Female Corporate Management Styles

Why are so few women in top business leadership positions? My experience over thelast three years is that the Australian corporate environment is much more blokey than its US counterpart. I'd say that sexism remains alive and well in Australian workplaces. A 2006 study revealed that women hold fewer than one in ten Australian executive management positions. On top of that, half of Australia's top 200 public companies actually have no female executives at all. On the other hand, more than eight out of ten companies in the United States do have female executive managers.

From a personal perspective, sometimes I feel as though management in Australian organisations has far too many dinosaurs who need to wake up and smell the roses. I lived and worked in Chile for several years and the cultural business attitude I've experienced in Australia is not all that different! Today my colleague made an interesting comment. I'd invited him to attend one of my client meetings, as he's starting up a similar project with a different client. After the meeting he said he was struck by the "softer touch" I had in guiding the client towards the decisions I wanted. I do work in a male dominated industry, and he might not have ever attended a meeting at our company headed up by a female. I wonder if he meant I was subtly manipulating the outcome rather than strong-arming it in the male fashion. Anyway, I did have a fantastic boss and mentor in my US job, and I'm struggling to find anyone who can fit that mold at this one.

An Adoptee

I am adopted. My parents adopted me when I was 6 weeks old. I've grown up knowing that I'm adopted since before I could remember. I have parents who love and support me, and a large extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins. I also have an adopted brother, who was adopted at the age of 3 months. My experience growing up as an adopted child has been wholeheartedly positive. In fact, I've never had the urge to investigate or contact my birth parents. I think this is probably based on a large fear of what I may find, and the certain possibility of disappointment. Why look a gift horse in the mouth?

Oh, sure I have a rebellious streak and probably had my parents wondering what they'd gotten themselves into during my adolecent years. In fact, they sent me off to female Catholic boarding school for high school because of attitude problems and "failure to live up to my potential." The shouting matches and arguements with my parents during the teen years are not something I've forgotten. But looking back, packing me off to boarding school is probably what saved me from myself and kept me focused on getting into a good university and achieving some goals in life.

I've never quite understood the sentiment from many adoptees that they just couldn't connect with their adoptive parents, or overcome some deep feelings of abandonment. What exactly are they expecting? For some reason, its never been an issue with me. If anything, I feel the opposite. It is completely illogical that I was randomly chosen to be adopted by nice, middle class people who had heaps of love to give. Now that I've lived in Latin America, and traveled through eastern Europe and a bit of Asia, I'm even further baffled that I somehow managed to end up with statistically incredible luck to be adopted by a family that had enough to eat at night, treated women as equals, were reasonably mentally stable and didn't practice any form of physical or sexual abuse. Why me? How did I get to be the lucky one? Maybe I was originally supposed to be born to a single 15 year old mother living in a trailerpark, intermittantly dating sketchy guys who might've abused me when mum wasn't looking. How would I have turned out then?

Anyway, being a parent I can now understand that maternal tug that probably never goes away when you give a child up for adoption.... regardless of the reasons why. But isn't it a mother's primary duty to do what is best for the child?