Feminine Values Ascending
A
review of The Athena Doctrine: How Women (and the Men Who Think Like Them)
Will Rule the Future, by John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio
Most of us are not happy with the
state of world. At least that’s what John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio
conclude from their surveys of 64,000 people in 13 major countries. The surveys
revealed widespread dissatisfaction among the respondents—who were chosen to
mirror national populations—with how power is concentrated, resources are
allocated, and decisions are made in their home country.
What are the drivers of this
pervasive discontent? Government, the economy…oh, and apparently men. “A clear
majority of people around the world are unhappy with the conduct of men,”
declare brand consultant Gerzema and journalist and author D’Antonio. This
includes 79 percent of people in Japan and South Korea and two-thirds of all
people in the United States, Indonesia, and Mexico; the rate of dissatisfaction
was nearly equal among men and women.
How should men act? Like women,
according to the survey results. For example, 66 percent of respondents think
that “the world would be a better place if men thought more like women.” A
majority of the men surveyed expressed this view, and Japanese men reported the
highest levels of conviction (79 percent). In addition, 65 percent of people
from all 13 countries believe that having more female leaders in government
would prompt a rise in trust and fairness, and a decline in scandal and wars.
“Thinking like women” is, of course,
a highly ambiguous concept, so the authors then asked half of their global
sample to identify 125 behavioral traits as masculine, feminine, or neutral.
Perceptions turned out to be fairly consistent across countries and cultures.
Respondents pegged traits such as dominance, aggression, decisiveness,
ambition, and analytical orientation as masculine, and traits such as being
community-oriented, social, supportive, intuitive, cooperative, empathetic, and
patient as feminine.
Members of the other half of the
sample were asked to correlate these different traits with leadership, success,
morality, and happiness. In all four domains, feminine traits were ranked as more
highly correlated than masculine traits. Morality and happiness showed the
strongest relationship.
Clearly, we’ve come a long way since
1982, when Carol Gilligan’s highly influential In a Different Voice:
Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Harvard University Press)
showed how decades of flawed academic research had resulted in the widespread
perception that women, in addition to lacking leadership skills, were deficient
in morality and ethics in comparison with men. The robust research tradition
that started with Gilligan, along with changes in the nature of technology, the
economy, and demographics, appears to have given at least a theoretical edge to
leadership ideals of context and collaboration over the decisive, top-down
approach associated with hierarchies and traditional male leadership models.
The widespread nature of this shift
is documented by the authors of The Athena Doctrine, who begin by associating inclusive and cooperative
approaches to leadership and organization with the Greek goddess of
civilization and culture. These values contrast with those of Athena’s brother
Ares, the dominant and aggressive god of war. The authors then set off on a
world tour in search of examples of “Athena values” in action. Most of these
examples—including social entrepreneurship, community building, social marketing,
financing cooperatives, bottom-up support networks, and a host of other good
works—prove to be engaging and inspiring, although sometimes less than
convincing as proof of the authors’ thesis because of their anecdotal nature
and their lack of scale.
The most compelling chapters in the
book focus on countries in which systemic disruptions have spurred grassroots
efforts to institute systemic change: Iceland in the wake of the financial
meltdown, Israel after the intifada, Japan following the Fukushima Daiichi
nuclear disaster, and Colombia recovering from the worst of the drug cartel
wars. Although the authors’ examples of the efforts to rebuild damaged
economies, ecologies, and infrastructures may seem at first to lack coherence,
it soon strikes the reader that this may be precisely the point. After all,
haven’t many of the large-scale interventions made throughout the 20th century
proven destructive of community and sustainable livelihood in application?
In fact, the concept of making
something bad a little better rather than seeking one heroic solution seems to
define the essence of The Athena Doctrine and is indeed demonstrative of
a less arrogant and elite-centric leadership model than the usual. It also
provides an interesting counterpart to the “shock doctrine” described by Naomi
Klein in her book of the same name, which details how the chaos that follows
financial and economic disasters can be exploited by those seeking to impose
control on struggling communities via clean-slate solutions. Gerzema and
D’Antonio offer examples that are admittedly scattershot, but in doing so, they
may provide us with a viable and valuable approach to creating change.
No comments:
Post a Comment