Leadership coaches Megan Evans and Lindsay Wittenberg, with neuroscientist Dr Geoff Bird, examine the neuroscience of gender in the latest in a series of workshops
Diversity challenges in our society and organisations, and the lack of equal opportunity, exist not because male and female brains are as different as we tend to think, but because of socialisation, suggested practising neuroscientist and coach Dr Geoff Bird.
Among some of the confronting myth-busting concepts presented by Bird at a recent workshop was the concept that the relationship between societal factors (including cultural factors) and gender differences – nurture rather than nature – and the effect of learned associations, account for many of the apparent gender-related issues that arise at work. Our society shapes much of our behaviour from very early on – pregnant women talk more to female foetuses than to male foetuses – and talking to the foetus affects its cognitive development, he said.
Dr Bird, who works at the cutting edge of academic research, besides having an understanding of organisational issues and coaching, offered a rigorous scientific approach, challenging some established beliefs and assumptions many of us take to our coaching encounters, as well as affirming why some things we know work actually do work. He was speaking at a workshop on Neuroscience, Gender and Performance, part of a series organised and facilitated by leadership coaches Megan Evans and Lindsay Wittenberg (this author).
The workshops’ topics connect neuroscience with areas of practical interest to those in coaching, L&D and the professions more broadly, blending a didactic and reflective approach, respecting the neuroscientific principles that underpin effective learning.
The coach needs to be acutely aware of the role and effects of socialisation: this awareness can create a level of perceptiveness which enables both coach and coaching client to surface and contest assumptions, to be aware of confirmation bias, and even to unlearn and relearn long-established messages.
The very words we use inform this: while ‘sex’ is what relates to biological function, ‘gender’ relates to a sociocultural phenomenon. Strictly speaking, we should be talking in terms of ‘sex’ in the context of science.
Here Bird challenged another widely held belief : if it’s true that the two sides of the brain are better connected in females than males (as yet, neither proven nor disproven by science), it’s actually of no consequence, because there is no inherent gender difference (in neurological terms) linked to any left-right brain dichotomy.
In this context, differences between the genders are rather about the nature of connectivity within the modules of males’ and females’ brains. So right from the beginning of a coaching encounter, the coach would do well to pause and become aware of assumptions they may be making about behaviour and capabilities by reference to gender alone.
Capabilities are, of course, related to IQ. Here again Bird challenged established ideas: there is no overall gender difference based on adult IQ, even though there may be marginally more males than females at the upper and lower ends of the IQ range (ie, more males than females with very high and very low IQ scores).
However, there are differences in specific aspects of IQ: females score higher on linguistic ability (they speak more fluently than males and are better at understanding speech); short-term memory and processing speed, although males score higher on maths and spatial ability due to higher levels of testosterone (a clearly biological basis) and mechanical reasoning.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are distinct gender differences in the arena of emotional intelligence (EI). Females seem to have higher EI than males. However, it was surprising to learn that the traditional male advantage in abstract reasoning has, since 1947, gradually converted itself into a neutral advantage and even a female advantage (depending on which test results you’re looking at). The reasons for this may be social and economic: in many countries boys and girls now have the same education, women have more access to higher education than before and more women now work. Women perform consistently more strongly than men
in exams.
If there are relatively few biologically based gender-differentiated capabilities, perhaps a different perspective needs to be taken to the recognition and nurturing of strengths.
A well-known experiment at Stanford University in the US has shown that stereotype threat in relation to capability can convert into concrete outcomes: having women indicate their gender before taking a calculus exam triggered stereotype threat and significantly suppressed their scores. Fascinatingly, the scores went up when the women indicated their gender after the exam.
Armed with this awareness, the coach can play an important role in challenging their client’s assumptions and exploring with them the context in which those assumptions may have arisen and also the scope to reframe.
For coaches who work with clients on unconscious bias, Bird revealed that not all psychologists believe that we can hold biases unconsciously, and warned that well-known implicit bias tests can be poorly constructed, to the extent that responses can be faked and their results unreliable. Buyer beware!
By way of solutions, academic research gives us no data to indicate that, in seeking to reduce unjustified gender differentiation, gender quotas work for any more than two days. Even more confronting, diversity policy and diversity training often have a zero effect on diversity. Nevertheless, having a diversity department is more likely to increase diversity, while making it the manager’s responsibility decreases diversity. Furthermore, ‘objective’ performance reviews tend to be of little help, although diversity taskforces do help. Such data can be valuable in guiding the coach in their work with leaders and managers who have responsibility for creating robust, sustainable and meaningful outcomes from diversity initiatives.
The scientific data is also directly relevant for coaches and trainers working with teams and groups, including boards. The benefits of, and statistics relating to, diversity have been set out in numbers of studies which demonstrate overall a positive relationship between businesses’ profitability and the percentage of female executives, eg, ‘The CS Gender 3000: Women in Senior Management’ (2015) http://bit.ly/2e9h47a
And what explains effective team performance? There’s plenty of scope for the coach’s contribution in this area: the highest-performing groups are characterised not by IQ, but rather by good communication (both listening and conveying information); each member’s ability to work and interact with other people; members contributing equally to discussions – and a high proportion of women, suggested Bird.
- The workshop will be repeated in London on 24 Nov 2016. For details, contact: lw@lindsaywittenberg.co.uk