Women better, but we still want the men

WHEN it comes to leadership qualities, the women have the men beat.

According to a poll by Washington-based Pew Research Center, both men and women agree that women are more honest, intelligent, compassionate, outgoing and creative.

But here's the irony - despite these views, those polled still believed that generally men make better leaders than women.

About one in five respondents (21 per cent) said men made better leaders, more than three times the number who said women were better (6 per cent).

The rest (69 per cent) believed that men and women made equally strong leaders, reported McClatchy News Service.

Men and women held those views almost equally.

'You've got a public that, on some level, has a complex mix of views on this subject: admiring of women, admiring of traits that they associate with leadership, (but) not yet admiring of women in top leadership roles,' said Mr Paul Taylor, the lead author of the report and the executive vice president at the research centre.

He added that the researchers hadn't 'cracked the code' for the contradictory findings.

The findings are based on phone interviews with 1,060 men and 1,190 women in the US from 16 Jun to 16 Jul by Princeton Research Survey International.

Those who were surveyed were asked questions regarding eight leadership traits.

Both men and women were ranked as equals on two of them: being hardworking and ambitious. Men ranked higher in decisiveness.

Women were seen as superior in honesty, intelligence, compassion, creativity and how outgoing they are.

Researchers also conducted a separate analysis to see whether respondents had skewed their answers to avoid appearing prejudiced.

They found no such hidden bias.

Ms Carol Hardy-Fanta, the director of the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, said that women yielded too much when they favoured men over women as leaders.

'If women are not distinguished from men in their view of men and women in politics, then there is no hope for change,' she told Mr McClatchy.

Acceptance still slow

She added that the preference by Americans for male leaders could help to explain why Mrs Hillary Rodham Clinton was edged out by Mr Barack Obama as the Democratic presidential nominee and why acceptance of women as leaders in politics and business has been slow.

Women make up just 2 per cent of the CEOs of the US Fortune 500 companies. In the political realm, they make up just 17 per cent of all members of the US House of Representatives; 16 per cent of all US senators; 16 per cent of all governors; and 24 per cent of all state legislators.



This article was first published in The New Paper on Sep 7, 2008.