Challenging Women – Gender, Culture and Organisation was ten years in the making. As such, it provides a powerful insight into changes in political ideology over that period and into how those changes impacted both on women and on the public sector – particularly local government. When I started to read this book I expected to read and learn about the experience of women managers. I also found, however, a book rich in the study of public sector organizations, what characterizes such organizations and the changes (good and bad) wrought on them over the 1980s and 1990s. Su Maddock has gathered a wealth of information reflecting individual women’s experiences and presented that information in a wider theoretical framework.
As a senior woman manager in local government on the other side of the globe from Su Maddock’s study, it was fascinating to note the number of times I could directly relate to the experiences of the women managers presented in the book and to the cultural and organizational issues discussed
Challenging Women focussed on the role women played in organizational change during the 1980s and 1990s and how male gender culture and organizational behaviour impact on that role.
As outlined in the book, current management gurus promote the importance, in today’s organization, of those attributes which many women working in local government have – social commitment, self‐motivation, autonomy, openness to change and a desire to change things. Interestingly, a number of these women saw the advent of the new public management (NPM) and the increasing emphasis on contracting services out, as a real opportunity to deliver on user/customer needs in an efficient and open manner. Many of these women had been initiators of new approaches and promoted alternative working practises. As the book reveals in its latter chapters, many women became disillusioned with the manner in which NPM and managerialism developed, with its emphasis almost solely on efficiency. Contracting increased competition rather than enhancing the partnerships and collaboration many had hoped it would. To me, the book revealed much about the power of both organizational systems and gender to ward off challenge and subvert change initiatives.
Transformational rather than transactional leadership was a key characteristic of the majority of the women cited in the book. However, the gender cultures in many organizations dulled this characteristic and sadly, women were often ridiculed or sometimes even “sacked” for challenging and innovating. Maddock also drew out other factors which can and do thwart women promoting change – these include professional, economic and management systems.
Maddock provides useful statistics to set the context for her studies and draws on a range of management and gender studies to provide a wider‐ranging discussion of the woman’s individual experiences highlighted in the book. Having these potted summaries of many different writers and researchers I found both useful and frustrating. In parts of the book I felt like I was reading a compendium of experts and would have preferred more direct commentary from Maddock’s own, obviously extensive studies. Where individual or groups of woman’s experiences were offered, I found them both enlightening and familiar – enlightening in the way they described their experience and familiar – in terms of the overall context of that experience.
One telling component of the lives of the women interviewed was that the awareness of a gender culture did not make women supportive of one another. Gender culture, it seems, is powerful enough to make women’s expectations of women almost impossible. Women wanted other women to be strong leaders and yet not stand out – to be challenging and yet conform. Being conciliatory and open were highly valued in a theoretical sense but often criticized in practice. This reinforced the conundrum facing many women who wish to maintain and develop a different style of leadership but find that it is either ineffective or too controversial to the mainstream.
One hopes that with the increasing emphasis on business ethics, socially‐responsible businesses and triple bottom line accounting, that the different skills and approaches women can bring to organizations will be sought out, listened to and valued.
The chapter on British Public Sector Reforms was extremely familiar. The irony of the Libertarian Left and the New Right being collaborators (perhaps unwittingly) in the dismantling of public sector bureaucratic structures and cultures was well presented. New Zealand experienced a very similar collusion. As Maddock states:
While both the Right and the Libertarian Left were critical of the bureaucratic nature of public administrations, their solutions to the problems were very different. The Libertarian Left wanted to develop local democracy and involve people in the planning of local facilities and services. … the significance of community activity was understood by the New Right. Although they never acknowledged it they realised the potential within voluntary and community organizations as substitutes for state service providers, not as a powerful vehicle for local democracy or their ability to socialize public sector management (pp. 132‐3).
Public sector restructuring and reforms in both the UK and New Zealand were based on the claims that these would bring a more business‐like approach to public management (after all who wouldn’t want to act in a business‐like and efficient manner?) and on concepts of choice. Alongside this, a new type of public sector manager was promoted. Radical change swept through many organizations – flattening structures, downsizing, introducing performance management criteria for staff and agencies alike, with a strong base in accounting and financial performance.
The more market and competitive contracting approach encourages combative and competitive behaviour and tends to focus managers on short‐term wins rather than longer term sustainable changes. For the women interviewed by Maddock, such behaviours were a long way from the community‐based, local choice, local governance environment they had hoped to see emerge.
Chapter 8 – “Innovative women are challenging women” – articulates the desires of women public sector managers interviewed to seek a change in management style and to transform the organizations they worked in – particularly in terms of staff relationships, customer and service users, and bringing social values into the workplace and into management thinking.
… developing democracy inside and outside (of) the organization. Central to their thinking and actions was a desire for change in cultures and structures as well as in inter‐personal behaviours. They not only challenged the male mode of interaction but also the institutional frameworks and value systems (p. 159).
Many of the women interviewed were driven by a strong desire for social change, a desire that outweighed their own career ambitions, to the extent that some saw a move to the top level of management as working against what they hoped to achieve. It seems that many top level managers who were women were viewed as having opted out and taken on a male management style. As a consequence, a lot of the women pushing for change and innovation were not visible.
The majority of women were insistent that collaborative ways of working were essential to service quality, but only those more challenging women were prepared to argue for changes in management structures, reward systems and performance measures. Many suffered and were punished for their efforts and attempts as social transformation (p. 162).
Working in the public sector system became a huge frustration for the majority of women interviewed. They wanted more emphasis on clients and users and a workplace environment where working relationships were open, more informal and focussed on solving problems. One crucial aspect of the approach of these challenging women is one I see played out in my own and other organizations – women in management tend to plan and think their way into work issues; men, on the other hand, seem to prefer a crisis management approach. This factor in turn has a major flow‐on effect on visibility and impact. Having and managing crises becomes valued and noticed, while running an area smoothly and quietly seems to imply that your area of work is easy and undemanding.
Chapter 9 outlined the barriers to achieving the transformation challenging women had hoped to pursue and achieve. Interestingly, some of these barriers were gender culture related and some very reflective of the nature of public sector organizations. The main barriers included:
Other women (their lack of support and often highly critical stance of women managers).
What Maddock has termed as the “Caring conundrum”. To be challenging often meant appearing less caring and therefore reinforcing myths of the hard career women.
Making innovators scapegoats. Challenging management systems made these women vulnerable and often ostracized – some to the point where they were sacked, only to be reinstated as a result of unfair dismissal and then feeling too vulnerable to stay on in their positions.
The blame culture. Local government (and probably the public sector in general) is heavily dominated by a culture of blame. Perhaps because everything local government is involved in is visible and subject to localized and personalized politics. It is a very sad reflection on the sector because innovation (which always carries risk with it) gets beaten out of the people who work within the sector. Personally, I think Maddock touched on a factor here which is worthy of a lot more explanation – if we want our local government (and other public sector) agencies to be more responsive, innovative, and open to change, what can be done to take these agencies beyond a culture of blame?
The impact of managerialism and the impact of staff. Women managers hoped that dismantling bureaucracy would bring an acceptance of inclusive management – however, it resulted in a focus on contracts, tight performance management and a high degree of specification. The focus on efficiency made everyone very busy measuring and reporting (and increasing outputs) but it was at the cost of collaborative relationships between colleagues, staff and agencies. Many women found this alienating and increasingly questioned their ability to influence change.
Maddocks’ drawing together of individual experience, management and gender theory and organizational (at least public sector) behaviour, leads to a very clear message for innovative women wishing to change systems – it is more than an uphill struggle. Maddock concludes that change is possible but is most likely to occur when we can talk openly about gender effects and when there is a greater awareness of how male culture permeates organizations, influences decision making and management styles. I hope that these challenging women will continue to challenge and from their own frameworks. The words of one rang strongly in my head – “It’s a question of what you feel ambitious for, life or work”. Striving to be ambitious for life is my kind of challenge.
