Bridging the Gender Gap in Teams

Bridging the Gender Gap in Teams

In September 2013 issue of Harvard Business Review, Cathy Benko and Bill Pelster discuss the research about how women decide. Both were working at Deloitte consulting when they conducted the study. During this time Deloitte had noticed there were multiple occasions when they had lost the bid for a project when women were the decision-makers. A team was pulled together to investigate this issue because women are increasingly moving into decision-making positions. Deloitte management wanted to understand the problem to ensure the trend that was noticed could be remedied. They conducted an internal survey of their associates and 70% of the respondents perceived that selling to women was different than selling to men. According to their statistics women represent half of the management and professional positions in the United States. They continued their research to explore the existing body of knowledge about the differences between the decision-making processes for women versus men. The found current research in the academic community has shown that women have a relative strength of looking at issues at a system-level integrating multiple separate pieces of information to see the whole. Additionally, consumer research has documented the difference in the way men and women make choices during shopping. Men are much more task oriented. However, women are much more exploratory considering all the options available before making a choice. Surprisingly they did not find correlations between consumer related decisions to those which involve business to business transactions. Absent this information they conducted their own survey of women who were experienced decision-makers. They found that women are sensitive to even small amounts of indications of gender-based inequity because of the amount senior executives have seen over their career. They also found that during the final stages of closing the deal, women viewed this as an opportunity to explore options for collaboration whereas men considered this stage