Questions For You

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin said:
Since 2002, the CBP has been sponsoring PM Benchmarking Forums attended by an elite group of project management leaders--PMO directors, etc. In the beginning, we had few women in the groups, but that number has steadily climbed. Today, women usually outnumber men at these events ... even the IT-focused ones. And, last year our PMO of the Year award was won by a PMO with a staff of eight ... all women.

Kate Burns said:
I think that this seemingly simplistic question is actually very complex to respond to it and give it justice. I would therefore hesitate to respond with a simplistic response. However in my experience, successful projects require a number of key people, not just a 'good' project manager. The whole leadership team - its skills, experience and ability and additionally all the other project staff, are critical to the success of a project. Do women tend to understand this and build a team to suit? Do women recognise their own abilities and areas for improvement and consequently surround themselves with a top team that complements their own skills and the skills required for successful delivery?

Robin Hornby said:
This information is extremely interesting. I have thought about my own experiences of the past 30 years and concluded: I can recall many good and very good PMs, both male and female, but I can only recall poor PMs who were male. But I inherently dislike advice like “if you want a PM who meets on time on budget choose female”. That is a potentially discriminatory judgment. What we need to do now, as other respondents have noted, is determine the characteristics of the individual that point to good performance, and ignore the gender. Robin Hornby

William Ng said:
As a bold generalization, the trend tends to be true in terms of both project outcomes as well as content level of the project team upon the completion of the projects. While there are very talented male project managers as well, female project managers are generally stronger than the male counterpart both in communication as well as attention to details. Both traits are critical towards the success of a project and project team satisfaction. However, in projects with short turnaround time, my observation has been that male project managers tends to deliver higher performance.

priya said:
yes, they are generally speaking more realistic, more patient, more fluent with life circumstances, better trained to cope with several tasks & conflicts at the same time & hard workers. In contrast, men are normally more result oriented, get faster to the point, tho usually thru very bad people management. They can be better at pressing people to go further.

Kathryn Bishop said:
This is a hard question to respond to fully. Let's just say that I have often had to make choices between an action which will certainly deliver the predicted benefit, and a different approach which will cause less collateral damage in the organisation and probably deliver the predicted level of benefit. As an experienced programme and project manager, I am well aware of the need to consider how much change the organisation has had to deal with in the past, and how well or painfully that change was implemented, very much as a surgeon might consider how much scar tissue is around in the part of the body which requires more surgery; so I am increasingly aware of the need to reduce collateral damage to the organisation for business reasons as well as reasons of humaneness. Perhaps it is the degree of experience of certain types of (badly implemented) change which make people work in this way?

priya said:
I think men can get better clarity as far as it seems to be easier for them a result oriented approach. I think women do more allowances on the way to success. In the long run I dont think this is a bad approach. Men seem to manage results better, women seem to prioritize the process over the result.

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin said:
Women can be better at facilitative and communications roles ... but it isn't a given by any means. I have had dreadful female managers and wonderful male managers, even within the same organization. I think frequently the best women in leadership roles become discouraged with workplace culture that does not allow them to smoothly combine their equally important "project portfolios" at work and at home, so they migrate out of corporations and towards entrepreneurship. This is borne out by recent statistics on the increasing numbers of women small business owners in the US.

priya said:
From my point of view nurture means more then nature. Workplaces are in a way unfit to welcome women, who are always with an outsider air in them. Either you do too much or too little, the standards for women's successful behaviour are always elusive & conflicting. I think it has to do a lot with women's attitude (out of so much learning process all life long) about authority, success, deserve...

Kate Burns said:
Currently the balance of the sexes in my part of the organisation is skewed with higher numbers of women. Past experience when working on other projects tended to have more women in project management roles too.

William Ng said:
In my organization, the mixture of famale to males tends to be balanced. However, male project managers tends to be in more senior positions and female project managers are more likely in more junior positions. As well, there is a tendency of hiring females as new project managers.

priya said:
I am answering from Spain. I work normally on gender research projects, gender equality policies & the like, so I am very familiar with the controversial world of sex & gender in the workplace. There are way too more women than men in my field, which makes it a bit of an underground world. Men seem to mean "importance", "status"; "value" at workplaces, while women are more on the "amateurish", "social", "taken-for-granted care activities".