MANAGEMENT EDUCATION FOR WOMEN

MANAGEMENT EDUCATION FOR WOMEN

- A critical appraisal with new possibilities

Virender Kumar*


INTRODUCTION

There are four things a student should expect of any business school. One is to learn something about the business discipline like organization, accounting, finance, production and marketing. The second is to deepen an intellectual understanding of the relation between activities in business and the major issues of human existence. The third is to able to signal that you are the kind of person who goes to a certain kind of business school, and the fourth is to lay the basis for a set of personal equations. If your primary interest is in learning about the business disciplines, you do n’t need to spend money on a first class business school, because its comparative advantage lies in the other three areas. This is a fairly open secret. There are any number of places that do a pretty good job of teaching organization, accounting, finance, production and marketing. They do not, however, do nearly as good a job of establishing that you are one of the very smart folks or of putting you in contact with other smart folks to build national or international network of personal contacts and they do not relate business life and talents to fundamental questions of human understanding.

Traditional approaches to management education aim at changing the personality of women only on short term basis. These approaches are based on faulty assumptions. We assume that we know and respond to the unique needs that women bring to our classrooms and programmes, and we press forward with pedagogical designs that simply meet the test of time rather than encourage women’s intellectual and professional development. We assume parallel life and organizational experience for men and women, filling our courses with genetic strategies and solutions that alienate more than educate women. We assume we are preparing women for traditional organisational careers despite evidence that women define and manage careers differently than men. We assume male experience to be the norm, illustrating our andocentric theories with cases and examples that better reflect the lives of

* Joint Controller of Examinations, Panjab University, Chandigarh.

men and women and pay token attention to women issues. We assume that our instructor roles, teaching practices and styles and classroom dynamics are gender neutral, ignoring the powerful role of gender in the management classroom. Let us examine some of these assumptions and see for ourselves the role management education is playing especially for women, and for their intellectual development.

ASSUMPTIONS

Responding to the Learning Needs of Women

Women bring distinctive learning needs to the management classroom. What are these needs, how they form their choice about teaching, strategies, course content, activities and evaluation practices. Such questions are hard for many management administrators to answer. We have been regularly asking faculty to share the ways in which their classrooms and their teaching reflect the unique learning needs of women. The request is almost always met with silence initially. Slowly, some faculty members begin to talk about adding readings such as balancing career and family or sexual harassment. Other profess good intentions but have no real strategies. Many reluctantly acknowledge that they have never considered the question and don’t know where to begin.

Such attention to women’s need in the management classroom is more universal than we like to admit. As educators, we assume that what and how we have always thought is equally well for men and women. In reality few instructors have given serious consideration to how women’s unique needs might reshape courses, programmes and disciplines. As educators working to prepare people for a diverse work-place, we have largely ignored the educational diversity in our classroom.

Research tells us, for example, that women bring more self-doubt and more questions about their capabilities and intellectual competence to academic setting than men do. Forced with failure of challenge, female students frequently blame and question themselves, while their male peers are more likely to attribute problems to external causes. Social factors reinforce women’s fears. Media images tout physical attractiveness, not intellectual achievements as key to successful womanhood and societal forces still foster traditional feminine stereotypes that sound like prescriptions for anti-intellectualism. Lingering beliefs that women are rational and intuitive serve more as continued suggestions of women’s deficiencies than as praise for special talents.

Acknowledging all this might, therefore, indicate the need for classroom activities that develop skills in accepting personal causality for the benefit of male students, paralleling opportunities to diagnose external causes of events for women’s development. This would incorporate the recognition that highly combative exchanges and devil’s advocacy, strategies used by powerful authority figures (such as Professors) can feed women’s fears of being intellectually one down. It would multiply opportunities to demonstrate to women that they have the right stuff for intellectual discourse and accomplishment. It would also mean more emphasis on well-polished instructor performance and textbook answers. Activities that illustrate theory building as an ordinary human enterprise would be recommended and those that highlight only the extraordinary contributions of great masters in the field would be discouraged.

We need to ask ourselves honestly how often we approach the design and teaching of management with an awareness of women’s self-doubts. We need to understand the power of these potential fears as well as other unique needs that women are trying to learn. For example women often come to academic seats with deep feelings of alienation. These feelings have been fostered by too many years of school experience of men and to accept these as representative of all human experience and too many texts, examples and cases that record the world of men’s professional work, histories, sports and hobbies.

Women come to the management education needing to know that this educational experience will be different. They need their life’s experiences and ways of knowing acknowledged, respected and validated in the classroom. Social forces may have channeled these women into pink-collar jobs or dead-end work. They may have chosen to place relationship and family before high powered careers and the chance to climb in organizational hierarchies. They may have forced blatant or subtle biases that have robbed them of their faith in the system or in themselves.

There are many reasons why women come into management education with thinner resumes than men do, or less hope for the kind of existing jobs and organizational experience that instructors use to illustrate theories. Female student need to know, however, that all of their life experiences-whether in high-powered careers or in family connections – are important functions for ongoing learning. Too often, women have been asked to leave their life experiences outside the classroom door in order to study the “real world”, a world that not only ignores the frequently different experiences of women, but which also offers only limited and different access . When asked, women report that they need help to learn. They need encouragement and confirmation. They want clear and honest feedback about their accomplishments in the classroom. They want teachers who help them identify and build on their classroom work. They want teachers who help them identify and build on their progress – teachers who tell them, “That’s good, now do more”. They want faculty to take an interest in them and their specific needs. They want self-directed, projected and self-generated criteria for evaluating their success. They want to learn in ways that encourage personal and professional development rather than ways that tap into family-tuned social skills of performing to please (powerful) others.

Women want to learn in supportive communities when relationships are on equal standing with accomplishment. They want learning that matches their life experiences, and theories that value women. They want opportunities to stretch and grow in an environment that tells them it’s all right to be what they are.

How well do we provide this kind of learning environment? How often do we assume that we do?

Parallel life, Managerial and Organizational Experiences

There is no doubt that gender effects have been experienced by each one of us in our day-to-day life. From the moment of birth, boys and girls receive many subtle, and not so-subtle, social cases on what is and is not expected of them. In addition research reminds us that females define and experience the world differently than males, communicate differently, define professional success differently and face different work place conditions. There are also differences in how men and women navigate mid-life, face social pressures and opportunities and approach leadership. And of course, women have the capacity for childbirth and must deal with the unique pressures of a biological clock.

If men and women do not have parallel experiences, we need theories that reflect this. How well do gender differences form our theories of organization and management? How often have we assumed that our genetic solutions and models based on years of androcentric research and male experiences in organizational settings are sufficient to explain the ways in which both sexes adapt to organizational life? How well do our practices prepare both men and women for successful and satisfying professional lives?

We have made progress in adding knowledge about women’s experiences to the periphery of our disciplines, although these insights are often segregated into women’s topics and courses. We have done less well in looking honestly and thoroughly at the core of our management and organizational theory base to distinguish what applies best to men, to women, and to both. How, for example, does gender affect our theories of strategy, business policy, motivation, assessment and so on, our beliefs about rationality that underpin our definitions of efficiency and effectiveness, and the core of what we define as essential to good management education?

While there have been debates over, for example, whether we need a separate theory of women’s careers, there is no advocacy for a separate theory of women’s organizational behaviour, nor any mention of the need for a theory of men’s organizational behaviour. Yet if gender is a powerful social influence that we know it to be, we need both such theories. There are always risks in acknowledging gender differences, there are many examples of the use of differentiation to reinforce existing systems of inequality, providing justification for the continued exclusion of women from positions of power. But by making gender differences in our organizational and management theory bases, we run the even greater risk of falsely assuming that our generic teaching serves women well – and in so doing, we alienate another generation of female students, who wonder in silence and self-doubt why they don’t fit the expected mould.

Preparing Women for Traditional Organizational Careers

Just as our management theories and disciplines assume parallel life and work experience for men and women, our approach to management education is based on the belief that we are preparing men and women for identical opportunities and career paths. However, the realities of a patriarchal society and the power of cultural experiences tell us that this is simply not true. While there has been some progress in breaking down the barriers to professions, occupations and positions, statistics still point to distinct gender bases job and career choices. Lingering stereotypes colour available opportunities and choices for both sexes. The unchanging pattern of a heavily female corps of school teachers, contrasting with largely male administrative ranks, serves as a perfect reminder of how slowly things are changing.

But when we look beyond socialization and differential opportunities, theories of women’s development raise critical questions about our assumed educational mission of preparing both men and women for traditional organisational careers. Research tells us that women understand and manage their careers differently than men do. For many women, this has meant creative definitions of careers, non-traditional work arrangements and entrepreneurial ventures (when economic conditions and social responsibilities allow the freedom to think beyond survival).

Gender differences lead to distinct set of choices, meanings and pressure for women, evident most clearly when we examine the difficulties and dilemmas women face in trying to balance career and family concerns. While career and work are the essential cornerstones of male identity, in women’s identity formation they are coupled with strong needs for relationship and attachments. As Nobel laureate Toni Morrison elegantly illustrated when she refused to define herself as a writer but instead saw herself as “a mother who writes” or a “an editor who writes”, for women, there is a great distinction between identifying one’s work and “being the person who does the work”. Linear advancement and an unwavering focus on a fast climb to the top, traditional definitions of a successful career path, provide too limiting a perspective for women’s careers.

How well does management education prepare women for a career outside traditional organizational arenas, with a path and focus that differ significantly from traditional norms? How well do we offer skills and theories that assist rather than undermine women in their professional and career development? How often do we assume that we do?

Male is the Norm, Female the Exception

Working effectively with gender differences does not mean merely pointing to the ways in which women are different, while continuing to implicitly define men as the standard and women as the exception. For years, men have been the dominant theory makers, history writers, researchers and research subjects, providing us with a long, deeply rooted tradition of maleness as the norm in managerial and organizational life. We have inherited concentric definitions of organizational “truth” as well as tendencies to label gender differences as women’s deficiencies. In the same way some researchers have challenged maleness as the norm for healthy human development; we need to stand up and challenge maleness as the norm for a host of beliefs about good management, effective leadership, career success, work practices and organizational essentials.

We have equated, for example, male experience, interest and work patterns with effectiveness. We have made male work norms and standards synonymous with productivity. We have designed organizations based on the ways in which men think, feel and act, and we have justified those choices with old theories of human development and adult maturity, psychoanalytic notion that work alone is central to identify and developmental beliefs that maturity and personal empowerment require competitive individualism and separation from others.

It is theories that researchers claim have falsely established a male standard for adulthood. We need to explore the ways in which normative assumptions colour our theories, disciplines and perspectives. In the process, we will raise the need and the potential for major transformation of our institutions, organizations and management training.

While we speak of creating organizations, that respond to the realities of a diverse work place how much do we still implicitly sell the traditional male model of life and work as a women’s salvation from second class citizenship? As management educators, we have remained stubbornly resistant or largely oblivious to much gender needed change, frequently dismissing those who suggest it is as radical or unrealistic. Instead, we still deal largely with assimilation issues, that is, how we can best absorb women fairly and equitably into existing organizations. We make only minor concessions and adjustments, ignoring demographic and economic predictors that show women to be a fast growing percentage of the work force.

All this puts management theory and education at significant crossroads. We have allowed women to enter the hallowed halls of organizations under the conflicting requirements that they become clones of their male counterparts while simultaneously conforming to cultural expectations of femininity. When women refuse to meet these requirements or demonstrate that they cannot do so, the result is the reinforcing of organizational preconceptions of what it really takes to succeed. This leads to the glass ceiling phenomenon in organizations, as well as to an environment of veiled signals. In career theory vernacular, the failure of women to meet the conflicting requirements proves once again that women have less career motivation than their male counterparts. In organizational lingo, women are said to be unwilling to give their all to the company, to go the extra mile and so on.

Looking beyond our organisational experience and theory base, we also need to recognize the subtle ways in which we perpetuate the male norm in management teaching by using examples and cases that illustrate only men’s lives and work experiences. When successful women are depicted, it is often as exceptions or as opportunities to explore so-called women’s issues, thus reinforcing accomplishment and success as largely male domain. For example, such terms as manager, leader, or accountant are often preceded by the world female when women in business are discussed, while no modifier is used in the case of men. Such terminology may seem innocent enough. However, this kind of framing implicitly communicates powerful social messages about who is the assessed achiever and who is the exception.

Teaching Practices & Classroom Dynamics are Gender Neutral

Incomplete theories, case choices, language usage and selectives are often inadvertently sent in the management classroom. Attending to such issues only begins to scratch the surface of what we need to do in order to understand how gender influences learning, student development, career choices and professional preparation.

The gender-neutral classroom is a myth. Gender plays an unacknowledged role in whether an instructor will serve as a role model for students who are of the same sex as the instructor or as a source of conflict or potential intimidation for those who are not. Instructors interact differently with male and female students, often unintentionally giving male students more attention, eye contacts, feedback, and implicit encouragement. There is a mounting evidence of differences in how male and female students approach and react to instructors, prepare for the classroom, participate in group activities and discussions and response to pedagogies and assignments. How aware are we of the ways in which our classroom teaching methods are steeped in gender dynamics? How confident are we in our abilities to manage these dynamics productively?

Case teaching and experiential learning are the pedagogical mainstay in management education, both with implications for women’s learning. Explorations of the educational merits of case teaching, for example, revolve largely around issues of selection of the appropriate case, instructor’s skill in creating productive discussions and the developmental sophistication necessary for students to learn from cases. But a significant question often unasked by instructors, is that how equally men and women learn from the method. Research on women’s ways to knowing offers an answer. Traditional case discussions, with their fast-paced intensity, implicit completion for student floor time, and propensity for combative exchanges favour men’s ways of knowing. Women researchers tell us, they often find these public interchangers debilitating and doubt inducing.

Experimental activities on the other hand, offer female students opportunities to learn by being themselves in the classroom. Theory is developed from reflection on personal experiences, with women’s experiences viewed as a foundation for academic learning, not as an embarrassment. Comparing personal theories with those of experts encourages critical thinking, enhances self-confidence and helps develop theory-building skills. This is also much work to be done in expanding present options for how best to teach.


Conclusions

As management educators, we must take a deep and critical look at the assumptions that underpin our present beliefs about the essential structures, methods, and content of quality management education. Acknowledgement of gender issues and recognition of the unique perspectives, needs and experiences that women bring to our programmes make evident the need for macro and micro level change in how we define and approach our educational mission and process.

If we no longer embrace promotion of the male model of the work and management in our teaching, then we need well-developed alternatives. But, perhaps more importantly, we need to believe in the importance and viability of developing and fostering these alternatives. We have expounded and thought about the need for organizational justice and valuing of diversity, yet we have created and maintained a theory base that in many cases lacks both these elements. A sweeping exploration of our beliefs and theories of organization and management are for men, too. In addition, such an exploration offers us a model for exploring the ways in which race, caste, creed and national origin have also shaded our thinking and theoretical foundations.

We need to dig deeply into widespread pedagogical beliefs about what and how to teach. On a macro level, we need new ways of teaching that better reward collaboration and positive interdependence. We need ways of better modeling, shared leadership and encouraging the development of sophisticated interpersonal skills. We need creative options for fostering critical thinking, cooperative learning, and successful team work. We need pedagogies that enable students to fine-tune such essential skills as negotiating interests, holding others accountable, resolving conflicts, and solving problems in an increasingly diverse work place. We need more methods for encouraging entrepreneurialism and the skills this requires. We need better ways to teach flexibility. We need teaching processes that fire up students and encourage them to love learning.

On a micro level, we need to acknowledge that gender affects our views and behaviour in the classroom. We need video opportunities to see ourselves teach and supportive environments for learning from such opportunities. We need sophisticated instruments to help us explore the subtle ways in which we perpetuate inequity in our teaching. We need faculty development programmes to engage instructors in such learning ventures and reward systems that acknowledge and value the difficulties of change and the development of teaching alternatives.

If we want to move beyond our present methods and programmes, we need to imaging more experience-based learning and management education beyond the classroom walls. We need to encourage students actively by defining learning projects and field-based experiences that truly encourage them, that is, projects that interest and belong to students rather than faculty. We need to rely more in our teaching on student-generated standards and developmentally appropriate activities that encourage students to take increasing responsibility for their own learning. We need to define the role of instructor as that of a guide and an encouragement – an experienced learner who knows how to weave theory from action and who assists all students in developing the confidence and skills for reflective practice.