Recent Posts
Women and decisiveness. The two never seem to mesh well together. When women hesitate in making a decision, they are seen as weak. When they are aggressive with their decisions, they come off as mean or stubborn. Either way, women just can’t seem to win.
When you let someone else take the reigns, you reduce your guilt in making bad decisions and you avoid the “bossy” stamp. But if men are making all the decisions, how does that improve any situation for anyone other than them? Here’s why you need to be more decisive.
Let’s first take a look at what being decisive means. To be decisive means to make a decision confidently and quickly. Let’s break down those two aspects of decision making: confidence and quick thinking. Confidence in decision making is especially difficult for women because most women aren’t naturally inclined to think quickly with little information about the decision.
Therese Huston explains in her book, “How Women Decide,” that women tend to be more collaborative when making decisions. However, this desire for collaboration is often misconstrued. She explains, “A woman’s colleague might mistake a desire to collaborate for an inability to decide.”
Eugenia, a chief marketing officer at a data visualization company and one of the women featured in Huston’s book, says this about collaboration in the workplace, “When a woman is being collaborative, what she’s really trying to do is think three steps past the decision. A decision isn’t just a decision. It’s a decision that has to be implemented.”
This kind of thinking is in the best interest of everyone. Women do not need to include multiple viewpoints in every decision, but if she does it’s not because she’s indecisive; rather, it’s just a different way of thinking.
So what about the issues of making decisions quickly?
Studies have shown that women tend not to make decisions as quickly as men because women are more analytical thinkers. Huston says that “If anyone’s more analytical and systematic in their thinking in the workplace, it’s women, not men. Many women feel they need to have all their ducks in a row long before they propose an idea.”
Diane, a female police chief, and other women Huston interviewed compared the difference between a male cop and a female cop rushing into a crime scene. She said that many men would run into a situation head-first and try to get the situation under control. A female police office might instead ask questions and try to analyze the situation. This can be misinterpreted as hesitancy.
If a woman does not have enough evidence to support her decision, she is not going to announce it readily. This gives the impression that women are indecisive. However, women aren’t hesitant, they are simply sorting between options and making the best decision based on their knowledge and their predictions.
But even though women make decisions in different ways than men, men still seem to have little tolerance for the process. Alice Eagly, psychologist at Northwestern University, and Steven Karau, a management professor at Southern Illinois University believe this phenomenon may be due to the role congruity theory.
This theory explains that people are more liked when they behave in ways that fit society’s typical roles. In contrast, those who don’t fit in are disliked. Because of this behavior, women are often encouraged to make quick decisions simply because it’s socially acceptable.
This habit to hesitate is also partly due to stereotype threat, which is when one group is marginalized by a particular (and often untrue) stereotype. Huston uses the example that “women are bad drivers.” A woman may be confident in her driving but when she gets in the car with someone who has openly stated he or she thinks women are bad drivers, she drives extra carefully.
As a driver, she is faced with the added pressure of avoiding that stereotype. The same applies to other situations, affecting many marginalized groups. Because of this, many women tend not to make decisions for fear of fulfilling the stereotype. This results in men’s continued practice of taking charge.
So why does being decisive matter? Although nothing is inherently wrong with letting someone else make a decision, it is never healthy to allow that person to dominate every time a decision is made. If only one group were to speak for multiple voices, repression of those voices would eventually occur.
If women are to continue staying silent when a decision has to be made, men would take over. What would happen then? Women might not be able to control their own bodies, have a say in welfare or gain leadership positions. So in order for more equal decision making between men and women, women need to be able to step in and take control of a situation quickly and confidently.
