How women are ahead in recession jobs race

Philip Delves Broughton
03.08.09

During previous recessions, the classic evacuation policy applied to job losses: women and children first, men last. The most disposable employees were seen as those with the least important jobs, which tended to be the young and the female.

In the past year, however, 80 per cent of the jobs lost in the United States have belonged to men, despite the fact that women now make up 50 per cent of the workforce. In the UK, the pattern is similar. The number of unemployed men has increased by 45 per cent in recent months, the number of women unemployed by a quarter.

Women, for all kinds of reasons, are turning out to be the more recession-proof sex.

Partly it is because the heaviest job losses have been in industries where men predominate: construction, manufacturing and finance. Women are more strongly represented in the public sector and in more flexible, part-time work which can be adapted to the economic times.

But there is evidence of a more remarkable story surfacing in the recession: the convergence of economic and social trends redefining the role of women in business.

“Everyone's looking for value these days,” says Catherine Kaputa, a former Wall Street banker and author of the book The Female Brand: Using the Female Mindset to Succeed in Business. Suddenly, the fact that women have been shamefully underpaid over the years compared to men is proving to be an advantage. When the cost-cutters go over the compensation figures, women look like a bargain.

According to Kaputa, who interviewed 150 senior women managers for her book, women have been having an incremental influence on business leadership for years, chipping away at traditional hierarchies, to foster a more collaborative environment.

“Women are more interested in building consensus and harmony,” she says. “In global companies, where people are often working in ad hoc teams around the world to solve a problem, those skills are incredibly valuable.” Women also tend to have less regard for organisational structure, picking up ideas wherever they find them, another major asset in turbulent times.

When it comes to the now highly valued sphere of emotional intelligence, she says, women have all kinds of natural advantages. During President Obama's recent search for the next Supreme Court Justice, he stressed the need for a judge who possessed both a fine legal mind and a deep understanding of people. He wanted a judge who understood how people felt and could in turn make them feel understood. All of his leading candidates were women.

When he eventually picked Sonia Sotomayor, he emphasised how she rose from poverty in the Bronx, went through the best universities, to reach the heights of the legal profession. But above all, she could empathise.

Women also tend to be more sophisticated communicators than men, claims Kaputa, a pattern which begins in early childhood as girls talk and read at a younger age. And, like good team management, good communication is a coveted skill for modern managers.

Claims that women are better empathisers and communicators are often attacked as unfounded stereotypes. Kaputa, however, cites evidence from recent studies of brain scans of boys and girls that suggest girls are hardwired to care about one-on-one relationships, while boys are more interested in competition and group dynamics.

When a woman has to fire someone, Kaputa found, she tends to do it in a more caring way than a man, being more interested in the effect on the individual rather than the group. Consequently, people prefer to be fired by women.

And whereas men tend to have lots of shallow professional relationships, women will have fewer, deeper ones. When the knife is being wielded, depth rather than breadth is what counts.

This reversal of fortune has been a long time coming — from a world in which men assumed women simply weren't as good as them at business, to one in which women claimed equality, and dressed like men to prove it. For a while, female management skills were insidiously described with words like “nurturing” and “intuitive”, which meant too soft-hearted or muddle-headed for the top jobs.

Now the assumption is that there is no difference in ability between the sexes, only differences in mindset, motivation and preferences. A healthy business finds ways to encourage men and women to learn from each other. Men tend to be much better at self-promotion, say, while women are inclined to downplay their achievements.

When she worked on Wall Street, Kaputa noticed that men would make sure to brag about their achievements around bonus time while women would quietly wait for their work to be recognised. Inevitably, the men received larger bonuses. This is something a woman could easily fix.

On the other hand, what were seen as minefields for women, such as how to dress for work, have become advantages when the economy turns sour. It is a question of creating a “visual identity”, says Kaputa. Whereas men tend to wear a uniform whatever the dress code, women draw on a broader set of tools to establish a clear identity within an organisation.

When companies cut jobs, the first targets are those whose role is unclear. A strong visual identity conveys that you stand for something non-replicable. The splashy dresser stays. It's all the indistinguishable guys in suits and ties, or chinos and blue shirts, who have to go.