We wanted to bring to your attention a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, “Is Having More Than 2 Children an Unspoken Taboo?”, that further underscores the impact that female associated behavior, in this case raising families, has had on the ability of academic women to advance their careers. In relation to our leadership theme, this article raises the issues of work/life balance and double standards for various groups of employees (men/women, parents/non-parents). How does the good leader address these?

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i41/41b01601.htm

Great conversation.

I certainly have observed that, in general, women seem to have a more, what one friend called, “socially situatated cognition” than men and it is well known (really your field) that women are more sensitive to non-verbal cues. I do think this difference can lead to the formation of better leadership in team building. As Dean, I found that teams provided a superior way to get people to throw themselves into a task and feed back ideas about new projects or how to fix ongoing projects. I even occasionally got a comment that I had something of a feminine management style, which I always took as a compliment given the importance I placed on teams in the College.

Now how this leadership issue relates to male vs female cognition in social situations is a fascinating question about which I know little. I would like to someday see the overlap between fMRI revealed brain areas in leadership and those that are involved in neuroeconomics where “other lobe” decisions are made about what is important or valuable about an interaction, plan, theory, even data set.

Wouldn’t it be great to actually have a neuroscience of mentoring along with one for experiential education? However, there is no reason right now without such data we can not do a better job of rewarding faculty who engage in this important activity - and we do know it is important.

-Jim

Maybe the answer lies in situations where faculty members are able to benefit professionally from a mentoring relationship, such as when an undergraduate assists in the publication of a manuscript, or even the running of a study? I guess what I’m saying is that mentoring and academic/professional advances do not always have to be separate. Especially in the case of thesis mentoring, directed studies, research assistants, etc.

I was glad to read your question on intuition because in addition to being an item on my leadership essentials list, it is absolutely part of the makeup of emotional intelligence. Interestingly, one of my professors at Simmons School of Management (a women only business school) devoted a whole class to the discussion of intuition while I never encountered a discussion of it in any of my classes in Northeastern’s MBA Program (a co-ed program).

I agree with you that society justifies women’s listening to and acting upon their intuition based upon their need to care for their children. At the same time society conditions men to ignore their intuition, seeing it as a female-linked trait. Society teaches men to base their actions on visible facts. Intuition is based on information that tends to be invisible to others (more on that in another blog). Although I think men and women have equal capacity for intuition, women have had more opportunity to openly practice it and thus to develop their emotional intelligence.

But back to the male vs. female theory, for discussional purposes I will pose this qwuestion- could it be that because of “motherly intuitions” women have an easier time developing emotional intelligence?

Thanks for your comment on the value of mentoring to you personally. From a business standpoint, students are an educational institute’s clients. Successful businesses understand and resond to what their clients want. However, since students do not often choose to go to a particular institution because they desire mentoring but rather realize its value after they receive it, it is challenging to get institutions to reward faculty for performing this vital function. I think we are making a good effort, though, by discussing it in this blog and by alumni sharing with their educational institutions their experiences being mentored. Students do choose to attend a particular institution if they are looking for experiential education and so we also make headway by emphasizing how closely experiential education and mentoring are connected.

I enjoyed this post and think that you (Cynthia) make a good point about relational practice being most associated with (and most expected of) females vs males. Although there are many men out there who engage in relational practice and become excellent mentors, it is often the female professors and bosses that take their students/employees “under their wing” so to speak and reach out in a personal way. Most times, these professors/bosses are not rewarded in any tangible way for doing this work. Perhaps they receive a good personal feeling but do not receive any monetary or status benefit. A professor will not receive tenure for mentoring students, she will receive tenure for writing papers. Yet, for me, the benefit of having great mentors in college far outweighed the benefit of having professors who handed me papers of their published research. The mentors are truly the people who help shape the students into the professionals they become. I, personally, believe that professors should be rewarded equally for the time they spend mentoring and the time they spend writing papers/conducting research. More value should be placed on personal interactions with students.