What gender is your agency?
July 18th, 2011 § 3 Comments
There’s much talk about the feminization of business, but what does it really mean? Does it mean that your business is more emotional, wears pink, and gives birth? Not exactly.
To better understand what gender has to do with business, let’s take a look at what masculinity/femininity means in a cultural setting. Geert Hofstede is the pioneer in studying cross-cultural groups and organizations and created a framework for comparing cultures on various factors called the Cultural Dimensions Theory. This framework analyzes culture by assigning and comparing power distance, individualism, uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation, and masculinity across various cultures. This framework seems to have leaked into the world of business when assessing traits of businesses, which is probably a good thing, but it’s often miscommunicated.
In masculine cultures, traits such as assertiveness, competition, materialism, and ambition are valued greatly (such as in Japan and Germany), while feminine cultures value relationships and quality of life (such as in Norway and Sweden). Knowing this, is leaning towards one of these traits over the other bad for business? In general, a healthy business needs to encompass both of these traits to be successful.
As this framework suggests, these values are all measured on a scale of 1-100. For masculinity and femininity, where would your agency fall?
I was taking notes just last week on figuring out ways to implement Hofstede’s work at an organizational/brand level, particularly with regard to gender. We had a big conversation about the different dimensions and how they relate to our company culture, and the cultures of our clients’ brands. Interesting stuff!
Definitely interesting stuff. Any revelations you care to share about where Forty sits in the scales he created (particularly when it comes to gender)? Or have you not gotten quite that far yet in your research?
Well, it turned out that we aligned fairly well with the Scandinavian countries. Go figure.