Women and Men as Executives

Women and men tend to do things very different in general, from how to put together a piece of furniture to running a business or company. In many cases people feel more comfortable with men taking charge of major corporations or being President of the United States. The general conception is that women lead with their hearts while men lead with their heads. That women base their decisions on emotions to much while men weigh the logical differences to make the right decision. Interestingly, a recent research study showed that Fortune 500 corporations that have more women directors achieve, on average, stronger financial performance than corporations without such women leaders (Nowicki, 2009). Companies like PepsiCo, Avon, and Kraft Foods seem to have gotten this memo when recently hiring these powerful women to run their major corporations. In a Collegiate Case Study done by USA Today they looked at Women CEO’s and the small and slowly growing group of Women CEO’s in Fortune 500 companies. One of the first women to break this “glass ceiling” was Carly Fiorina in 1999 when she took over the major company, Hewlett Packard. She was one of the first women to take over a successful Fortune 500 company and pave the way for all of the other women CEO’s. It was said that Fiorina was “the first woman CEO in a male-dominated industry”. In this article it talks about two types of leadership style: pink and blue. The pink leadership style emphasizes relationships and the blue leadership style is task-focused. It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that the pink leadership style is focused on emotions and relationship much like the common conception of women being emotional and that the blue leadership style focuses on getting the job done and doing anything to get it done effectively and efficiently much like the common conception of men (USA Today, 2005).