Are women naturally better leaders?

A guest blog by Debbie Robinson

At this critical time in the veterinary sector, we all know many are seeking alternatives to the traditional command-and-control models of leadership. Neuroscience is highlighting some of the biological underpinnings of women’s natural leadership talents. Many diverse factors contribute to leadership performance in both women and men, including thinking and behaving styles, values, motivations, childhood experiences, and cultural background. However, a great deal of scientific evidence has now revealed that in some respects the sexes are not alike.

For centuries, men and women did different jobs, tasks that required different skills. As natural selection weeded out less able workers, time carved differences in the male and female brain. No two human beings are alike. Countless cultural forces influence how men and women think and act. Each one of us is an elaborate mix of both male and female traits. Yet, each sex has its own range of abilities; each is a living collection of its distinctive past.

Neuroscientific research has identified some talents that women express more regularly than men; aptitudes that stem, in part, from women’s brain architecture and brain chemicals, skills that leadership theorists now promote as essential to leadership effectiveness. These talents are not exclusive to women, of course, yet women display them more regularly than men.

Different brains

Men and women should be equal in terms of their rights to opportunities to exercise their full potential, but they are not identical in their natural abilities. Whether men and women are equal is a political and moral question, but whether they are identical is a scientific one. While there are essentially no differences in general intelligence between the sexes, a neuroscience study by the University of California found significant differences in brain areas where males and females manifest their intelligence.

The study shows women having more white matter and men more grey matter related to intellectual skill, revealing that no single neuroanatomical structure determines general intelligence and that different types of brain designs are capable of producing equivalent intellectual performance. “These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behaviour,” said Professor Richard Haier, Professor of Psychology and long-time human intelligence researcher, who led the study with colleagues at UCI and the University of New Mexico.

In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of grey matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Grey matter represents information processing centres in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of, or connections between these processing centres.

Women thinking differently

One remarkable difference is the way that men and women tend to think. Psychologists report that when women think, they gather details somewhat differently than men. Women integrate more details faster and arrange these bits of data into more complex patterns. As they make decisions, women tend to weigh more variables, consider more options, and see a wider array of possible solutions to a problem. Women tend to generalise and to take a broader, more holistic, more contextual perspective of any issue. They tend to think in webs of factors – or ‘web thinking’.

Men are more likely to focus their attention on one thing at a time. They tend to compartmentalise relevant material, discard what they regard as superfluous data, and analyse information in a more linear, causal path. This male pattern of thinking is referred to as ‘step thinking’.

We are beginning to know how these capacities for web thinking and step thinking are created. The female brain has more nerve cables connecting the two brain hemispheres; the male brain is more compartmentalised, so sections operate more independently. Moreover, testosterone tends to focus one’s attention. Women’s lower levels of this hormone may contribute to their broader, more contextual view.

Women’s tendency for web thinking probably evolved millions of years ago when ancestral females needed to do many things at once to rear their young, whereas men’s step thinking probably emerged as ancestral hunters focused on the pursuit of game. Both web thinking and step thinking are still valuable in the complex world we now live in, having a contextual view is a distinct asset.

Natural leadership qualities

Women are built to employ this perspective. In fact, in one study of Fortune 500 companies, senior executives were asked to describe women’s most outstanding business contribution. Their consensus: women’s more varied, less conventional point of view. Women’s web thinking provides them with other natural leadership qualities. According to social scientists and business analysts, women are better able to tolerate uncertainty – a trait that most likely stems from their ability to hold several things simultaneously in mind. And if we had to sum up the modern veterinary practice environment in one word, we would probably call it . . . uncertain!

Women are gifted for this uncertain business climate. Women’s web thinking also enables us to exercise more intuition, and intuition plays a productive, if often unrecognised, role in management decision making.

This mental capacity has been explained by psychologist Herbert Simon. He maintains that as people learn how to analyse the stock market, run a business, or follow a political issue, they begin to recognise the patterns involved and mentally organise these data into blocks of knowledge, a process Simon calls “chunking”. With time, more and more related patterns are chunked, and clusters of knowledge are stored in long-term memory. Then when a single detail of a complex situation appears, the experienced person can instantly recognise the larger design and predict outcomes that another must deduce with plodding sequential thought.

Long term planning

Women, on average, excel at this form of thought. Also related to web thinking is long-term planning – the ability to assess multiple, complex situations and plot a long-term course.

There is no evidence that anyone has studied gender differences in long-term planning. However, some business analysts believe that women are apt to think long term more regularly, whereas men are more likely to focus on the here and now. Women definitely use long-term strategies more regularly in their financial affairs. In fact, in a study of six thousand investors, three-quarters of the women had no short-term investment goals; the trading records of thirty-five thousand clients of a large brokerage firm showed that men traded 45 percent more often than women.

There is, most likely, a biological component to women’s long-term approach. From studying patients with brain injuries, neuroscientists now know where in the brain long-term planning takes place. Women and men display some differences in the structure of these brain regions. So, it is possible that women’s brain architecture contributes to their tendency to plan long term. Women may have evolved the inclination to think long term to plan for their children’s distant future. Today, however, this capacity predisposes women to see business issues from a longer perspective – an essential element of leadership.

The significant problems we face today in the world cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. Women bring a different way of thinking; a supportive spirit; a gift for “reading” people; patience; empathy; negotiating skills; a drive to nurture children, kin, and the local and world community; an interest in ethnic diversity and education; a keen imagination; a win-win attitude; mental flexibility; an ability to embrace ambiguity; and the predisposition to examine environmental, and political issues with a broad, contextual, long-term view.

Go Girls!

Debbie Robinson is a business mentor, coach and trainer who has guided and supported numerous businesses and their teams, helping them to develop happy, harmonious and financially sustainable businesses.

In 2015 she had the opportunity to provide coaching and training to the independent veterinary sector on behalf of Vet Dynamics, where she coached and mentored some of the UK’s now top performing independent veterinary practices.

Debbie founded VetNetics in 2022 to help veterinary practices and their teams develop leadership skills and understanding, to create happy, harmonious and empowering workplace cultures.

Reference: The Centre for Applied Neuroscience and Prism Brain Mapping

Richard J. Haier is an American psychologist who has researched a neural basis for human intelligence, psychometrics, general intelligence, and sex and intelligence. Haier is currently a Professor Emeritus in the Paediatric Neurology Division of the School of Medicine at University of California, Irvine.

Herbert Alexander Simon was an American political scientist whose work also influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary research interest was decision-making within organizations and he is best known for the theories of “bounded rationality” and “satisficing”.

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