Tight cultures, extremism, women and dogs

Humphrey was feeling a bit down in the dumps this week. Readers of this blog know that he takes a strong stand on promoting women's issues. And yet, after decades of molasses-slow movement in more or less the right - er, correct - direction, society seems to be taking a few steps back. More accurately, the right seems to be vanquishing human rights.

Humphrey and Kramer (in the background) looked around for some answers.

Humphrey has been wondering all week how the things he's been hearing on the news could possibly be true. Are some of the American political leaders really saying those things?

Then, he came across a summary of research from the Rotman School of Business carried out by Soo Min Toh and Geoffrey Leonardelli summarized in today's Globe & Mail. While this research doesn't point to solutions, it helped Humphrey understand a bit more about the phenomenon.

The researchers define tight cultures as those who have clear, rigid rules about how people should behave, and impose tough sanctions on those who don’t. Loose cultures, conversely, tolerate difference and are open to change. When tight cultures are patriarchal and sexist, they hold women back with overt systemic barriers. But when tight cultures make a top-down decisions to promote women (Norway is an example of this), then women do well because the population tends to be compliant. The article states that: "Tight societies that choose egalitarianism are good at pushing women into the corporate establishment. Loose societies that are open to change are good at empowering women more broadly, encouraging them to join the work force and to start their own small businesses."

The last couple of paragraphs are especially intereting:
But the authors point out that leadership is not only about how others view you, but also about how you view yourself. Centuries of sexism, they argue, mean that female leaders sometimes cede leadership roles to men because the women, too, “believe that being male … is more leader-like.’’
Loose cultures can counteract those self-imposed stereotypes to some degree. But the final frontier for women, even in societies that allow them to lead established organizations, is to be ruthless and to take big risks – essential qualities in world-changing entrepreneurs.

Now, Humphey is not so sure that entrepreneurship is the answer to women's problems. He thinks that Norweigians may argue that it's more about creating systems that support women's advancement - for instance, shifting gender roles in highly prescriptive ways, and supporting women by replacing "false choices" (in the Martha Nussbaum sense) with "real choices," and making those choices possible with things like daycare.

Kramer rather quickly tired of this discussion, and yawned.