Who really won’t shut up in meetings? Men or women?

THE Tokyo Olympics was already rumbling with controversy when president of the Tokyo organising committee, Yoshiro Mori, dropped the sexist bomb.

“On boards with a lot of women, the board meetings take so much time...” and “If their speaking time isn’t restricted to a certain extent, they have difficulty finishing, which is annoying,” were some of the derogatory remarks he reportedly made about women.

The committee was discussing steps for bringing more women on to boards in sports.

To be fair, Mori, probably didn’t even realise the issue with his words.

Japan seems to have a vocal women problem. Just a few days after Mori’s put down, the country’s governing party, the Liberal Democratic Party, invited women to attend its key meetings – as long as they do not speak. They can only submit opinions afterwards.

Unsurprisingly, Japan’s sexism row has raised the nagging question: Who really won’t shut up in meetings? Men or women?

According Wharton School’s organisational psychologist Adam Grant, data shows it is men who can’t stop yapping in meetings.

As he writes in an op-ed for the Washington Post, “The pattern is clear and consistent: It’s usually men who won’t shut up. Especially powerful men.”

He cites a study of US senators, which shows that those who had more leadership roles, seniority, committee assignments, influence, legislative activity and earmarks in spending bills took up more time on the Senate floor – but only if they were men.

“Why didn’t having status and influence lead women to be more vocal? Experiments showed that women weren’t worried about building rapport. They were afraid of being perceived as too dominant and controlling, which is exactly what happened when they did speak up,” says Grant.

As he puts it, gender stereotypes persist:

“People expect men to be assertive and ambitious but women to be caring and other-oriented. A man who runs his mouth and holds court is a confident expert. A woman who talks is aggressive or pushy.”

This, he adds, helps explain why meetings are full of “manologues.”

Political scientists find that when groups of five make democratic decisions, if only one is a woman, she speaks 40% less than each of the men. Even if the group has a majority of three women, they each speak 36% less than each of the two men. Only in groups with four women do they each finally take up as much airtime as the one man.

According to Grant, in too many teams and too many workplaces, women face the harsh reality that it is better to stay silent and be thought polite than speak up and jeopardise their careers.

“As Mori said of the Olympic Committee, ‘We have about seven women at the organizing committee but everyone understands their place.’ If you think women talk too much, it could be because you expect them to talk so little,” he writes.

When women take the risk of speaking up, they’re often silenced by men.

Says Grant, journalist Jessica Bennett calls this “talk-blocking” by men: “manterrupting”.

“In a meta-analysis of 43 studies, men were more likely than women to talk over others — especially in intrusive ways that silenced the rest of the room and demonstrated their dominance. At least Kanye West promised to let Taylor Swift finish when he took the mic from her,” he notes.

Since these studies were done in Western cultures, a natural question is how things play out in the East.

Grant agrees.

“Sure enough, Japan is different when it comes to gender bias. It tends to be worse. In the World Economic Forum’s 2018 ranking of 149 countries by gender equality, Japan ranked 110th – trailing behind not-so-egalitarian countries like Brazil, Ghana, Guatemala, Hungary and Russia,” he points out.

Yoshiro Mori has his own explanation for why women talk too much. “When one person raises a hand, others think they need to speak up as well,” he mansplained. “Women are competitive.”

But the data tell us the opposite, says Grant.

He explains, women are often reluctant to compete against men, and it doesn’t stem from biology. It stems from power. In patriarchal cultures like Japan, men are more competitive than women, but that pattern reverses in matrilineal cultures, where women compete more than men.

“One hallmark of a patriarchal culture is precarious manhood. The core idea is that masculinity is hard to win but easy to lose. Men face pressure to demonstrate their superiority and strength. An assertive woman can be a threat to a fragile male ego.

“In countries and companies dominated by alpha males, women are often expected to be seen but not heard. Much ink has been spilled helping them figure out how to walk this tightrope.

“Women have received many tips on how to disagree without seeming disagreeable, challenge without being too confrontational, raise their voices without shouting,” says Grant, before noting, “But maybe it’s overconfident men who need to change.”

In studies of over 100,000 leaders, although men were more confident in their leadership skills, women were rated as more competent leaders by others. In evaluations from their bosses, women outscored men on 17 of 19 key leadership capabilities, he adds, highlighting how in the early months of the pandemic, researchers found that Covid-19 mortality rates were lower in countries with female leaders and US states with female governors.

“Of course there are exceptions, but on average women introduced lockdowns sooner and faced less resistance – in part because they were more likely to acknowledge people’s fears and express compassion for their pain.

“It’s not that women are necessarily naturally better listeners and leaders than men, but that women have had to master these skills to succeed within the shackles of gender stereotypes.

“If a woman pointed all this out, she’d be accused of whining and complaining. When (white) men make the same case, we’re more likely to get heard,” Grant says, stressing that recognising this injustice is the first step toward changing it.

“When asked at a news conference whether he genuinely thinks women talk too much, Mori responded: ‘I don’t listen to women that much lately, so I don’t know.’ And therein lies the problem.” — Agencies