Interesting and perhaps slightly controversial view on which gender makes the best leader. Admittedly one should take all studies with a pinch of salt.

As John Gray advocated in his 1992 bestseller Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, there are fundamental differences between the genders. According to a new study, these differences are evident when it comes to leadership behaviour.

• Planning and managing activities – organising, prioritising and planning, in order to meet deadlines and deliver on promises.
• Respect and empathy for others – caring for others, effective listening and noticing how others are feeling.
• Taking personal responsibility – being open and honest, owning the consequences of your decisions and admitting mistakes.

• Strategic vision – seeing the ‘big picture’ and the long-term impact of decisions, creating a strategic plan and considering the financial implications. 
• Commercial focus – being ‘hard-nosed’, driving improved business results, striving to manage key financial metrics. 
• Personal impact – making a strong first impression, expressing views with confidence and being visible across the organisation.

I have written extensively on the double role of the mother/worker and the way in which women are perceived to be the all encompassing figure but as the world changes and women increasingly are taking on greater obligations in the workload- how does this affect our menfolk? For many years, his nibs and I seriously considered him being a house husband whilst I retained a role in the City. Financially and practically, it would have made sense but people around us chided us for this and especially those of the older generation thought it an oddity. However I increasingly see a greater number of men providing childcare whilst their wives/partners are the breadwinners. So is there a daddy shift? The article below by Jeremy Adam Smith provides an insightful and slightly provocative read.

 

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By the time my mother and father met in 1963, the same year that Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, more and more people were starting to question this division of labor between men and women. The following year, the Unites States Congress formally abolished sex discrimination at work. I was born in 1970. “I wanted to be closer to you than my father was to me,” my dad told me when I interviewed him for my book, The Daddy Shift. “I wanted to participate more in my kids’ lives.” Even so, my parents never questioned for a moment that he would make most of the money and she would change most of the diapers.

By 1988—the year I graduated from high school—only 29 percent of children lived in two-parent families with a full-time homemaking mother. And like many Baby Boomer couples, my parents split in 1991—the same year I met the woman who is today my wife. By the time we became parents in 2004, my wife and I were stepping into a family landscape that was totally different from the one my grandparents faced in 1946.

For one thing, we never assumed that one of us was the natural breadwinner and the other a natural caregiver—instead, we saw those as roles that we would share and negotiate over time. For a year, I took care of my son while my wife went to work, and as we visited playgrounds, I met many other dads who took care of their kids while their female partners were at work.

This personal reality reflects one that has been empirically measured. For almost every decade for the past 100 years, more and more women in the United States have gone to college and work. Over the past three years, men have been much more likely to lose their jobs than women, who are concentrated in fast-growing, high-skill industries like health care and education. Between 2009 and 2010, men with college degrees saw their median weekly earnings drop 3 percent while the income of women with degrees grew by 4.3 percent. Today, young women’s pay exceeds that of their male peers in most metropolitan areas. Not coincidentally, fathers now spend more time with their children and on housework than at any time since researchers started collecting comparable data. I call it “the daddy shift” — the gradual movement away from a definition of fatherhood as pure breadwinning to one that encompasses a capacity of caregiving.

The right-wing “family values” movement has painted these trends as a crisis, but no one I know experiences them that way. Instead, we seem to share a positive (if often unarticulated) vision of the family as diverse, egalitarian, voluntary, interdependent, flexible, and improvisational. Many people hold these ideals without necessarily being conscious of their political and economic implications—and they’re not making politically motivated choices. In researching The Daddy Shift, for example, I didn’t interview any breadwinning moms and caregiving dads who adopted their reverse-traditional arrangement for feminist reasons. They almost always framed their work and care decisions as a practical matter, a response to brutally competitive labor and childcare markets.

Indeed, I don’t believe that a political force like feminism has driven men and women to share roles more equally; it seems more accurate to say that feminism has tried to teach people to personally adapt to broad, deep economic and technological changes that made equality more possible and desirable—and the movement has fought for public policies that would support our new roles at home and at work. Rising inequality and economic instability has meant that many families can’t afford specialists anymore, with one focused on career and the other exclusively on taking care of the family. And so couples are moving from a family model that prioritizes efficiency to one that tries to build resilience in the face of economic shocks. In the ideal resilient family, both women and men are capable of working for pay and working at home.

But families often fall short of this ideal, partially because of lingering structural and interpersonal sexism, and partially because men lack support for their new caregiving roles at both home and work. Studies consistently show that 80 percent to 90 percent of mothers still expect fathers to serve as primary breadwinners (and very few will consider supporting a stay-at-home dad). At work, only 7 percent of American men have access to paid parental leave, among other structural limitations.

How can the daddy shift continue? The to-do list is long. It includes an education campaign to help men of all social classes understand what workplace and public policies can help them be the fathers they want to be — and legal campaigns that will defend their jobs against backward attitudes at work. Men whose mindsets are still shaped by the sole-breadwinner ideal need explicit permission and encouragement from both their female partners and their bosses to take advantage of leave policies and participate in family life.

We also need to shift the language we use to discuss work-family issues in a more inclusive direction, so that it includes fathers as well as mothers. That language should stress resilience and meaning to men instead of the language of equality that has mobilized women. In the end, it’s up to guys to tell the stories of our lives and speak up for what we want. No one will do it for us.

Jeremy Adam Smith is Web Editor of the University of California, Berkeley, Greater Good Science Center. He is also the author or coeditor of four books, including The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting are Transforming the American Family and Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood. In 2010-11, Smith was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. This essay was adapted from pieces originally written for the New York Times and Yes! The Magazine for Positive Futures.

Yes I have been juggling  – again…. with the long weekend in the UK, half term vacation and work and my usual social outings, I have been left a little weary.   So as I throw my hundred balls in the air, I look to Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s article below and realise again that I cannot be Wonder Woman and something has to give… hmmm less sleep perhaps?

 

The political debates of the last few months in the U.S. have revealed just how much we undervalue women in this country, and subsequently the work of women both inside and outside of the home. Not only are we underpaying and under-supporting women everywhere, we are especially failing our mothers in the workforce.

The feminists before me fought for my right to vote, to work and to have more choices than they had. Yet we are all still strapped with an extremely heavy and unfair burden. Because despite all of the progress we have made, women are still expected to be the primary caretakers of the young and old, while continuing to manage the home and their careers. And you don’t want to get me started on the expectations for how women are supposed to look! It’s unhealthy to idolize the “Wonder Woman” phenomena – the mythic woman who can do it all to perfection. She does not exist and never will. And, it’s extremely dangerous that we think we can be her.

Moreover, it’s hypocritical that we tell our daughters that they can be whatever they want to be when they grow up, knowing that being a mother and having a full fledged career is not a real option for most women.

It’s clear we are still amidst a “stalled gender revolution” in this country.

The lack of proper respect and assistance for working mothers is a major factor in the lack of equality for women across the board. The pay gap still exists, with white women earning 77 cents on the man’s dollar, African American women earning 63 cents and Latina women earning just 57 cents. Furthermore, even though studies have shown that working mothers pose fewer burdens for employers than their co-workers, the stereotype persists, and women with children make 7% to 14% less than their childless female peers. It’s ironic when one considers that if we paid stay at home moms, they’d make over $117,000 a year.

On top of the pay gap, we have no national family leave, flex-time, or child care policies. The United States is the only industrialized country in the world without paid family leave, putting us decades behind the rest of the world. While it’s true that some women are helped by corporate maternity leave policies, spouse’s income, and personal savings, the majority of working mothers suffer. Single mothers—especially those in low-income communitieswho don’t work at women-friendly companies and who struggle to pay the bills—often end up losing their jobs or quitting because of the lack of assistance during the first few years of their children’s lives. It’s not physically, emotionally, or intellectually possible to do it all. Trust me—I am trying, and often feel like I am failing across the board. And I have help!

As a result, most mothers must still choose between career and family, leaving us with fewer women leaders shaping our world outside of the home. Consequently, our entire society is deprived of what could be the most innovative, creative, strategic, and moving ideas of our time. We are missing the voice of motherhood at the tables of leadership because we continue to limit the choices of working women.

So we must do more for women in our culture—at work and at home.

Certainly times are changing, but they are not changing fast enough. Yes, there are some incredible father figures in our society who push the envelope of what is possible for fatherhood as they take on a larger role in parenting and the home.

But at the end of the day, the majority of women aren’t married to men who share equally in parenting and household management. The majority of heterosexual women are married to men whose careers are deemed more important and more valuable than their own—even if the woman makes more money.

Fathers out there, remember that your hopes and aspirations for your daughters are connected to whether or not you are demonstrating to them a man’s ability to play an equal role in parenting and household management. She is learning her role and a man’s role in society by watching you. And mothers, if you have daughters who are juggling family and work, please be careful every time you hold them to unreal expectations of household, maternal and even personal perfection. The worst thing we can do as a society is judge each other as women. What we must do for our collective future is support each other in our life’s decisions and champion each other’s successes.

Overall, we are not only harming ourselves but the collective female population by staying small, not believing in ourselves, and not demanding the support we want and need to succeed. If we are going to change the landscape for women and girls during our lifetimes, we all need to take action now – because each and everyone of us has a sister, a colleague, a neighbor, or a daughter who needs us to fight for her equality in the workplace as well as at home.

So join us in challenging the status quo when it comes to women and girls. It is up to us as individuals, families, communities, businesses, and government entities to act now and champion a society and culture that encourages and enables all women and girls to fulfill their potential. Organizations like IMOW and MissRepresentation.org, which I founded after making Miss Representation, are great places to begin. Together we will succeed.

Jennifer Siebel Newsom is a filmmaker, speaker, actress, and advocate for women, girls, and their families. Newsom wrote, directed, and produced the 2011 Sundance documentary Miss Representation, which explores how the media’s misrepresentations of women contribute to the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence. Newsom launched MissRepresentation.org, a call-to-action campaign that gives women and girls the tools to realize their full potential. Newsom is an Executive Producer of the 2012 Sundance Award-winning documentary The Invisible War and is currently in pre-production on her next film. Newsom is also the founder and CEO of Girls Club Entertainment, LLC, which develops and produces independent films that empower women.