不能小觑女性市场
2008-05-07
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| 女性市场,womenomics |
WHY YOU DON'T WANT A WOMAN TO BE MORE LIKE A MAN
不能小觑女性市场
By Evelyne Sevin
Sunday, May 04, 2008
BOOK REVIEW: Why Women Mean Business
By Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Alison Maitland
John Wiley, £16.99
This could just be another book about women, the glass ceiling and the usual laments about why women don't make it to the top. But Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Alison Maitland clearly want to avoid this dead end.
They give a broader picture, take a stand and offer a comprehensive view of women both at work and as consumers as suggested in the punning title.
Why Women Mean Business, they explain, is “dedicated to the companies that are waking up to ‘womenomics',” the economic revolution being created by women's growing power and potential. To ignore these demographic and commercial developments is bad business.
Wittenberg-Cox is a practitioner who founded networks such as the European Professional Women's Network and is an executive coach who started her own company (20-First) to advise organisations on gender-related matters. Maitland is a former FT journalist, now a writer and a senior visiting fellow in the faculty of management at Cass Business School in London. She brings an academic perspective, having researched and written about women in business for a decade.
Not surprisingly, Why Women Mean Business is well documented and summarises leading and recent studies in this field. Thorough and direct, it also abounds in footnoted anecdotes and comments from figures such as Jeremy Isaacs at Lehman Brothers, Niall Fitzgerald of Reuters, and Anne Mulcahy of Xerox, making it both a practical and a lively read. “Business remains a world created by males for males,” admits Isaacs and what alienates women is that “the language people fall into using is sometimes unacceptable”, as Fitzgerald points out. It is clear, authentic, stimulating and sometimes provocative.
The authors try to offer a new perspective, taking men's views into consideration through extensive interviews. They move the debate on when they say that “[womenomics] is a business issue and not solely a women issue”, or when detailing the limitations of diversity management by explaining the differences between gender and diversity. The point is that women are both different and equal and to this end they call for “bilingualism” at work – women and men bring different qualities to work, but of equal value to the company.
Meanwhile, “including gender within diversity programmes positions it incorrectly, almost dooming companies to fail in their efforts,” they write.
Wittenberg-Cox and Maitland suggest that companies “define the business case and involve executive committee members to debate their analysis. The aim is to align the top management team on why a gender initiative is necessary and win agreement on how to address it.”
Further tips: “Let people express resistance”; “make it a business issue not a women's issue”, and maybe follow the example of Schlumberger, to “have gender initiatives headed by a senior male fast tracker.”
They also rightly point out that “gender is not the same topic as work-life balance”. Too many companies associate these issues and/or mix them up with ethnic diversity, which “then becomes too often about making minorities comfortable with the dominant norm”.
So if “women are not yet natives of the business world”, as the authors say, and often describe themselves as uncomfortable with workplace politics, why should that be so? And if we understood that, would it help businesses engage and tackle the issue? Here, the authors might have pushed the analysis further. The work of the late David McClelland, professor of psychology at Harvard University, helped our understanding of the problem when he concluded that “power is the great motivator”.
Both research and my own experience in women's networks indicate that motives do not differ between the two genders but the acceptable manifestations of it do.
Several interesting concepts have been developed by the authors, such as the three Ws – “weather, women and web” – that are changing our lives and economies, or their thinking on gender-based segmentation, which recognises that women today represent myriad market segments. Women of all ages constitute many sub-segments with still untapped market opportunities. They also reflect the complexity and the many facets of marketing to women.
“We have sought to be as accurate as possible,” say the authors. In fact, they have done more than this, and offer a refreshing and constructive view. “I have to admit that women are still an absolute other,” Christophe de Margerie, chief executive of Total, tells the authors at one point. But, as the authors argue, women mean business, and gender sensitivity is not about diversity management.
The author is a senior partner
at Egon Zehnder International, in charge of diversity. She is a founder of professional women's networks in France and is on the founding board
of the Women's Forum for the Economy and Society
不能小觑女性市场
作者：埃弗利娜•塞万(Evelyne Sevin)为英国《金融时报》撰稿
2008年5月4日 星期日
书评：《女人不容小觑》(Why Women Mean Business)
阿维娃•维滕贝格-考克斯(Avivah Wittenberg-Cox)与艾利森•梅特兰(Alison Maitland)合著
约翰威立出版社(John Wiley)，16.99英镑
这本书也可以是另一番模样——写女人、写玻璃天花板、对女人为何不能升任最高职位发出司空见惯的悲叹。但是，阿维娃•维滕贝格-考克斯与艾利森•梅特兰显然想避开这个死胡同。
她们描绘了一幅更广阔的图景，采取了自己的立场，对女性作为职场人士与消费者的两种身份进行了全面分析。（本书的标题一语双关，也可解释为“女人即生意”）
她们解释道，《女人不容小觑》要“献给那些觉悟到‘女性经济'的公司”。女性经济即由女性日益增长的实力与潜力引起的经济革命。如果忽略这种人口统计学与商业上的发展，就做不好生意。
维滕贝格-考克斯是一位实践者，创建了欧洲职业女性网(European Professional Women's Network)等网站，她还是一位高级指导，自创了一家名为20-First的公司，就性别相关问题向各个组织提供建议。梅特兰曾是英国《金融时报》的记者，现在是一名作家，同时是伦敦城市大学卡斯商学院(Cass Business School)管理学系访问学者。她研究撰写关于商业女性的文章长达十年，为本书带来了学术视角。
毫不奇怪，《女人不容小觑》资料翔实，汇集了本领域的新锐研究成果。它分析透彻，文风直率，含有大量轶闻脚注与人物评论。发表评论的人物包括：雷曼兄弟(Lehman Brothers)的杰里米•艾萨克斯(Jeremy Isaacs)、路透社(Reuters)的尼尔•菲茨杰拉德(Niall Fitzgerald)以及施乐(Xerox)的安妮•马尔卡希(Anne Mulcahy)。因此本书既实用又生动。艾萨克斯承认：“商界仍然是一个男性为男性创造的世界。”而菲茨杰拉德指出，让女人持敌对态度的原因是“人们使用的语言有时令人难以接受”。话说得清楚、真实、刺激，有时还很挑衅。
两位作者试图提供一种新视角，通过大量采访将男性的看法纳入书中。她们指出，“（女性经济）是一个商业问题，而不只是女性的问题”，她们还通过解释性别与多样性之间的差别，详细说明了多样性管理的局限性，由此将争论又推进了一步。她们的观点是，女性既是不同的也是平等的，为此，她们呼吁在工作中实行“双语主义”——女性与男性给工作带来不同的品质，但对公司具有同样有价值。
与此同时，她们写道：“将性别纳入多样性计划，这种定位就是错误的，几乎注定会让公司的努力失败。”
维滕贝格-考克斯与梅特兰提出，各家公司“界定商业案例，让高管委员会成员参与对分析的讨论。这样做的目的，就是要让最高管理团队在为何需要采取性别举措的问题上联合起来，就解决方案取得一致。”
更多小贴士：“让人们把抵制表达出来”，“把它当成商业问题而非女性问题”，也许也可以借鉴斯伦贝榭公司(Schlumberger)的做法：“由一名有大好前途的资深男性负责推行性别举措。”
她们还正确地指出：“性别与工作生活平衡不是同一个问题。”有太多的公司把这些问题联系在一起，并且/或者把它们与人种多样性混淆在一起，然后“常常又变成让少数民族乐于接受主流规范的问题”。
因此，如果如两位作者所说，“女人并非天生就是商界中人”，而且对自己的形容是不喜欢职场政治，那么原因何在呢？如果我们能对此有所了解，那会有助于企业着手解决这个问题吗？在书中，两位作者也许已经分析得比较深入了。已故哈佛大学心理学教授戴维•麦克莱兰(David McClelland)的结论是：“权力是极大的激励因素”，他的研究可以帮助我们理解这个问题。
有关研究及我本人对女性网络的体验都可以表明，两性之间的动机并无不同，但可以接受的表现形式却有差别。
两位作者提出了几个有趣的概念，比如改变我们生活和经济的三W——天气(weather)、女性(women)和网络(web)；或是她们对按性别划分市场的看法——这种划分方法承认，今天的女性代表着无数市场组成部分。各个年龄段的女性构成了很多次级市场，市场机遇还有待开发。她们还思考了向女性营销的复杂性与多面性。
两位作者指出：“我们尽可能做到精确。”实际上，她们做的不止于此，她们还提供了清新而富有建设性的观点。道达尔(Total)首席执行官克里斯托弗•德•马尔热里(Christophe de Margerie)曾对两位作者说：“我必须承认，女性绝对是另一种人。”不过，正如两位作者所指出的那样，女性不容小觑，性别敏感性不是多样性管理的问题。
本文作者是亿康先达国际(Egon Zehnder International)公司高级合伙人，负责多样性问题。她在法国创建了职业女性社交网络，目前是Economy and Society女性论坛创始委员会的成员之一。
译者/徐柳
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