Segregated training for women managers?

Concern has been growing in recent years that it is a bad idea to put people into specialized tracks, not available to others for reasons other than merit, in order to afford them advantages for advancement that are not based strictly on individual ability. Affirmative action-style programs based on race, for example, have a controversial history, particularly in the US. Intended to right historical wrongs and to balance the disadvantages certain classes of people unfairly labor under, they sometimes backfire, creating resentment – and even increased animosity – as well as pernicious doubt about the actual individual abilities of people who have passed through these programs.

As a result, there is some skepticism about an interesting phenomenon, reported in today’s Wall Street Journal, wherin gender-specific management training programs are being provided for women. Companies are conscious of the disparity between the male/female ratio in the working population – and even in the ranks of management – and the ratio of males to females among senior officers in the country’s corporations.

Nevertheless, this is one that is worth looking at more closely. Women as a class (just as those subject to the previous affirmative-action programs) do face issues in the workplace that their male counterparts not only don’t face, but don’t even perceive as vital issues. Men don’t routinely worry about how to incorporate child-rearing – or even elder-care – into their careers. And they certainly don’t have to deal with the glass ceiling that women bump into. These female-only programs may provide an interesting and beneficial venue for discussing and sharing ideas about coping with gender-specific issues such as these.

But that’s not all. One of the components of the formidable glass ceiling is said to be the “old boys network” that men form across a range of shared experiences, many of which are unavailable to or difficult to access for women. These include training and work experiences in university and during work life, as well as social and sporting events that can be unwelcoming to women. Female-only management training programs may help set into motion the development of a wide range of shared educational and social activities for women that play a similar role. A professional network of shared experiences across a range of activities among women with similar aims and interests can be a valuable asset. It can help them leverage the totality of their knowledge, skills, and even seniority, bringing them to bear with great force on individual instances of benefit. These instances could be general work-related issues, just as for men, or relate to career-influencing issues that still tend to be gender-specific in our society, such as child-rearing. A potentially great asset for female managers, greatly aiding American corporate and organizational life, as well.

But, actually, my favorite part of this is the potential for female managers in these programs to explore what they can bring, as managers, to organizational life. Doing this in the absence of male thinking on the subject may help develop the female thinking in the area beyond the simplistic nature of the dialogue the topic has been riddled with so far, restricted, as it has largely been, to belittling nonsense about “nurturing,” and the like. Women have much more aggressively focused approaches to management than is appreciated, or than have even been discovered. Let them develop these unmolested by the momentum of male-dominated instruction – or even the blustering of male students – in an academic setting, then return to the work world emboldened with theory that has been tested against their peers, and is ready to be tested in practice.

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Technorati Tags: Affirmative action, management training, glass ceiling, old boys network, Women in Management