Pondering #1: Are Women Naturally Caring?

This is one of a number of topics that fit under the heading of Pondering the Imponderables in which a start is made to examine questions on topics for which answers are normally taken for granted.


Are women naturally caring, or is it largely that they have they been conditioned to be so; or are they not all that caring but merely assigned long ago by society to caregiver roles,and thus are forced into the role? From that forced occupation, they may have been conditioned through the centuries into a general acceptance of the role, reinforced by social conditions that have forcibly and legally kept them there. They perhaps have come to believe they tend to dislike competition and its attendant struggles for power, traits that arguably have made it more likely they will be chronically dependent (far beyond the dependence created by relative physical weakness).

Two characteristics result from conditioning that produces a dislike of competition: 1) One who dislikes competition is largely removed from the competitive pool in a society based on competition and 2) an emotional rejection of competition is comforting and conducive to the compassionate nature of a caregiver, therefore tending to assure accepance of the caregiver role. A negative byproduct, however, is that the caregiver of children (primarily the mother) may discourage the competitive tendencies of their children; thus handicapping them in a society that, again, relies on competition for its good health and its progress.

This raises questions about whether a perhaps necessary element of earth life, vigorous competition, will be changed as more women enter the work force and become executives, supervisors and entrepreneurs. If they are inherently caring, the workplace will become a kinder, gentler place. Or, are such women, hence women in general, likely to lose their caring natures (if they had them at all) in order to be more competitive. This may be the downside to equality of sexes. Competition appears to be vitally necessary to the healthy functioning of an open economy, and to human development toward Godhood, while some substantial body of people with deeply caring natures is needed to nurture future generations and instill and bring to blossom the humanity necessary for a civil society. Certainly a case can be made for the argument that, in the event there are no naturally caring classes of people, someone should be assigned the task. Women? In the event of the assignment will they then develop the requisite caring skills? If they were assigned the task generations ago, have they developed the skills and passed them on to their daughters, and will those skills be lost as woman step out of the home and into the work place? Tangentially, of course, they may discourage their sons to be competitive. Such an action makes the son more considerate of others, but may dull the competitive urge.

There is a cultural tendency to discourage competition so that women (and many men) feel it is an evil that needs to be eliminated. To that end, they encourage children to engage in non-competitive activities (producing win-win situations in interactions with others). Team sports in which no score is kept until children reach a certain age; competition, one-on-one sportss (chess, for example) in which combatants are encouraged to act modestly when they win. As emotionally attractive and laudable as that might be, the life of an individual is heavily invested in competition (for jobs, for performance in jobs, in winning a mate, in applying for educational opportunities, etc.) so that learning to truly compete is, indeed, a useful skill. Contrast such competition with the situation in China, and other communist countries over the years, or in traditional cultures where competition is minimized as either the government assigns individuals to tasks, or the ladder of advancement is strictly defined, as in promotions based on seniority. A deterrent for women in the workplace has been their conditioning to avoid competition, or conflict.
As they increasingly step into the workplace and find themselves in executive positions, evidence seems to emerge that, though they might prefer to be nurturing, conciliatory, and compromising for a common good, they tend toward some traditionally male competitive characteristics.

“In a study of more than 200 Fortune 500 leaders, Calvin Morrill, a sociologist at the University of California at Irvine, found that almost all of the small number of women bosses—23—had cultivated a powerful male mentor. 'The men had mentors, too, but for some reason were likely to split with them,' Dr. Morrill said. 'But women kept these guys in their pockets, and their ability to mobilize these partisans made some of them more confrontational.'” (Carey, Benedict, “A tyrant boss, even without the Y chromosome,” New York Times, Week in Review, June 25, 2006, p. WK3)

This suggests that women (in the relative infancy of their emergence into corporates leadership) are moving toward aggressive, competitive behaviors that bely their compassionate natures/conditioning.

Still, those other values seem to be useful and present among women executives: “In an authorative 2003 analysis of 45 studies in a wide range of organizations from schools to hospitals to financial companies, Alice Eagly of Northwestern University and Marloes van Engen of Tilberg University in the Netherlands found that women managers tended to be—on average—more collaborative than men, more encouraging to subordinates, more likely to include them in decisions. Men were more likely to lead by top-down command, or to be strictly hands off, distant.” (Carey, 2006)

“But these instincts break down in certain circumstances, studies suggest, namely when women feel insecure because they are a token minority whose competence is in question, said Theresa Vescio, a psychologist at Penn State University. 'In these conditions, women tend to treat the lowest-ranking female workers as poorly as men do,' Dr. Vescio said. The social skills that allow many women to be effective leaders also give them access to valuable information that hands-off or dictatorial types don't have. Collaboration not only engages colleagues but also helps expose them as possible allies or rivals. Helping others manage their careers and home life brings out gossip about hidden vulnerabilities and relationships in the organization. A manager, as she ascends, may use this information to protect others—or to keep them in check. (As in: “Can you take this job, given your family situation?').” (Carey, 2006)

In the article cited above, Carey doesn't explore the nature of men and women in competitive leadership roles, seeming to take it for granted that women are likely to continue being compassionate and collaborative, and citing some exceptions. Neither does he directly examine the question of intense competition that faces executives as they attempt to advance the fortunes of their organizations.

The question is still open, then, about whether women will, when faced with such competitive situations, shed a win-win mentality that is the hallmark of collaboration and become intense competitors.

The problem of creating dependency, if true in the case of women, is an interesting one as an aspect of power accumulation. My experience with women, students and others, is that tend to be defensively pleasant. Women are more likely to smile quickly at a stranger, it appears to me; perhaps as a way to dissipate potential hostility.

It appears to me that women may have traditionally been raised (as a part of the coercion/legal assignment above) so they have been persuaded to believe they need someone to care for them, and for them to be (because of the inherent dependency) subservient. This may be a part of a natural master plan, or it may merely be the way things have worked out. At any rate, it is a functional arrangement, as far as perpetuation and care of family goes, because it assigns superior and, despite the rhetoric, inferior roles. It seems to be a natural assumption, supported by generation after generation of experience that men will be the providers (strength having been one of the deciding factors when it came to wrestling sabre tooth tigers for the meat). Women have naturally fallen under the protection of the stronger males in response to the mortal dangers that were always present. In later generations, men naturally were the breadwinners (though physical strength has become less of a factor in day to day life). The problem is that it has led to the assigning of women an apparently inferior place in society to the extent that women were prohibited from voting for more than 100 years in a new democracy, they “just did not” smoke in public for decades; they were prohibited from owning property and were required to marry in order to have any property within their legal purview. These conditions persist in many cultures to the present day