“Forget China, India and the internet: Economic growth is driven by women”.

I have been always wondering if in today’s world any particular gender can make a significant leap than the other one especially in the corporate world.

Then I stumbled upon this April 06 headline in Economist which read “Forget China, India and the internet: Economic growth is driven by women”.

This takes me back to my memories right from my MBA classes where I was one amongst the 4 men in a class of 15 or so. The rest were all women who wanted to mark their career in HR. But why did they choose HR? . There were very few women in the marketing class, even fewer in finance and probably none at operations?. After I stepped on into the corporate world I saw this distinction even more clearly. Women love to take up HR but why? The initial reasoning for me was purely driven by my knowledge about the Indian Market and the culture. India like most of the Asian countries are very relationship oriented and the gatekeepers of it are none other than women. Traditionally jobs associated with high task are marketing, finance, operations, and, HR has always been associated relationships. So they ended up taking HR.

Now, how does that fair in today’s context?. Most of the economies in the world have moved from Agriculture to manufacturing to service industry. This has been the evolutionary trend except for few countries like India which moved sort of reverse. This in my opinion would lead to stage where the more “relationship oriented” women would end up gaining up more and more jobs in the corporate world and make their success a mark than any of the men would have done. Now look at some statistics (updated in 2006) in terms of men vs women in the different sectors. It clearly shows the obvious.









For example it is well known factor that the economy in China is driven by women and according to statistics given out by the Chinese govt, by 2004, china had 44.8% of its workforce populated by women. This is higher in areas like manufacturing (which is different from countries like US) where it goes up to almost 65%. This is also a key learning for India which unfortunately still has not tapped into the full potential of women it has. This is one amongst the many reasons why India has not grown at the same pace like that of China


If the question comes to leadership and If leadership is, as we say, about results, then consider this: well-regarded research by Catalyst Group has proven that corporations in which women hold at least 25 percent of the top leadership spots deliver 35% higher ROI and 34% higher Total Return to Shareholders. Research at London Business School proves that innovation on teams soars when the teams are 50/50 male and female – a perfect balance of male and female energy. Women entrepreneurs lead in new business starts, at least in the US, and women micro-entrepreneurs in developing countries are famously successful (as well as extraordinarily diligent in repaying their loans – something to consider given recent events in the financial markets). Despite this and other evidence of their value, women still hold but a tiny percentage of senior executive jobs in our largest and most powerful companies( highlights from the blog in fast company on Leadership Code Meets Gender Science,by Kate Sweetman ). This is a question that we need to ask us then. What makes women more successful in today’s world. What gives them that “relationship factor” that may help up them do better than males in today’s socially connected organization. Let us look at what makes them scientifically (key points from the book “Leadership and Sexes” by Michael Aurian and Barbara Annis).

• Men have more gray matter; women have more white matter. Gray matter localizes brain activity into a single active brain center. White matter connects brain centers in the neural network. As Gurian describes it, the gray/white matter difference goes a long way toward explaining why men tend to task-focus on one element or pattern without distraction better than women may – but also explains why women are often better at making important connections, and therefore integrating widely disparate elements in ways that men don’t. Interestingly, a woman typically has 15 to 20% more blood flow in her brain than a man does at any given moment in time. Does this further enable simultaneous use of different parts of her brain in ways that he cannot? Researchers believe that this is likely
• •The hippocampus is a major memory center in the brain. The male hippocampus is generally less active than the female’s during emotional experiences in the workplace. The male hippocampus is also less active during “relational” experiences. The female hippocampus is also much more connected to the word centers of the brain. This may explain why I remember this Classic Greek Explosives incident with such force so many years after it happened – and still feel a need to write The Untold Story about it.
• The female occipital and parietal lobes are more active than the male’s. This difference can affect, among other things, the negotiation of deals and daily conflict and communication situations, as they explain in great detail and at great length in the book.
• The male temporal lobe is generally less active than that of the female, which means women have a greater comparative ability to hear words and transfer what they hear, read and see into written words. The conclusion: that men and women often use words for different purposes.

These brain science data proves that women are more relationship oriented and hence would be able to communicate well and increase their sphere of influence through relationship management. If organization do understand this better , that will help them maximize their ROI with more and more women executives in the organization. But why do we still see the numbers so low at the executive level?. Because orgamisations still tend to focus on hard task oriented approach even in today’s socially connected world and they struggle to keep pace with change. Some organizations have already started thinking differently, for eg the way John chambers is trying to change the way cisco operates. Now that has no direct correlation to bringing in more and more women at top, but it definitely need to have women to sustain these sort of change. If this has to happen then they need to groom more women executives which probably is the biggest challenge that organization would be facing.