In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker presents data showing that human violence, while still very much with us today, has been gradually declining. Moreover, he says, “over the long sweep of history, women have been and will be a pacifying force. Traditional war is a man’s game: tribal women never band together to raid neighboring villages.” As mothers, women have evolutionary incentives to maintain peaceful conditions in which to nurture their offspring and ensure that their genes survive into the next generation.
Skeptics immediately reply that women have not made war simply because they have rarely been in power. If they were empowered as leaders, the conditions of an anarchic world would force them to make the same bellicose decisions that men do. Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, and Indira Gandhi were powerful women; all of them led their countries to war.
But it is also true that these women rose to leadership by playing according to the political rules of “a man’s world.” It was their success in conforming to male values that enabled their rise to leadership in the first place. In a world in which women held a proportionate share (one-half) of leadership positions, they might behave differently in power.
So we are left with the broader question: does gender really matter in leadership? In terms of stereotypes, various psychological studies show that men gravitate to the hard power of command, while women are collaborative and intuitively understand the soft power of attraction and persuasion. Americans tend to describe leadership with tough male stereotypes, but recent leadership studies show increased success for what was once considered a “feminine style.”
In information-based societies, networks are replacing hierarchies, and knowledge workers are less deferential. Management in a wide range of organizations is changing in the direction of “shared leadership,” and “distributed leadership,” with leaders in the center of a circle rather than atop a pyramid. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that he had to “coddle” his employees.
Even the military faces these changes. In the United States, the Pentagon says that Army drillmasters do “less shouting at everyone,” because today’s generation responds better to instructors who play “a more counseling-type role.” Military success against terrorists and counterinsurgents requires soldiers to win hearts and minds, not just break buildings and bodies.
Former US President George W. Bush once described his role as “the decider,” but there is much more to modern leadership than that. Modern leaders must be able to use networks, to collaborate, and to encourage participation. Women’s non-hierarchical style and relational skills fit a leadership need in the new world of knowledge-based organizations and groups that men, on average, are less well prepared to meet.
In the past, when women fought their way to the top of organizations, they often had to adopt a “masculine style,” violating the broader social norm of female “niceness.” Now, however, with the information revolution and democratization demanding more participatory leadership, the “feminine style” is becoming a path to more effective leadership. In order to lead successfully, men will not only have to value this style in their women colleagues, but will also have to master the same skills.
That is a trend, not (yet) a fact. Women still lag in leadership positions, holding only 5% of top corporate positions and a minority of positions in elected legislatures (just 16% in the US, for example, compared to 45% in Sweden). One study of the 1,941 rulers of independent countries during the twentieth century found only 27 women, roughly half of whom came to power as widows or daughters of a male ruler. Less than 1% of twentieth-century rulers were women who gained power on their own.
So, given the new conventional wisdom in leadership studies that entering the information age means entering a woman’s world, why are women not doing better?
Lack of experience, primary caregiver responsibilities, bargaining style, and plain old discrimination all help to explain the gender gap. Traditional career paths, and the cultural norms that constructed and reinforced them, simply have not enabled women to gain the skills required for top leadership positions in many organizational contexts.
Research shows that even in democratic societies, women face a higher social risk than men when attempting to negotiate for career-related resources such as compensation. Women are generally not well integrated into male networks that dominate organizations, and gender stereotypes still hamper women who try to overcome such barriers.
This bias is beginning to break down in information-based societies, but it is a mistake to identify the new type of leadership we need in an information age simply as “a woman’s world.” Even positive stereotypes are bad for women, men, and effective leadership.
Leaders should be viewed less in terms of heroic command than as encouraging participation throughout an organization, group, country, or network. Questions of appropriate style – when to use hard and soft skills – are equally relevant for men and women, and should not be clouded by traditional gender stereotypes. In some circumstances, men will need to act more “like women”; in others, women will need to be more “like men.”
The key choices about war and peace in our future will depend not on gender, but on how leaders combine hard- and soft-power skills to produce smart strategies. Both men and women will make those decisions. But Pinker is probably correct when he notes that the parts of the world that lag in the decline of violence are also the parts that lag in the empowerment of women.
Joseph S. Nye, Jr., a former US
Assistant Secretary of Defense, is a professor at Harvard and the author most
recently of The Future of Power.
Joseph S. Nye: 當女性掌權
慕尼黑—如果讓女性來領導，世界會變得更和平嗎？哈佛大學心理學家斯蒂芬·平克（Steven Pinker）的新書對此的回答是“是”。
在《天性善良的天使》（The Better Angels of Our Nature）一書中，平克用大量數據証明，人身暴力雖然仍然困擾著世界，但已呈現出逐漸減少之勢。此外，他還宣稱“從歷史長河看，女性一直是、將來也會繼續是和平的動力。傳統戰爭是男性之間的游戲：部落中的女成員從來不會聯合起來掃蕩相鄰部落。”作為母親，女性具有進化性動力維系和平環境，以便更好地哺育后代，確保自己的基因傳遞下去。
質疑者馬上就可以反駁說，女性之所以不曾引發戰爭，隻是因為她們很少掌權。如果她們能獲得領袖之位，得到權力，那麼這個弱肉強食的世界將迫使她們採取與男性一致的好戰決策。撒切爾夫人、梅厄夫人和英迪拉·甘地都是掌權的女性﹔在她們的任期內，她們的國家無不對別國開戰了。
但不可否認的是，這些女性是順著“男性世界”的政治規則爬到領導人的位子上的。她們首先滿足了男性的價值觀，這是她們獲得領導權的第一步。如果女性能夠在領導崗位上頂半邊天，那麼她們掌權后的行為也許會有所不同。
因此，我們需要面臨更廣泛的問題：性別真的能影響領導行為嗎？很多心理學研究表明，男性渴望發號施令的硬權力，而女性更具合作精神，在本能上更理解吸引和說服的軟權力。在美國傳統中，領導人總是硬朗的男性形象，但最新的領導力研究表明，曾經被認為是“娘娘腔”的做派，其成功的可能性正在增加。
在一個基於信息的社會中，網絡正在代替層級，腦力工作者更加難以馴服了。大量組織的管理正在朝“共同領導”和“分散領導”的方向轉變，其領導層處於圓心，而不是金字塔塔尖。前谷歌首席執行官施密特（Eric Schmidt）說，他必須“驕縱”手下的雇員。
就連軍隊也面臨著這種改變。在美國，五角大樓宣稱陸軍教官“動輒大吼的情況更少了”，因為新新一代對“更多扮演導師角色”的教官反應更好。從軍事上戰勝恐怖主義以及反暴動要求士兵能夠贏得心理戰，而不僅僅是摧毀敵人的工事和肉體。
前美國總統喬治·W·布什曾經將他的角色描述為“決定者”，但現代領導工作的范圍遠不止這一點。現代領導人必須能夠使用網絡，能夠協調並鼓舞參與者。女性的非層級制風格和公關技巧更適合在當今新涌現的基於知識的組織和團體中擔任領導職位，男性（平均而言）還沒有做好適應這一變化的准備。
過去，當女性奮斗在爬向組織最高寶座之路的時候，她們通常不得不採取一種“陽剛風格”，打破女性“溫柔”的常規社會范式。但是，如今，信息革命和民主化要求更具參與性的領導，因此“娘娘腔”正在成為更有效率的領導方式。為了獲得成功，男性不但必須理解女性同事處事風格的價值，還必須掌握這一技巧。
這是一個趨勢，而（尚）不是既成事實。女性仍然在領導職位的競爭中處於劣勢，公司首腦中隻有5%是女性，議員選舉中當選女性也隻是少數（比如，美國隻有16%，而瑞典達到了45%）。一項研究表明，在20世紀獨立國家的1 941名執政者中，隻有27名女性，其中還有一半是以男性執政者的遺孀或女兒身份問鼎權力的。整個20世紀，隻有不到1%的執政者是完全靠自己獲得成功的。
那麼，既然領導力研究中的新傳統智慧表明進入信息時代等於進入女性時代，那麼為什麼女性的表現沒有起色呢？
因為女性缺乏經驗，其首要角色是看護者，其談判風格尚不為人所接受，且舊歧視頑固不化，這些都能解釋性別差異。傳統職業道路及其形成和加強的文化范式使得女性無法在組織環境中獲得最高領導職位所必須的技能。
研究表明，即使是在民主社會中，女性在進行與職業生涯資源有關的談判（比如薪資談判）時所面臨的社會風險也要高於男性。女性總的來說無法很好地融入主導組織的男性網絡，而頑固的性別觀念仍然是女性克服這些障礙的絆腳石。
這一歧視在基於信息的社會中正開始被打破，但把我們在信息時代所需要的新的領導風格簡單地歸為“女性世界”是不對的。即便是積極的頑固觀念，對女性、男性和高效領導也是不利的。
領袖應該更多地在組織、團隊、國家或網絡中承擔鼓勵參與的角色，更少地扮演英雄式的主宰者。什麼才是合適的風格——什麼時候硬，什麼時候軟——對男性和女性同樣重要，我們不應該被傳統的性別頑固舊觀念蒙蔽了雙眼。在某些情形中，男性需要表現得“像個娘們”，而女性在某些情形中需要表現得“像個爺們”。
我們的未來是戰爭還是和平，關鍵的選擇並不取決於性別，而取決於領袖如何軟硬兼施來構造巧妙的戰略。不論是男性還是女性，都可以做出決策。但平克指出，從世界范圍看，暴力消解不力的地區往往也是女性掌權情形落后的地區，或許，他是對的。
Joseph S. Nye是前美國助理國防部長，現任哈佛大學教授，最近著有《權力的未來》。
