Read the passage below and check your comprehension by answering the following questions. Then “submit” your work.
Making up 50 percent of the population and 47 percent of the workforce (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012), women are outperforming men in terms of earning college and advanced degrees (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012; Perry, 2013). But when you look at the highest levels of corporate and public sector leadership, it is clearly still a man’s world: in January 2017, a mere twenty-one of Fortune 500 CEOs were female, and there were only 104 women in the U.S. Congress (and 83 out of 435 in the U.S. House of Representatives). Leaving aside the reasons for the underrepresentation of half the population in corner offices, consider the communication challenges that women working in male-dominated industries face. What is it like to be the lone woman at the boy’s club? And how do women overcome preconceived notions of masculine versus feminine leadership styles?
Some women have found that it may actually be effective to use traditionally feminine communication techniques when dealing with an entrenched masculine culture. Work–life legal scholar Joan C. Williams interviewed 127 highly successful women and found that adopting masculine communication styles often backfired. “If you’re too feminine,” Williams explains, “you’re perceived as incompetent. But if you’re too masculine, you’re seen as difficult to work with.” Williams suggests women engage in what she calls “gender judo” (judo being the Japanese martial art of the “gentle way,” which involves overcoming your opponent by using his own momentum to overpower him) to remind men of the traditional feminine roles (like that of a mother, daughter, or teacher) with which they are comfortable and using those roles to exert authority. “Be warm Ms. Mother 95 percent of the time,” explained one executive, “so that the 5 percent of the time when you need to be tough, you can be” (Williams, 2014).