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Executive summary: Professor Ginka Toegler of IMD stresses "the prediction that the axis of global conflict in this century will not be ideologies, geopolitics, race or ethnicity, but rather gender might be true".
"We are used to gender gaps in wages or in management positions. In some industries (...) where there is poor information about range and standards of base salary, there is a $10,000 gender gap in MBA salaries. One of the reasons is women's perception that they run a 'social risk' when negotiating for higher salaries. Women believe that asking for higher pay makes them look less agreeable and charitable, overly demanding and not particularly other-oriented, which would correspond to their gender role. Therefore, it is not surprising that participants in negotiation experiments allocated more money to men than to women assuming that women would be satisfied with less," states professor in organizational behavior and leadership at IMD, Ginka Toegel, also program director for the Strategic Leadership for Women program.
"The recession, however, has created a new gap, but this time in the opposite direction. According to the latest statistics in the US, 82 percent of the job losses have befallen men. Some sectors of the economy such as health care or education traditionally dominated by women are less sensitive to economic turmoil than typically "male" occupations such as manufacturing or construction."
The global gender conflict
Professor Toegel says that "The great he-cession"-label was invented and some have speculated it could be the silver-lining for women: "Journalist Reihan Salam went even a step further predicting that the axis of global conflict in this century will not be ideologies, geopolitics, race or ethnicity, but rather gender."
"(...) The recession will soon be over and unless women work hard to develop their leadership skills, their route up the corporate ladder will be as difficult as it used to be before the recession. Women need to respond to some specific challenges and questions. I would like to focus particularly on the topic of authenticity. Do women have an authenticity problem," asks professor Toegel.
Women should be authentic
"There is a misperception among women that they need to be like men in order to be successful. Often, they try to emulate a male model and the result would be toning down their feminine style, for example by smiling less, by suppressing an inclination to be 'warm and nice', or by dropping the pitch of their voice. Indeed, agentic male behaviors such as projecting self-confidence, ambition, power or being in control, are associated with effective leadership. But doing only what men do is not enough. When women are perceived only as agentic, they violate the gender stereotype, which prescribes communal female values such as being helpful, friendly, caring and gentle. The result is a perception of lack of authenticity. Interestingly, uppity women are subjected to more sexual harassment as a form of punishment for being 'deceitful'."
Professor Toegel concludes: "In order to be successful, women need to be perceived not only as agentic, but also as communal."
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