Time for Women to Take Over

I have a theory that women, especially mothers, have several advantages over men in the small-business world.

¶They are better listeners.

¶Consequently, they pick up details and nuances men often miss.

¶They are more active networkers.

¶They are better motivators.

¶Having to juggle home and workplace duties, they are better multi-taskers.

¶They are more patient, and thus better able to stick to long-term strategies.

¶They are more tenacious. Men can be pretty dogged, but not a single one, to my knowledge, has had to endure childbirth.

I searched the Internet for evidence for this thesis and found none. The book titles I came across, like “Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office” by Lois P. Frankel, seemed to contradict it. It’s a familiar tune: women leaders need to drop that nurturing nonsense and kick butt the way men do.

Perhaps it is the other way around. Perhaps men ought to imitate the opposite sex. The tide is turning in women’s favor, after all. They now account for 57 percent of college students. They are rising up the ranks in corporate America and invading formerly male sanctuaries like engineering and even construction. Most profoundly, they are changing the entrepreneurial landscape, with the number of businesses they own increasing at twice the overall rate for the last two decades, to 10.4 million today, or 40 percent of the total, according to the Center for Women’s Business Research (www.cfwbr.org/).