Barbara Gentry, director in the office of women business owners at the Michigan Department of Commerce, tells of a woman who was named Michigan's Small Businessperson of the Year. When the honoree accepted her plaque last spring, on the floor of the state legislature, the presenter -- a representative of her local Chamber of Commerce -- had to admit that he had never heard of her company. It was hard to say which of the two was more embarrassed.
Women don't seem to be comfortable schmoozing with men in the formal and informal settings that first offer the exposure that leads to contacts and sales. Check the Chamber of Commerce, the National Federation of Independent Businesses, the Young Presidents' Organizations -- the percentage of women members is disproportionately low. The Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE) even had trouble attracting women to its training programs until it offered women-only sessions. "They were too bashful to ask questions," explains Alice Brown, who now directs the women's program out of St. Louis. Women who "network" with women may gain moral support, but even the women who lead such organizations agree that you've got to wade into the business mainstream to find credibility and visibility.
There are many businesses, of course, that have done well without remarkable sales or innovation, but on sheer gambler's guts. Fortunes and reputations have been made solely on a chief executive officer's ability to wheel and deal, to trade up assets, and cash in on the occasional highly leveraged investment. Most of the men who wheel and deal do so with other people's money. But women don't have such ready access to capital, and the service businesses to which they gravitate don't easily generate it. As author Taylor puts it, "You don't wheel and deal on retained earnings."
Still, even if they were to find the money in the street, studies show that most women would be reluctant to bet with it. Thinking big just wasn't in their upbringing. "Mom taught us to manage our money, not invest it," says Barbara Gentry. Adds Joan Sweeney, program director at The Stone Center for Developmental Services and Studies at Wellesley College: women either ignore risky business propositions, or "convince themselves that all the games are somewhere far in the future."
By all accounts, women seem to view risk from many different perspectives at once. Selling out, buying in, merging -- these strategic decisions are not merely win-lose, dollars-and-cents calculations. Research by Taylor and others shows that women think a lot harder about the stress such changes might put on their relationships with employees and family. They also worry more about their ability to manage the big deals.
By contrast, men seem to thrive on the sheer sport of wheeling and dealing. And to a large extent, that's the way business is covered in the business press: in terms of leagues and team standings, world records and lifetime averages, front-office trades and locker-room banter. Women, to the degree they're considered at all, are thought of as strictly farm-league players.
Overheard at a cocktail party:
Man: "And what do you do? Do you work?"
Woman: "I have my own investment company."
Man: "Oh, that's nice. My wife's in business, too."
Harry Levinson is the sort of psychologist that leaves many women grinding their teeth. Levinson, who has made a specialty of the psychological aspects of leadership, cheerfully acknowledges that there have been women in business "for as long as they've carried baskets on their heads." But, he says, their "Oedipal conflicts" come too late in childhood for them to be anything but unlikely or unwilling entrepreneurs. Women lack the "irrational intensity that drives men to see rivals on every business horizon, and to build compensatory organizations that will prove their worth to their fathers." Some women may approximate the drive, he figures, but women as a group will never match it.
Without buying into all of Levinson's Freudian analysis, I think the man has a point. There will always be some women who thrive in the male business world by doing things almost as irrationally and intensely as men. And, in time, as leftover layers of discrimination fall away, as childrearing becomes more enlightened and less exclusively the work of women, as larger numbers of the new companies started by women finally mature and make their mark -- after all of that, the glaring distinctions between the sexes will begin to disappear in business. Still, in the end, many of the subtle but telling differences between business men and business women will persist. And women will discover that they have created not only their own livelihoods and their own companies, but a business culture that is distinctly their own as well.
For the male business world -- its companies, its institutions, its newspapers and magazines -- that poses an interesting challenge. Because even if women-owned companies aren't making the business beauty-contest lists, even if they aren't setting the world on fire by more traditional standards, they are nonetheless an increasingly important part of the economy. These are companies that hire people, buy products, contract for services, and rent space. And their female owners drive cars, take vacations, invest their profits, and, yes, read magazines. If only to ensure their own market share and continued profitability, male-oriented businesses will have to adapt themselves to this "female" economy, and to the different ways that women manage their companies.
That's the challenge. And if it's met successfully, there should be an added premium. For in the process of learning to service this new business culture, businessmen might pick up a thing or two about putting their businesses in some broader perspective. It's a rare male CEO who isn't driven, deep down, by the fantasy of making his company the next IBM of his industry, of topping $100 million in revenues in the next five years, and reaching the Fortune 500 by the end of the next decade. But ask him why, ask him what he would get out of it personally, and most likely his best response is a shrug. It is in answering such questions that women have so much to bring to the business discussion -- and to INC. magazine, as well.
Keep those cards and letters coming.
