At the beginning of the year, I called the worldwide swing in Europe and the wider Anglosphere to radical forms of conservatism the ‘Great Reversal’.
US President Donald Trump set the pace faster than both his critics and supporters expected with his pledge to end wars in Europe and the Middle East with some tough love.
Some saw his appeasement of Russia as a rerun of Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time”, though this scenario is impossible to judge at this stage. The neutralisation of Iran had a more positive response.
On the domestic front, Trump’s rapid despatch of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives was imitated in the private sector, with few regrets as it was not obvious the claimed benefits had outweighed criticism that talent and merit had been downgraded.
New Zealand is an outlier to these sea changes. While the coalition Government was among the first in the world to cruise into power on the Great Reversal, public opinion indicates frustration at the pace of expected change.
Some of this may be attributed to yet another phenomenon, this time at the psychological level. This ‘Great Divergence’ – unlike previous economic concepts – recognises that, as societies have become more gender-equal, as well as wealthier and healthier, behavioural sex differences and preferences have become greater.
Opposite outcome
American psychologist David Geary.
It’s the opposite of what was expected when women reached equality in the workplace, education, politics, and other aspects of life, given that past sex differences were simply due to stereotypes or social norms and expectations.
PIC DAVID GEARY
Caption: American psychologist David Geary.
The new phrase was jointly coined by evolutionary psychologist David Geary and Lewis Halsey, an environmental physiologist, who link the expansion of sexual differences with higher living standards. “These differences are smaller in populations living in difficult conditions – those with higher disease burden and relatively poor nutrition,” they say.
Girls and women typically do better on what’s called episodic memory – memory for personal experiences; verbal memory; short-term and long-term memory. Boys and men generally do better in visual-spatial tasks such as navigating from one place to another or generating and manipulating visual images.
“As we move from these stressed populations to more-developed regions with healthier populations, the sex differences in both areas expand, but in different directions. Women’s memory and verbal advantages get bigger, and men’s visual-spatial advantages also increase,” Geary said in a Quillette podcast.
One effect in the workplace is that women who are interested in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics still prefer to go into occupations such as nursing (that is, medicine) but at a much higher level as highly qualified doctors and clinicians.
Secret Service bumbled in response to Trump assassination attempt.
Inorganic fields
“However, they’re not more likely to show preferences for inorganic fields like becoming a mechanic or an engineer, computer science, or working with non-living things,” Geary said.
The result is that medicine, once dominated by men, is now a female-majority profession in most Western countries. This is even more the case with veterinary medicine. Women with the science and maths skills necessary for engineering or computer science are not choosing to take that route.
While these areas may remain male-dominated, the opposite is the case for most other professions. This includes education, social sciences, law, and communications. According to Geary, a distinguished professor at the University of Missouri, gender dominance is self-reinforcing, not necessarily due to any type of prejudice or stereotyping, but because men and women have different ways of relating to one another.
In this context, DEI can have the perverse outcomes that Trump hopes to reverse with his executive order, “ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity”. He had some easy hits – the bumbling Secret Service agents at his assassination attempt, and diversity as the priority in the Los Angeles Fire Department rather than preparation to fight fires.
This anti-male ‘feminisation’ has concerned some conservative female intellectuals. Examples are Theology of Home founder Carrie Gress (The End of Woman); Louise Perry (The Case Against the Sexual Revolution); behavioural scientist Cory Clark; philosopher Kathleen Stock (Material Girls); and Australian activist Bettina Arndt.
Among other things, they argue that successful societies and enterprises need masculine qualities such as risk-taking, hierarchies, and aggressive competition as much as the feminine ones of protecting the vulnerable, risk aversion, and egalitarianism. They provide lists of ‘yin and yang’ characteristics that are too long to debate here.
Local perspective
For a local perspective on some of these issues, I turned to a rare example in publishing: a man writing about business (another case of female domination?). Australian-born Steve Vamos launched Through Shifts and Shocks last year to advise executives on how to manage change. He featured in this NBR podcast.
His parents were Hungarian refugees from the 1956 uprising. Steve arrived in December 1957 when his mother Kathy was still in her teens. Father Peter worked at IBM Australia for 38 years, a company that typified a masculine environment. Steve started work there in 1979 and stayed for 14 years, rising to head of its personal computer division.
This, he discovered, made him second class in the IBM hierarchy, where the mainframe was king. The mainframers disdained their colleagues in the “toy factory”, who in response referred to the “dead division”.
IBM gave up personal computers and now makes money from large-system services. Today, Microsoft is worth 13 times more than IBM and Apple 14 times more.
Vamos wisely moved on, headhunted to run Apple Asia-Pacific at a time when it was in turmoil after the departure of co-founder Steve Jobs. A low-end, low-cost strategy failed under two interim CEOs until reverting to Jobs in 1997.
But Vamos didn’t stay for that highly successful era. He was instead attracted by an internet-based startup media business, NineMSN, jointly owned by Microsoft and the Packer family’s publishing and TV empire.
Steve Vamos.
Poor culture
Here, Vamos was in an industry he didn’t know. It had a poor culture in its youthful workforce and no clear purpose or direction. It was also losing money. His immediate response was to cut its 10 business plans back to three.
It taught Vamos to listen and learn, as well as adopt a mindset of not being a ‘know it all’. – the head coach approach, rather than the star player.
NineMSN survives as Nine.com.au, one of Australia’s top four news websites. It is fully owned by Nine Entertainment, publisher of the Age in Melbourne and the Sydney Morning Herald, after Microsoft pulled out in 2013.
After five years, Vamos accepted another step up, as managing director of Microsoft Australia, giving him more access to the top tier of America’s technology titans.
His final career step was one best known to New Zealanders: rising to Rod Drury’s challenge in 2018 to take accounting software company Xero from local hero to the global stage. Vamos had been familiar with the company as an adviser for 18 months. In late 2022, Vamos announced his intention to step down as CEO, leaving in May 2023.
Xero founder Rod Drury.
Career path
His career path is told in fits and starts between long stretches of management advice, which is the primary purpose of the book. However, I would have preferred the more personal approach of a conventional autobiography.
To make up for this, Vamos provides a few pages on the notable people he worked with – Jobs, Kerry and James Packer, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, and, of course, Drury. He also comments on some of the DEI issues mentioned above.
The technology environment he describes is unlikely to lose its dominant male characteristics, but he was an early adopter of gender quotas, as was IBM some 30 years ago. He was pulled back then, when he asked a potential hire whether she had plans for a family.
That awareness of what was appropriate was reinforced in a quote from a Harvard Business Review study of why women appeared to lack confidence in interviews, compared with men, and how that can be overcome.
Behavioural psychology is something all managers should heed (Vamos recommends Gabor Mate’s The Myth of Normal) but that doesn’t extend to social activism at work.
“… [I]n a world of distraction and more distance between people at work than ever, it is important that we don’t pursue social issues at the expense of the ‘meat and potatoes’ of why organisations exist.”
At Xero, that meant selling software and providing customer service, something Vamos ensured was his legacy.
Through Shifts and Shocks: Lessons from the front line of technology and change, by Steve Vamos (Wiley).
Nevil Gibson is a former editor-at-large for NBR. He has contributed film and book reviews to various publications.
This is supplied content and not commissioned or paid for by NBR.
