UCI Professor Defends Study on Managing

A UC Irvine professor who has penned a controversial study on women’s management style defended herself in Washington on Friday against charges that the report contributes to sexual stereotypes.

Women have a natural tendency to manage democratically, the way one would run a family, while men’s tendency is to command as though running an army, according to the report by Prof. Judy B. Rosener, published under the title “Ways Women Lead” in the November-December issue of Harvard Business Review.

“We are not blaming them. We are not saying it’s better or worse. We are just saying it’s different,” Rosener said at a news conference in Washington, where she is attending a conference of the International Women’s Forum, which sponsored the study.

The point is that both are needed, she said.

“We don’t want an interactive leader in Saudi Arabia at the moment,” Rosener said. “I would think we want a command-and-control type.”

The Harvard Business Review will run a dozen or so letters on the subject, many of them critical, along with the author’s response, in its January-February issue, Rosener said. One of the critical letters is from Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, director of the Center for Leadership and Career Studies at Emory University.

“What’s dangerous is that it wildly misstates the full range of who women are,” Sonnenfeld said during a telephone interview Friday. “This research denies women the possibility of varying from what these New Age feminists call the feminine personality. Where society needs to focus attention is on where women have trouble getting ahead in the workplace, the barriers, the bias.”

The study was based on responses from 355 members of the forum and 101 men in similar positions.

Gillian Rudd, chairman of the Foundation for Women Business Owners who attended the conference Friday, said the study contained some good news. She said the study focused on successful women and so may not give a clear picture of women’s progress in the workplace, but it is an indication that there are more role models for women today than there were 20 years ago.

“The study looked at the tip of the iceberg, and it is a very nice tip of the iceberg,” she said. “I hope it will show national and local policy-makers what an economic force women business owners represent in this country.”

The study said that management by personal interaction with subordinates--rather than by an authoritarian, reward-and-punishment system--will be the wave of the future.

“This is not revolutionary; men are very much in tune with this,” said Olga Vives, a sales manager with a $4-billion corporation who is a member of the board of the National Organization for Women. “This is a style that’s been developing over the years. Perhaps’s it’s easier for women because we are new to management.”

The International Women’s Forum is an organization of prominent women leaders in 16 countries, including astronaut Sally Ride, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Rosener said she has received about a hundred telephone calls about the study since her article appeared.

“People are saying: ‘Gender has nothing to do with it. You are really enforcing gender stereotypes,’ ” she said. But, she said, “We are not saying that all women behave one way and all men behave another way.”

Cynthia Maduro Ryan, a Washington lawyer and former corporate executive who is president of the IWF, said, “We are not here in any way to discredit the command-and-control or authoritarian style.”

“It was basically appropriate and well done for purposes of the industrial era,” she said. “We are going through rapid changes in the information age and a period of adjustment. Women are not having to unlearn the other style because they never adapted to it in the beginning.”

It says the typical woman surveyed “prefers the use of personal power, that is, power based on her charisma, work record, and contact, as contrasted with structural power based on the authority that comes with organizational position, title, and the ability to reward and punish.”

It says the women make the same amount of money as men in comparable positions but “appear to lead differently than their male colleagues; they are likely to be more transformational than their male peers.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.