Gender and managerial competence: support for theories of androgyny?

Since Schein’s evocative and enduring metaphor "think manager – think male" there has been a stream of literature discussing gender difference in managerial style. The newer literature about managerial competence, however, remains largely silent about gender, regardless of whether managerial competence is contextualised in an organizational or a human resources perspective. This is true even of edited collections where gender tokenism is generally evident. The study uses a rarely‐researched sample, female manufacturers in small and medium manufacturing enterprises, to explore gender and managerial competence and to test Marshall’s suggestion that the next wave of theorizing may well strengthen an “androgynous” manager model. The findings show a pattern of both similarity and difference in the managerial competence of male and female manufacturers in technology uptake and tentative support for the androgynous manager model.