their male peers.  They’re the primary wage earners in a rapidly growing percentage of households.  American women even won more Olympic medals than their male compatriots did this summer.  But for all of women’s success, there’s one area in which the rumor of male demise has been greatly exaggerated.  At the top of every industry, men remain in charge.  Finance, law, medicine, business, government, media, academia—you’ll have a tough time finding enough alpha-level women in any of these fields to fill a Davos conference room.

This is not a new issue and the author is not alone.  Just this last Summer, in The Atlantic, Ms Anne-Marie Slaughter, now a Princeton Professor, wrote “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”.  It was a cover story.  She had been the Director of Policy Planning at the Department of State.  This was the position that Diplomat George Kennan had when be became "Mr X" and published in Foreign Affairs the article that set our Cold War policy toward the Soviet Union—Containment.  Ms Slaughter was walking the corridors of power, but walked away.  She wanted to spend more time with her teenage son, who she thought needed her.  From the Hymowitz article:

[Ms] Slaughter stumbled onto a truth that many are reluctant to admit:  women are less inclined than men to think that power and status are worth the sacrifice of a close relationship with their children.

I think a key paragraph is this one:

A lot of feminists and work/family specialists assume that these preferences aren’t permanent.  If we educated women properly and structured the workplace in a humane way, goes the thinking, women would want to spend more time at work and less at home, and men would want the opposite.  It’s the structural, institutional, and ideological “barriers,” especially “domestic responsibilities,” that prevent women from gaining full workplace equality as they climb the career ladder.

As long as there are Alpha types, there will be competition.  As long as there is competition there will be people who will try to work longer and work harder.  You can tell them they lose efficiency and effectiveness after 38 hours a week, but that won't deter them.  You can tell them they are burning up their intellectual capital and they need a break, but they just won't see space to take a break.  The boss wants this report and he wants it NOW.

People like Student and Fellow Blogger Greg Page are lucky. In Greg's case he is lucky because he has hit a natural break point, returning from Afghanistan, and it is a chance to go off to Sloan, at MIT.  Not everyone gets that good break.  One of the nice things about being in the military is that there are new assignments every few years, which change things up, and there are school slots, for the Army and Air Force, a couple of month junior officer school and two ten month schools at the rank of Major and Lieutenant Colonel or Colonel.  Forced breaks to recharge the batteries and to think outside the box where the consequences are not as severe as on the job.

As for women, they have choices to make.  The one thing I can tell them is that most of us never make it to the top.  It isn't about being male or female, but about the shape of the pyramid.  The opening of the middle ranks to women is important and it is about fairness.  Past that, it is a whole different gender, the Alphas.

Hat tip to the Instapundit.

Regards  —  Cliff