December 17th: 40% of people think men make better business executives than women

I’ve mentioned previously that, while I don’t inherently think of myself as a feminist, the data sometimes shocks me into being one. This one, from the World Values Survey, is one of those bits of data. [My children tell me that being a feminist “is not a good look”, but I’m going to assume that readers of this blog are sufficiently enlightened to not associate that word with anything more than its basic definition, below.]

feminism
/ˈfɛmɪnɪz(ə)m/
the belief in social, economic, and political equality of the sexes

Now, I admit that I don’t actually know whether women are as good as men as business executives. I’ve come across no dispassionate, robust, empirical research on this. Obviously, it wouldn’t be easy to decide how to measure the “goodness” or otherwise of business executives. However, I think there may well be some reasons to believe that — in the current social and organisational context — it is harder for women to excel.

Of course, one of those reasons is precisely the lack of belief in women’s capabilities. These things — especially when it comes to performance and potential — can become self-fulling prophesies (even though, apparently, the famous study about teachers’ beliefs about children’s IQs changing pupils’ actual performance has been debunked). So, rightly or wrongly, the world’s attitudes remain somewhat stacked up against women in business.

Across 46 countries and 60,000 respondents, almost 40% of people “Agreed” (25%) or “Strongly agreed” (13%) that “men make better business executives than women do”. That is, to me, a shocking and a discouraging number, not least because this data is relatively fresh — from surveys conducted in the period from 2017 to 2020. Not surprisingly, men were more likely to believe in this statement. Around 44% of men “Agreed” (28%) or “Strongly agreed” (16%) with the statement. Women were not that different, though. Around 32% of women “Agreed” (21%) or “Strongly agreed” (11%).

What is slightly more encouraging (under some scenarios) is that, broadly speaking, the more educated the person answering the question, the less likely they were to agree that men were better executives than women. In the top highest-educated and highest-paid occupations (bottom 2 rows of the panels in the chart), “only” around 35% of men and 20% of women, agreed or strongly agreed that men make better business executives.

These are still big numbers, given that in an ideal world, they would be zero.