“In difference lies possibility”
-Scott E. Page
Last week a (male) friend (in information management) offered a simple explanation for why we were all so unprepared for Covid19: public health, he said, is led by women, and in the systems we currently run, women still don’t get listened to.
There are other factors, not least how we assume that the way things are today will continue into an uninterrupted future. Just-in-time has tended to supplant planning for disruption with a boisterous concern for what might be happening now.
I can’t speak to the specifics of my friend’s claim, or the extent it can be justified in a raw argument. But it is true that public health in all our jurisdictions comes a way down the road (Public Health England experienced a 40% cut in its short life).
And it is also true that forty years after the first anti discriminatory legislations were passed women still do not command equal voice and power in most of our public and private institutions. In The Irish Times today Orla O’Connor writes:
The pandemic highlighted the absence of women at senior level of decision-making in Ireland and it also shone a light on a new age of leadership, one that is being redefined by women themselves. This approach favours a more collaborative and inclusive approach that has been exemplified by women leaders in the pandemic.
The focus of Orla’s piece is women in politics (and it links to a report on access issues by Claire McGing), but the boards and executive ranks of many of our large firms as well as large public sector organisations are short of women too.
The case I would make is not just that we need more women, but that the cognitive diversity that seeking greater gender equality is not just inherently fairer, but Scott E Page’s research in mathematics shows how diversity trumps ability.
This is a profound to older arguments about individual talent should be the single arbiter of who gets opportunity. But we know that left to their own devices people select other people who are like them. The result is a slowing in performance.
This doesn’t just apply to gender. It applies to culture, class, race, like experience and skill sets. Each diverse member covers the blind spots of others in the team. Whatever the truth of my friend’s assertion, boy was public health ever a blindspot?
It’s not a matter of just levelling up numbers but changing how we work, of opening our institutions to new ways of seeing the world, seeking new influences and moving away from the “economic man” model seeking reward rather than insight.
Insight within our new connected world arises from our ability to connect with data that no longer flows within confined silos but through the porous walls of institutions. That needs skills in collaboration and developing strong social purpose.
And, a willingness to listen and not to fill all the available space with speech. As my friend John Kellden likes to say, “in a network, the best place to store information is in other people”. We definitely need more women.
“Intelligence is the ability to make connections”
–Edwin Boring, psychologist, 1939
Photo by geralt is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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