Beyond a pink phone

By Anne Bouverot, Director General, GSMA

If Steve Jobs had been a woman, the iPhone would have been pink. Siri would have been a man, and the default ring time before voicemail kicks in would have been two minutes, to allow women time to find their phone in their handbags. Very bad stereotypes, I know!, but sadly there is a grain of truth here. When I ran the mobile business for Orange – France Télécom, handset makers did actually send me pink phones, ‘because she is a woman’…

Thinking about this seriously now, if Steve had been a woman, I think products like the iPhone would be elegant and stylish. They would be perfectly sized to fit in your hand, and they would have a sleek design, sculpted from the finest materials. The software that runs on the phone would be simple and intuitive, while providing all of the features needed for your daily life. The iPhone would be a high-quality product that consumers would love to own.

Now, those of you that own an iPhone will realise that what I have described above is exactly what an iPhone is today. In fact, many of the latest generation of smartphones coming to market meet these criteria. We are in the midst of an exciting time for the mobile phone industry, with a range of amazing designs from companies like Apple and Samsung and others to capture the imagination of consumers.

«My goal is to live in a world of great design and services, but also a world where they are produced by companies that are led by great men and great women»

The key point for me is that it does not matter whether Steve Jobs was a man or a woman. What is important is that great design comes to the fore and helps us all take advantage of the revolution in our lives that is being enabled by mobile broadband services.

But there is an underlying problem that needs to be resolved. While woman make up over half of the world’s population, they hold less than 5 per cent of the senior management positions in technology companies globally. And this is a massive lost opportunity for the world’s leading technology companies.

My goal is to live in a world of great design and services, but also a world where they are produced by companies that are led by great men and great women. Only then will we see the next generation of amazing products, and the demise of the pink phone stereotype!

Genius is gendered: what would happen if Steve Jobs had been a woman?

By Gillian Marcelle, Associate Professor, Wits Business School

The invitation to write this blog on what would happen or have been different if Steve Jobs had been a woman proved to be too enticing to turn down. This despite the fact that I had left off my serious work on gender and ICTs for nearly a decade. Different themes emerged as I played with the idea of gender transformation and Steve Jobs. I am not sure whether I can cover all these themes here and so perhaps this invitation will lead to future work on the subject.

From the point of view of development studies, I would argue that we need more people like Steve Jobs, and it really does not matter if they are male or female, except if there are biases, whether structural, institutional or psychosocial that stand in the way of the emergence of female Jobs like figures. The point is that Steve Jobs stands at one level as a standard bearer for successful entrepreneurship and transformation and he has become the touchstone for success.

«A woman with a similar balance of negative and positive personality traits was very unlikely to have succeeded in formal business settings»

This then leads to my take on Jobs from a management science perspective. Steve Jobs’s approach to steering a company and its innovative process includes: single-minded dedication to “specification”, ruthlessness, setting standards very high and not compromising about how these were achieved, being unaccepting of industry standards and setting out to be disruptive. He is characterised by enormous self belief, arrogance and a spectacular willingness to take risks. Steve on all accounts is legendary for is attention to detail, keen observational skills and an ability to improve new possibility outside what currently exists. This latter feature has been hailed as him having a reality-distorting ability and this applied to the product features and design of Apple products and services.

From all accounts these “positive” qualities and characteristics were wrapped up in personal attitude that made Steve Jobs an exceptionally challenging human being, in both his personal and professional lives. It is his personality and human characteristics that have meant that he is revered and loathed with great intensity. Before his death, the negative and challenging aspects of his personality were spoken of in hushed whispers. Jobs the mythical path breaker occupied much more airtime than the man who insisted on a paternity test for his first child, refused to reconcile with his biological father, and regularly reduced managers and employees meeting with him at Apple to tears and even attempted suicide. Since his death, the accounts and reports have become more revealing and dare I say insightful. There have been many analyses attempting to reconcile the positive and negative aspects of his personality and to understand the implications for practice.

This is where the gender issues are stark. My sense is that a woman with a similar balance of negative and positive personality traits was very unlikely to have succeeded in formal business settings, let alone to have been celebrated and venerated as a management icon. She would be more likely to have been burnt at the stake! Reality-distorting women who buck traditions, set their own standards and insist on dragging followers on the path they have set out for them and have that confidence of conviction more on grounds of personal self belief and branding that norms and moral standards.

«Is society reproducing female and male Steve Jobs clones rather than developing alternatives?»

I don’t know whether we will even be able to test the hypothesis that a female Steve Jobs would not have been allowed to survive as against the counter hypothesis that a female leader in the ICT sector world is unlikely to have the same balance of “offensive” and positive personality traits. I certainly cannot think of a female powerful figure who is associated with single handedly setting new benchmarks for an industry, hero worshipped and venerated. These are some reflections on Steve the man.

As far as the products produced by Steve Jobs and Apple, I wonder about whether a woman of a similar age, cultural, racial and political background would have produced a set of technologies that had the same characteristics.

Industry domination, lock-in effects, propriety standards are central to the Apple success story. This is a technological leader model per excellence. If we are to separate out particular personality traits, we still have to ask the question whether the propensity to adopt strategies with these features is gendered. Do female leaders eschew strategies with these characteristics and do they have a high propensity to adopt alternatives? We don’t have any evidence to answer this question. Are female leaders, whether they pursue paths of business diversification and growth that differ from that pursued by Apple likely to be as successful? This would also need to be answered in the future. In considering these issues, it may be helpful to ask whether female executives operating in these settings actually have definitions of success and power that are fundamentally different from their male counterparts. Do put this differently, would a white, educated, middle class female in a wealthy country have either the option or desire to manage success and power in a way that differed significantly from Steve Jobs. Do we have processes of selection in place that effectively means that a female computer science or business student hoping to catch the eye of a mentor or to climb the ladder of success is more likely to perform management in a Steve Jobs like fashion than not. Is society then reproducing female and male Steve Jobs clones rather than developing alternatives? The recent opting-out and missing generation debates in the US suggest that these issues and questions are not that farfetched.

I want to also make some comments relating to design and functionality. If a Steve Jobs like character in female form were to emerge and survive would she make design and be successful by products that sought to have seamless integration across data from personal/private and professional aspects of life. Personally, I find the aspect of the Apple i-range of products quite irritating and somewhat disturbing. While I love the convenience of the i-Pad and the i-Phone for network connectivity, posh email features, I resist quite strongly the possibility and practice of blending/merging any aspect of life in one device. I am not certain that this is inherently female, especially since we are supposed to be so much better off multitasking than men but I do not regard that blurring of boundaries as healthy and/or desirable.

«Steve as icon not only sets the standard but has probably set back feminist advocacy in this field for many decades to come»

Finally, I want to tackle the politics of the situation. In my work as a gender equality advocate with a focus on the ICT sector, I argued that unless a critical political analysis was made of the integration of social, political, institutional and structural processes that led to patterns of gender inequality, the situation would continue. The advocacy positions of the groups with which I was associated called for concerted efforts within the ICT sector and in the policy space to end exclusion and inequitable access to and control of ICT systems and industries on a gendered basis.

Several years on, although I am not as familiar with the academic, policy or civil society work in this area, I certainly have the impression that there has been no major breakthrough in terms of wrestling into these issues and making transformational changes.

And in that sense, Steve Jobs’s success at Pixar and Apple, his wealth creation, his bad behaviour, and hyper-masculinity means that he is the robber baronesque figure of the 21st century. Steve as icon not only sets the standard but has probably set back feminist advocacy in this field for many decades to come. By contrast, Bill Gates is a mild-mannered, happily married, philanthropy inclined, not particularly macho man, who is very wealthy. But he has not attracted the same love-hate reaction (except in Open Source circles).

If there was a level playing field and the world had really become a fundamentally different place, perhaps a warm-hearted, fuzzy, female leader with a heart of gold and on her best behaviour would have emerged to lead a firm that was concerned about triple bottom line issues, making useful ICT product and services in collaboration with users and competitors that addressed human needs as well as advanced private motives.

Until then we have Steve...

Different genders, different worlds

By Joanne McGrath Cohoon, Associate Professor, University of Virginia.

Gender inequality persists. Both data and personal reports from transgendered people make this reality clear. For example, transgendered men received more workplace respect and more opportunities to speak than they had as women. Their observations illustrate how subtly and profoundly gender affects our lives, even the lives of exceptional people.

Culturally, gendered expectations of others and ourselves interact with race and class to shape our language, our interrelations, and our beliefs about what we might achieve and where we belong. Organizations in our immediate environment also affect us at each stage of our lives —schools; businesses; churches, temples, mosques; etc. Each has its own set of policies, practices, and local cultures that differentiate more or less between men and women. So, if Steve Jobs had been a woman, he would have lived in a different world than the world he knew as a man.

«Jobs lived in a world where technical interests, technical education, and aggressive business behavior were appropriate. Had Jobs been a woman, his behavior may not have been interpreted in such a positive light»

Steve Jobs, the man, lived in a world where technical interests, technical education, and aggressive business behavior were appropriate. Investors saw potential for his success, because Jobs fit their expectations for technical business genius. Employees tolerated his eccentricities because they saw him as a successful leader. Had Jobs been a woman, his behavior may not have been interpreted in such a positive light.

Stephanie Jobs, the woman, could have behaved in the same ways, but her behavior would have been interpreted differently. By violating expected behavior for women, she would have incurred harsh judgments about her likability, even if people thought her competent. And being thought competent would require performance several times better than Steve would have needed.

Stephanie would have had less opportunity than Steve to develop skills that contribute to success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). She might have been explicitly discouraged from taking elective STEM courses. Had she taken the courses anyway, she would have experienced isolation, stereotype threat, and less encouragement than her male classmates. Investors would likely have failed to see beyond her femininity to recognize her vision and ability to carry it out. Employees might have labeled her a crazy bitch and refused to contribute their passion in fulfillment of her dreams.

«Stephanie Jobs might have been wildly successful as a high tech entrepreneur and innovator, but she would have had to overcome many more barriers than Steve overcame»

Stephanie Jobs might have been wildly successful as a high tech entrepreneur and innovator, but she would have had to overcome many more barriers than Steve overcame. An astonishing achievement would have been even more spectacular, unless of course, the world changed at the same time Steve’s gender changed. 

It is difficult to know whether we are moving toward a world where Steve and Stephanie have equal chance of success. Obviously, women are advancing in education and economic independence in many countries. Yet, even in those countries where women seem to have the most parity with men, occupational gender segregation persists: women, more than men, are in fields with fewer economic rewards, less autonomy, and lower job satisfaction.

Would it have made a lot of difference?

By Inger Lassen, Professor, Department of Culture and Global Studies, Aalborg University (Denmark)

Intriguing as this question may seem, it might not have made a whole lot of difference whether Steve Jobs had been a woman. On the other hand it could. The question is perhaps not so much whether Steve Jobs would have been man or woman, but rather how Steve Jobs is discursively constructed as man or woman with stereotypically masculine or feminine features. Much gender research seems to be gradually moving away from essentialist views and the binary distinction between what professors Matts Alvesson and Yvonne Billing have referred to as bio-men and bio-women^[1], concepts that refer to the biological sex of men and women. However, we still tend to categorize each other, making stereotypical statements about what we see as typical masculine or feminine behaviour.

This is perhaps particularly predominant in management approaches, where for instance Judy Rosener, professor at The Paul Merage School of Business, refers to masculine and feminine leadership styles as transactional and transformational^[2]. In this view men’s role in leadership is seen as authoritative and women’s as empathetic. A transactional leadership style is task-oriented and uses the principle of rewards or punishments, relying to a great extent on positional authority. A transformational leadership style, on the other hand, encourages commitment to groups and organizational goals, participation in decisions making processes and managing through personal qualities, such as showing empathy and being able to listen to staff.

«Much gender research of today seems to share the idea that masculine and feminine behaviour may be characteristic of men as well as of women»

However, much gender research of today seems to share the idea that masculine and feminine behaviour may be characteristic of men as well as of women, gender primarily being constructed in social and cultural processes. Focusing on gender in organizations, Alvesson and Billing have warned us against gender over-sensitivity, claiming that gender might not always be a relevant parameter because individuals may perform a number of different identities which are not necessarily gender-specific. For instance, in a meeting where executives discuss whether to acquire another company, the parties involved in the discussion would rely more on various aspects of professional identity than on gender identity, which in the situation would most likely be irrelevant.

But where does this lead us when addressing the Open Thoughts 2012 question? According to journalist Sarah McInerney^[3], Steve Jobs’ management style «wasn’t the stuff of university textbooks – he wasn’t known for his consultative or consensus building approach. He was a “high-maintenance co-worker” who demanded excellence from his staff and was known for his blunt delivery of criticism». If the dual management styles mentioned above are anything to go by, this would categorize Steve Jobs as a transactional leader.

«There’s an impression that Jobs possessed both authoritative —or masculine— and empathetic —or feminine— features»

In many ways, this impression is shared by some experts, like Roberto Verganti, Professor of Management of Innovation at Politecnico di Milano,^[4] who refers to Jobs’ leadership style as «vertical, top-down and often harsh». However, Verganti recognizes at the same time that Jobs «managed by meaning» in the sense that to Apple’s co-founder people were human. In his view, Jobs thus offered meaning to customers as well as to employees by offering them a sense of mission, and thereby a sense of identity and loyalty with Apple. This might indicate that in addition to transactional features, Jobs also possessed what Rosener referred to as transformational features.

In his biography on Steve Jobs, author Walter Isaacson^[5] thus characterizes him as being «very emotional and sentimental» and able to «understand other people’s emotions». According to Isaacson, «Steve Jobs understood what caused people’s emotions and was able to connect emotionally with people». This combined with the sense of ‘meaning-making’ Jobs was able to infuse in people might be more closely related with a transformational management style.

So what if Steve Jobs would have been a woman? Well, there might not necessarily have been a whole lot of difference, don’t you think?

Footnotes:
1. Alvesson, M. and Billing. Y.D. (2002). «Beyond body-counting: A discussion of the social construction of gender at work». In Gender, Identity and the Culture of Organizations. Aaltio and Mills (eds.), 72-91. London and New York: Routledge.
2. Rosener, J.B. (1990). «Ways women lead», Harvard Business Review, November-December.
3. McInerney, S. (2011). «Steve Jobs. An unconventional leader». The Sydney Morning Herald, October.
4. Verganti, R. (2011). «Steve Jobs and Management by Meaning», Harvard Business Review, October.
5. Isaacson, W. (2011). Steve Jobs (Biography). USA: Simon and Schuster.

Further reading:
Majstorovic, D. and Lassen, I. (2011). Living with Patriarchy. Amsterdam and Philadelphia. Benjamins.