I recently read a book called Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux that I would recommend. It's (unintentionally) given me a new lens by which to look at the gender wars as they relate to the workplace.
The premies of the book is that Laloux has recapitulated several theories of societal organization into colour-coded groups. Organizations structure themselves around one of these collections of self-reinforcing traits.
They are somewhat sequential, with each new mode being a reaction and overcorrection of the negative aspects of the previous.
Red: personality-driven power struggles for dominance over subordinates. The leader is the strongest, most ruthless. Like the mafia.
Amber: A neat hierarchy of ordered job titles. like the military, or a government bureaucracy. The leader is the one with the most seniority, or some objectively-measured trait.
Orange: The organization as a machine for generating profit. The leader is the greatest personal achiever. Very capitalism, very startup.
Green: The organization is a "nice family", that seeks concensus before taking action. There is still a hierarchy, but managers are very aware of their power and use it self-consciously.
Teal: The future, autonomy- and values-based organization of the future. The author spends most of the book describing examples of this type, and how we might reach it.
So my view on where we are now, is that the venerated "man organization" could be anything between Red and Orange.
But Orange has its issues. Orange is a soul-sucking quest for riches. Alienating in its own way: you're either the burdened head of a company in stiff competition, or an exploited underling who doesn't even get to share in the massive profits. What about human values of respect, etc?
So the reactions is Green: this is where the feminization comes in.
We're not allowed to yell at people anymore. Instead of focusing on objective facts like money and power, organizations must focus on "not hurting anyone's feelings" and "not doing HR violations". We give lip service to sustainability and DEI because that's what employees say they want. We switch to a rainbow logo in the month of June. Because we want you to think we're nice. Unfortunately, even people who nominally believe in those things see that Green organizations are too caught up in consensus-building to actually accomplish anything. And you're not my real mom.
So the reactionaries see this, and think: we must go back. Either to masculine achievement Orange, or that Amber union job that let big strong men be the robots on the assembly line, or some Hobbesian Red struggle for power in the war all men long for. As you point out, the logic is internally inconsistent. These are all mutually exclusive worldviews. But we all agree that we gotta stop this lady thing.
Can these things be reconciled?
The final mode, Teal, may be the suitably androgynous solution. It's values-driven (for girls) and also based on autonomy (for boys). It takes as a given that people are competent and capable of working together. And it seems to have worked in all kinds of male- and female-coded situations. It gave me hope.
Tbh every organization on the planet has mixed traits of all, except maybe red, we do not resort to physical violence all that often, but ruthless and pretestous appeals to the local monopolist of force (aka "I'll see you in court!") can and do shape organizations.
HR and customer relationship are "green" bc in an adaptive process, that's what performed best. Sales are orange bc it's basically the only segment where one can implement Mechanism Design 101 and unsurpringly that's what companies landed on. The rest of the company is some linear combination of green and amber (yellowish?) bc someone has to be charge, but also unlike in the military, you can't jail people for disobeying, so some tact and social skills are necessary for success (my great-grandpa would have argued that nobody ever checked if the shot who killed a wildly hated officer came from the front or the back, so not even the military is pure amber, a successful officer cannot rule by rank alone).
The big missing are procedure-driven orgs, which is rather curious since they dominate the world. Sometimes procedures (eg Robert's rule, trial law, etc) become basically sacred, sometimes they are just rules of convenience, but regardless, virtually all the public sector and a very large chunk of the private one are essentially embodied protocols. It's frustrating, but again, there must be a reason why it's that way, and it does not seem likely to change any time soon.
I remember a US study , I think in the 90s, that showed relatively equal math scores for both sexes until seventh grade when boys began to do much better. That gap did not exist when the girls went to all girl schools.
The basis for the whole "gender equality paradox" is (bad) correlational data. The study is using the same methods with added confounders to dispute it.
The study in question uses cross-sectional country data because the concept it's responding to (the gender equality paradox) is observed and justified using those same correlations. This is part of the broader finding that the supposed paradox isn't causal and is just an artifact of Protestant Europe being both rich and having larger occupation gaps (presumably due to WASP cultural reasons), also cited in the section.
If you tried to do a more causal study design, you'd find that gender gaps in a given country tend to shrink as it develops.
Ah, ok. Does the study show that stereotypes themselves are the cause, or could it be that stereotypes are an indicator for some less measurable cultural stuff?
The study in question uses PISA scores to control for student math ability and finds a strong relationship between its measure of math-related gender stereotypes and the occupation gap by country, which they find are both larger in developed (Western) countries.
Note that "stereotypes" in this context is defined as the gap between girls' and boys' rankings of how much agency they have over their own math preformance and how much importance they think their parents put on their math preformance, conditional on their actual test scores.
Maia also cites this other study in the same paragraph, and I think it's the more robust and well-known take-down of how spurious the gender equality paradox is in terms of econometrics: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40472033/ This is the one that boils it all down to a statistical artifact of WEIRD cultures being both very egalitarian and having low female STEM particiaption.
I recently read a book called Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux that I would recommend. It's (unintentionally) given me a new lens by which to look at the gender wars as they relate to the workplace.
The premies of the book is that Laloux has recapitulated several theories of societal organization into colour-coded groups. Organizations structure themselves around one of these collections of self-reinforcing traits.
They are somewhat sequential, with each new mode being a reaction and overcorrection of the negative aspects of the previous.
Red: personality-driven power struggles for dominance over subordinates. The leader is the strongest, most ruthless. Like the mafia.
Amber: A neat hierarchy of ordered job titles. like the military, or a government bureaucracy. The leader is the one with the most seniority, or some objectively-measured trait.
Orange: The organization as a machine for generating profit. The leader is the greatest personal achiever. Very capitalism, very startup.
Green: The organization is a "nice family", that seeks concensus before taking action. There is still a hierarchy, but managers are very aware of their power and use it self-consciously.
Teal: The future, autonomy- and values-based organization of the future. The author spends most of the book describing examples of this type, and how we might reach it.
So my view on where we are now, is that the venerated "man organization" could be anything between Red and Orange.
But Orange has its issues. Orange is a soul-sucking quest for riches. Alienating in its own way: you're either the burdened head of a company in stiff competition, or an exploited underling who doesn't even get to share in the massive profits. What about human values of respect, etc?
So the reactions is Green: this is where the feminization comes in.
We're not allowed to yell at people anymore. Instead of focusing on objective facts like money and power, organizations must focus on "not hurting anyone's feelings" and "not doing HR violations". We give lip service to sustainability and DEI because that's what employees say they want. We switch to a rainbow logo in the month of June. Because we want you to think we're nice. Unfortunately, even people who nominally believe in those things see that Green organizations are too caught up in consensus-building to actually accomplish anything. And you're not my real mom.
So the reactionaries see this, and think: we must go back. Either to masculine achievement Orange, or that Amber union job that let big strong men be the robots on the assembly line, or some Hobbesian Red struggle for power in the war all men long for. As you point out, the logic is internally inconsistent. These are all mutually exclusive worldviews. But we all agree that we gotta stop this lady thing.
Can these things be reconciled?
The final mode, Teal, may be the suitably androgynous solution. It's values-driven (for girls) and also based on autonomy (for boys). It takes as a given that people are competent and capable of working together. And it seems to have worked in all kinds of male- and female-coded situations. It gave me hope.
Tbh every organization on the planet has mixed traits of all, except maybe red, we do not resort to physical violence all that often, but ruthless and pretestous appeals to the local monopolist of force (aka "I'll see you in court!") can and do shape organizations.
HR and customer relationship are "green" bc in an adaptive process, that's what performed best. Sales are orange bc it's basically the only segment where one can implement Mechanism Design 101 and unsurpringly that's what companies landed on. The rest of the company is some linear combination of green and amber (yellowish?) bc someone has to be charge, but also unlike in the military, you can't jail people for disobeying, so some tact and social skills are necessary for success (my great-grandpa would have argued that nobody ever checked if the shot who killed a wildly hated officer came from the front or the back, so not even the military is pure amber, a successful officer cannot rule by rank alone).
The big missing are procedure-driven orgs, which is rather curious since they dominate the world. Sometimes procedures (eg Robert's rule, trial law, etc) become basically sacred, sometimes they are just rules of convenience, but regardless, virtually all the public sector and a very large chunk of the private one are essentially embodied protocols. It's frustrating, but again, there must be a reason why it's that way, and it does not seem likely to change any time soon.
I remember a US study , I think in the 90s, that showed relatively equal math scores for both sexes until seventh grade when boys began to do much better. That gap did not exist when the girls went to all girl schools.
Why did patriarchy arise in the first place?
> but this appears to be driven by the role of gender stereotypes in career tracks
Isn't that study correlational? If so, I'm not convinced by your causal interpretation, because AFAIK stereotype accuracy is a well-replicated result.
The basis for the whole "gender equality paradox" is (bad) correlational data. The study is using the same methods with added confounders to dispute it.
Asking in good faith, is your reply supposed to contradict my objection or is it talking about the broader debate?
It depends on what your objection actually is.
The study in question uses cross-sectional country data because the concept it's responding to (the gender equality paradox) is observed and justified using those same correlations. This is part of the broader finding that the supposed paradox isn't causal and is just an artifact of Protestant Europe being both rich and having larger occupation gaps (presumably due to WASP cultural reasons), also cited in the section.
If you tried to do a more causal study design, you'd find that gender gaps in a given country tend to shrink as it develops.
Ah, ok. Does the study show that stereotypes themselves are the cause, or could it be that stereotypes are an indicator for some less measurable cultural stuff?
The study in question uses PISA scores to control for student math ability and finds a strong relationship between its measure of math-related gender stereotypes and the occupation gap by country, which they find are both larger in developed (Western) countries.
Note that "stereotypes" in this context is defined as the gap between girls' and boys' rankings of how much agency they have over their own math preformance and how much importance they think their parents put on their math preformance, conditional on their actual test scores.
Maia also cites this other study in the same paragraph, and I think it's the more robust and well-known take-down of how spurious the gender equality paradox is in terms of econometrics: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40472033/ This is the one that boils it all down to a statistical artifact of WEIRD cultures being both very egalitarian and having low female STEM particiaption.