Why Women Mean Business [Paperback]

Why Women Mean Business is a long awaited book highlighting the importance of gender balance as A business issue. It's refreshing to read something that makes sense of all the publicity, columns and columns of articles and debates on the subject; this book gives example after example, research after research of where companies have prospered using an effective gender balance of men and women. It seems hard to ignore given the endorsements this book has got from business leaders and academic professionals. For anyone wanting more persuasion, check out the customer reviews of the hardback version. Probably one of the most important business books to have been written in the last couple of years. I look forward to buying the new follow-up book How Women Mean Business.

This is one of two books written by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox that I have recently read, the other being How Women Mean Business published two years later (2010). It would be unfair to both books to suggest that one is a prequel or sequel to the other. There is much to be said for reading both, perhaps this one first, but each can - and indeed should - be judged on its own merits. At least that is the approach I now take.

In this book, Wittenberg-Cox and her co-author, Alison Maitland, state their primary objective: to explain how and why understanding the core principles and potential benefits of "womenomics" will help us to understand "the emergence of our next economic revolution." In fact, that revolution is now underway. Its scope and depth are having an increasingly greater global impact. They suggest, and I emphatically agree, that gender is a business issue, not a "women's issue," as the same can also be said of parental (not maternal) rights, IT, results-driven management, process simplification, performance measurement, and onboarding. Over time, let's all hope and then work to ensure, a term such as "womenomics" will become obsolete, perhaps even quaint, as men as well as women derive increasingly greater benefits from equal opportunity that has everything to do with merit and absolutely nothing to do with anything else.

Centuries ago, two metaphors emerged and have since become influential: the "crucible" and "the melting pot." Sometimes both have been invoked in a discussion of how immigrants "melt" into their new culture in the United States, as Crevecoeur describes it in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782). I rejected the concept of a melting pot when I first encountered a lengthy discussion of it in 1970, in Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Beyond the Melting Pot. Then and now, I reject this metaphor in favor of others, notably the salad or better yet, the symphony, and certainly much prefer those metaphors when acknowledging the diversity among women and men and when affirming the great value of such diversity. Differences between and among people should not separate them; rather, they should enrich and strengthen them.

Throughout their lively and eloquent narrative, Wittenberg-Cox and Maitland examine a range of major challenges, opportunities and issues. Just in Chapter One ("Womenomics"), for example, they explain:

o What "womenomics" means...and could provide
o Why women are "guarantors of growth"
o How organizations and individuals can be come "gender-bilingual"
o The cost of not being "gender-bilingual"
o The nature and extent of economic impact of three 21st century forces (i.e. weather, women, and the worldwide web)

There is also an abundance of valuable information, insights, and wisdom in each of the other chapters.

They also make brilliant use of several reader-friendly devices. For example, "Tips" on recruiting women Page 47), promoting women (67), tapping into the female market (100), and managing gender differences (127). She also provides 11 mini-case studies, six of them in Chapter Five ("Seven Steps to Successful Implementation"): Hands-on Experience, Role Reversal, Opening eyes, Lloyds TSB's multi-pronged approach, Schlumberger: A bold new approach to gender, and Bain & Company: Women hold the key, but men control the lock. The focus of all this material is on what can be learned from real people in real situations as they struggle to formulate and then implement programs and related initiatives to achieve "gender-bilingual" fluency.

The revolution to which Wittenberg-Cox and Maitland frequently refer offers almost unlimited opportunities to those who - regardless of gender - really do "mean business" in terms of principles as well as profits...non-negotiable values as well as adding value to the customers they are privileged to serve. It is by no means a coincidence: companies that are "gender bilingual" are the most highly-admired, best to work for...and yes, inevitably, they are also the most profitable.

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out How Women Mean Business as well as Neil Howe's The Fourth Turning and Rebecca Costa's The Watchman's Rattle.

I brought this book because I was genuinely interested in womens' perspective to work, and generally what they had to say. The book started promising enough, but as I continued to read I became more frustrated with it.

I felt like the Authors were bashing me over the head with the proverbial "we're Women and we are gonna be in your face whether you like it or not". The book was filled with quotes from different people who were basically stating the same points: the discrimination they experienced.

They stated a Truism: "Most Boardrooms are occupied by white men who are similar to each other." But does that mean only women will have difficulty getting there? I too can write a book filled with either personal experiences or the many people I had met who also faced many forms of discrimination.

It also shows another problem with the book in that the people [above] who should be reading this book, I really doubt that they will. This is because they know the unfairness that is prevalent in the job market, but they'll stick to the status quo because why should they jeopardise their positions for sticking up for women and ethnic minorities?

For the people like me who don't have a problem with women - or anyone else for that matter - working, this book is just full of case studies like "women engineers suggested making changes to the uniforms because they found that they were designed for men". No way, it took women to figure something like that out??

In chapter 6 they state that having women in work will increase child rate, and they use a graph produced by - Goldman Sachs. What did they do? Count the number of women working in their International offices? Yet on the next page, they use another graph, this time produced by a proper statistic agency which clearly shows the fall of birth rates started from 1965. Now wasn't this the time that women started to enter the work force en masse? There are many other examples where the Authors have used data to reinforce their perspective, instead of trying to be honest in saying what the information can mean.