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Professor Mark Ritson of Melbourne Business School – a leading business academic and a PhD alumni of Lancaster University, UK, my own alma mater – has declared that women should be the ‘natural choice’ for top marketing positions. The way Professor Ritson sees it, women quite simply have better brains for marketing. Interesting stuff.
Professor Ritson has laid out a genetics-based argument to back up this theory, focusing on the fact that women are more naturally …
… empathetic, whereas men can struggle with non-verbal messages, expressions of sympathy and general understanding. He states that:
‘There is, perhaps, no greater skill for a marketer than empathy. Women are genetically geared towards being empathetic before they are born. In the womb, men’s brains are affected hugely by testosterone which destroys cells in the communication centres of the brain and a growth of cells in the sex and aggression centres. This doesn’t happen to women’s brains and they continue to grow unaffected.’
In what appears to be a rather, um, damning and withering take on male attributes, Professor Ritson also states that the female brain is better suited to combining qualitative and quantitative research, has a greater attention to detail and is better suited to treat each client as unique, rather than putting them into groups based on previous experience – something their male counterparts are much more likely to do.
Ritson, who has taught at the London Business School, MIT and the University of Minnesota, concluded by saying that:
‘If I were to list the top 10 marketers I have worked with in my career, the list of women outnumbers the men. Despite this, the vast majority of my clients have been male.’
Whilst I think it’s great that this guy is recognising women’s strengths in the field of business, I do think that this is a controversial viewpoint, given that it focuses on genetics – surely nurture has to come into whether someone is a good marketer more than nature – especially nature that occurs in the womb and at least 20 years before some starts a career in marketing? As much as I want to be, I’m unconvinced.
In addition, I think Ritson might have unwittingly scored a bit of an own goal here, proving his point of ‘men aren’t too great at marketing’ himself. Let’s face it - in announcing his opinion on this one, he’s not exactly marketing his findings, books or future courses towards a male audience now, is he?
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If we switched the words male and female in this article you would be calling it sexist and writing it off as drivel.
I’m totally writing it off as drivel anyways.
Perhaps it is that women are ON AVERAGE better empathizers, and thus might be better at predicting what people will want, and convincing people of what they want. I think this only works as long as women are also the primary shoppers.
I am incredibly uncomfortable with these arguments coming out that women are inherently better at certain things than men. It wasn’t so long ago that the opposite arguments were made to keep women at home in the kitchen. I think we are doing a disservice to men and to feminism by accepting these arguments. It may be true that women and men have different talents, but I suspect that those differences are tiny and not worthy of the generalizations being made. They are also not true of all men and all women. Especially homosexual men and women – which this heteronormative take one the female brain and male brain totally ignores. Studies have shown that gay women have many brain similarities with straight men, and that gay men have many brain similarities with straight women. What’s their place in all this? It’s glaringly absent in this opinion. That should be a red flag.
I vote we just hire the most competent people without buggering about with gender.
Second!