Figure 7.2: Gender of commenter names: international and metropolitan news services (top 100 commenters) — Figure 7.2 Gender of commenter names: international and metropolitan news services (top 100 commenters)

The findings echo work done by Emma Pierson³⁰ for online statistical analysis site 23andMe.com. Pierson reviewed one million comments left on the New York Post in 2014 and concluded that men left 75 per cent of the comments, despite only accounting for 56 per cent of the readership. Dr Martin speculated that the discrepancy could be explained by the higher rate of unpaid work that women do. ‘They simply don’t have as much time to spend commenting on news websites’, she said. Interestingly, she suggests that online commentary is a microcosm of the everyday difficulties women face in getting their voices heard. ‘It appears our experience of online conversations is reflecting our gendered experiences of the world at large’, she said. ‘Just like in face-to-face public conversations, like meetings or forums, women are being put off by male voices being adversarial, dismissive and sometimes abusive.’

Why does this matter to leaders? Because leaders need to communicate not just in synch with their teams, but with their demographics and the channels they use. If women communicate more frequently and in a less opinionated style, then men need to bear this in mind. Hearing from a leader once a year on a channel that your team doesn’t use is ineffective communication.

In the United States, gender, income and education have little impact on whether or not someone uses social media. These factors, however, have a big impact on which social networks people opt to use. Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram have a strong skew towards female users. Women in the United States are more likely to use Facebook than men by about 11 percentage points, Pinterest by 29 percentage points, and Instagram by 7 percentage points, according to Pew Research Center. Twitter and LinkedIn continue to attract a mostly male audience.

In an in-depth report from BI Intelligence,³¹ data from many sources were used to understand how social media demographics and preferences are still shifting. For instance, Pinterest has a large reach among women. Among US female internet users, 42 per cent reported being on Pinterest, compared to only 13 per cent of men. Instagram has become the most important and most-used social network for US teens. Thirty-two per cent of US teenagers cited it as their most important social network. LinkedIn enjoys high adoption among highly educated and high-income users. Linked In is used by 44 per cent of Americans with income of $75,000 or more. Messaging apps like Snapchat, for example, also have become more broadly popular, but skew towards the young.³²

Overconfidence as a cause of our problems

There is something else here impinging on the gender debate. Is being overconfident part of the answer or part of the problem? Overconfident people frequently move too fast. It’s worth considering here what the opposite to doubt is. In light of too much analysis, it can be reassuring to find leaders that cut through the detail confidently.

One of the factors we’ve witnessed in so many corporate collapses and political miscalculations, such as Brexit, has been overconfidence while at the same time being under-skilled or incompetent.

In an interview in 2014 for The Harvard Business Review, Professor Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, from University College London, talked about how confidence can mask incompetence. He said that ‘confident people tend to be more charismatic, extroverted, and socially skilled, which in most cultures are highly desirable features … in virtually every culture, confidence is equated with competence’. So, we automatically assume that confident people are also more skilled or talented. He points out that: ‘Competent people are generally confident, but confident people are not generally competent.’ He says they’re good at hiding incompetence and insecurities ‘mostly because they are self-deceived themselves, so they generally think that they are much better than they actually are’.

He points out that the problem with overconfidence begins with recruitment and the interview process. Assessing candidate competence is a key objective of the process, but confidence is so often the method or a path that most people take to assess it. That route leads to inaccurate evaluations of people’s competence. So, for example, most people who interview really well and are assumed to be great are, in reality, just charming the interviewers during that session. He says that people need to understand that the main goal of interviewing is to discover how competent others are. Interviewers shouldn’t really care about the confidence of candidates. What matters is their competence.

Premuzic adds that the problem with confidence is that it’s often viewed more favourably when it’s high, regardless of whether it’s accurate, despite the well-documented effects that overconfidence has. This distorts the perception of danger. So, for instance, drinking, gambling, smoking, driving accidents, reckless risk-taking are often caused by having too much confidence.

Humility is perhaps a better indicator of competence because it operates as a reality check and it helps maintain awareness of weaknesses. This drives self-improvement as well. All of the evidence from psychological research suggests that humility makes leaders more likeable, even in the United States. The conclusion is that when people perceive leadership as more competent than it thinks it is, the more it likes it.

Could it be the faster we move, the more superficial our perception becomes?

The overload extracts a high price in terms of ability to concentrate on anything other than the first impression.

How many of us have ever really scrutinized the credentials of our dentist? Or do we just take a white coat, a dentist’s chair and a simple recommendation as being proof enough? Imagine a world where doctors, teachers, engineers or pilots are selected on the basis of their confidence, as opposed to their actual ability? Some would say this already happens in the world of politics and we can see the results. Until we stop appointing leaders on the basis of their confidence rather than competence, we will keep having problems.

Premuzic believes this will also keep making it hard for women, who are usually both humbler and more competent than men in these domains. As far as the gender debate is concerned, he says the problem is not that women lack confidence. It’s rather that men have too much of it.

He also says the criteria we use to evaluate the men are different from those we use to evaluate women. He points out that when men come across as confident or even arrogant, we assume that they are good at what they do and we call them charismatic. When women behave in the same way, ‘we tend to see them as psychopathic or a threat to society or an organization. So,society punishes manifestations of confidence in women, and rewards them in men – which only reinforces this natural difference between the genders.’

In another of his articles in The Harvard Business Review, entitled ‘Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?’, he pointed out three popular explanations for the clear under-representation of women in management, namely: (1) they are not capable; (2) they are not interested; (3) they are both interested and capable but unable to break the glass ceiling. Conservatives and chauvinists endorse the first; liberals and feminists the third; and those somewhere in the middle are usually drawn to the second. It’s possible they all missed the big picture.

He says the main reason for the uneven management sex ratio is our inability to discern between confidence and competence. If that’s the case, then it conveniently absolves men alone as the cause. That is because we (people in general) commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence. We are fooled into believing that men are better leaders than women. In other words, when it comes to leadership, the only advantage that men have over women is confidence, often masked as charisma or charm, which is commonly mistaken for leadership potential, and that these occur more frequently in men.

This makes sense, but what if the leadership environment has become so attuned to analytical thinking that it’s become the exclusive preserve of male thinking? Could it be that men think that because they’re more short-term, data-driven, they’re much smarter than women? Arrogance and overconfidence are inversely related to leadership talent. Much of leadership ability is about building and maintaining high-performing teams where followers set aside their own personal agendas to work for the common interest of the group.

It’s difficult to get away from some unfortunate and uncomfortable truths revealed by Premuzic’s research that male thinking leads to more analytic, more short-term, tactical, arrogant, manipulative and risk-prone thinking.

An inherent bias against diversity?

The paradoxical implication is that the same psychological characteristics that enable male leaders to rise to the top of the corporate or political ladder are responsible for their downfall. In other words, what it takes to get the job done is not just different from, but also the reverse of, what it takes to do the job well. As a result, too many incompetent people are promoted to management jobs, and promoted over more competent people.

We’ll hear more about this in the next chapter, but the conclusion here is scathing about leadership in general. Too many leaders, whether in politics or business, fail. The majority of nations, companies, societies and organizations can be better managed. Good leadership has always been the exception, not the norm.

So, in summary, part of the problem is that the people we elect to solve the problems look as if they know what they are doing, but so often don’t. They are too busy, too analytical or too short-term. When did you last hear anyone of significant rank say they’re not busy? We’ve developed a dangerous assumption that important people should be busy and vice versa.

It almost seems that we equate leadership with the very psychological features that make average male thinking more inept than the average female’s. Premuzic asks whether we’ve created a system that ‘rewards men for their incompetence while punishing women for their competence’?

A war on men?

Given the level of inequality and complexity, the anger can be understood. There are no simple solutions to this. Some might say men have little incentive to even recognize the problem, let alone do anything about it. This too would be a gross generalization.Shifting prejudice to a different gender may enhance rather than eradicate it.

Organizations are just not efficient unless they are balanced. There are too many instances of board directives that have failed in the implementation phase because of ‘bureaucratic resistance’. Furthermore, if groups are going to be agile enough to alter their own geometry to fit changed circumstances, then change needs to be implemented swiftly. Inefficient organizations are less likely to be able to do this.

In any case, there’s little point making men the target when some of them recognize the problem and are actively engaged in tackling it. Demonizing all men is not only unjust, it’s also counter-productive. There needs to be conversation. There’s no doubt, though, that some men are prejudiced, involved in sexual harassment and consider all displays of feminism to be a threat.

Training for confidence

While men are sometimes overconfident and under-skilled, women have a tendency to be the opposite. How can this be countered? First, we need to recognize that confidence, low self-esteem and self-critique are linked.³³

If this effect is valid, then it’s logical to suggest that to tackle gender prejudice, one should address several variables. This would include height, loudness, assertiveness, agreeability and so on. It may well be the case that these issues are reflexive. The perceptions create an overly self-critical cycle of assessment.

Techniques for boosting confidence

When coaching professionals, it’s important to point out that no one technique is suitable for everyone. Sometimes psychological displacement works. This is where delegates are asked to visualize and then act the role of the confident leader. This covers voice, deportment, eye-contact and so on. This is then videoed and played back against control footage to assess difference.

Another technique is known as circle thinking. This is where the delegate is asked to focus relentlessly on a circle around the speaker within which no critique is allowed. The white circle represents another form of psychological displacement.

In both cases, we’re trying to deflect the self-critique. In the former case, critiquing an ‘act’ somehow makes the learning process less personal. In the latter, the displacement occupies the self-critique.

This, at least, then reduces the presence of the negative. The presence of the positive is then one of training and discipline to adopt the persona or technique until it becomes second nature.

Techniques for breaking the circle

There are many techniques that can be applied to improve meeting performance. For instance, balanced chairing is where meeting members take turns in speaking and time is allocated by the chair equally. It doesn’t just go to the loudest or most opinionated voice. Silent brainstorms are another way of balancing gender bias in meetings. This is where a problem is set and delegates spend time in silence assessing the problem and drawing their solution. They then take it in turns to discuss.

Conclusions

Despite the opinionated debate in this area, there is room for neuroscience, clinical psychology, solid scientific research and leadership experience. As the internet disintermediates everything, we must expect it to do so for gender as well. This atomization could have profound negative effects if all we do is identify difference. The inequality is there and it’s real, but it’s also complex. There is no doubt that prejudice exists and sometimes it is hiding in plain view. It can be extant in basic issues such as height and loudness of voice. We know from some of the neuroscience that testosterone disrupts group working and increases egocentricity. This appears to be a key physiological difference. This also indicates that the anecdotal evidence that men are more opinionated has some scientific validation. Some will still label male leadership as hierarchical and patriarchal. Others will recognize that it is not gender alone which is desirable in achieving a balance.

We need an inclusive approach that encompasses new types of thinking. The gender debate is only part of the issue. Discrimination is a matter of justice, but it’s a matter of efficiency, too. Modern leaders can do a great deal to redress balanced thinking through training, provided they see it as a debate about avoiding leadership failure rather than a politically correct agenda. Forcing behavioural change through coercion is only likely to create superficial inclusions that lead to long-term resentment. If we demonize and patronize, we demean our mission here. Enlightenment and education to create efficiency are better ways of improving leadership. Joining up the genders and improving our capacity to move between feminine and masculine thinking strengthen our ability to contend with the future.