New Research Confirms What We Already Knew: Women Make the Best Managers

Women are superheroes. We are capable of managing an entire family, studying, running a household, and shining at work. While this is often a product of gender disparities, we have passed the test with flying colors. So much so that a new study has found that teams led by female managers perform better.

How ironic, isn’t it? We get paid less than men of the same gender, but we do our jobs better. But let’s get to the data.

According to new research led by Jorge Tamayo, cisgender men manage other men well. Similarly, cisgender women manage other women well. However, when the gender of managers and workers is mixed, women outperform men. That is, men manage women worse, while women are adept at managing both women and men.

The secret of efficiency

According to Tamayo, co-author of the research “Rapport in Organizations: Evidence from Fast Food,” women are more effective than men at establishing good relationships between mixed teams. This translates into higher productivity and increased sales.

Tamayo co-authored the paper with Achyuta Adhvaryu of the University of California, San Diego, and Parker Howell and Anant Nyshadham of the University of Michigan. The researchers found that teams with a high percentage of male managers and a majority of female workers tend to have less rapport, which can undermine productivity.

In short, women make better managers

Although researchers and professional development specialists have already highlighted the importance of interpersonal skills such as communication, Tamayo found that a proper relationship between management and staff is key.

In the fast food sector, for example, researchers found that women are, in fact, better team coordinators.

“This study shows that investing in both managers and workers is important at the same time,” Tamayo told Harvard Business School. “The notion that rapport is critical to performance is very novel. Some management practices require a good rapport with workers. And some management styles and approaches only work if you have that good rapport. [Lack of rapport could] lead to increased turnover and low effort or so-called ‘silent quitting.'”

These findings completely change perspectives on work organization

Did you know that women didn’t begin to enter management positions until the 1980s? However, progress towards gender equality at work has stagnated since the 1990s on key indicators such as attitudes, professional integration, and pay differentials.

Sociologist Paula England describes this situation as an “uneven and stagnant” gender revolution. She highlights how the momentum of the feminist movement of the 1970s has not been constant. Although female representation has increased considerably in management, the story is more complex.

Women have made great strides, occupying the majority of new management positions since 1980, but this progress is marred by increasing occupational segregation and persistent pay gaps in fields where women are in the majority.

Despite the increase in women in management positions, this progress has yet to translate into equality across the board. Many female managers are concentrated in fields that emphasize caregiving, such as health services and education, which also have the largest gender pay gaps. Meanwhile, male-dominated fields, such as engineering and computer science, continue to offer higher salaries.

This pattern shows that, although women have broken into management, the gender revolution is far from complete.

But could Tamayo’s findings change this situation?

Tamayo’s research focused on Latin America and studied the expansion of a major food delivery platform. It looked at how managers adjusted staffing levels to manage peaks in demand.

Analyzing staffing and productivity data, they found that female managers were 13% more likely to spend more time on scheduling than any other task and to assign workers preferred shifts to avoid high turnover.

“This is consistent with the fact that female managers are, in general, more aware of and responsive to workers’ scheduling constraints,” Tamayo says.

They also found that women managers cared more about their employees than men managed women. Likewise, women who managed stores also performed better on targets than when men managed women.

“Many industries are quite far from gender parity. Management, systems, and culture have been designed from a male perspective,” says Tamayo. “Our findings underscore that even if we bring women to the front line, we may not be setting them up for success if we don’t improve female representation at the senior level in parallel. Not only do we need to rebalance gender parity at senior levels, but right now, we are skewed in the wrong direction in almost every industry and every part of the world.”