Do #GirlDads make better bosses?

There is a piece of research doing the rounds about what happens to male bosses after they have daughters and it actually makes for quite a neat observation. Researchers Maddalena Ronchi and Nina Smith studied male managers in Denmark and found that, following the birth of a first daughter (rather than a son), women’s relative earnings at their companies increased and female employment also went up, with much of the effect appearing to come through hiring.

The takeaway very quickly becomes that men become better at understanding women once they have daughters. That feels a bit lazy, not least because women should not have to become someone’s daughter, wife, sister or mother before their experiences suddenly acquire relevance. It also leaves a fairly obvious question hanging over the men who never have daughters. Are they somehow less likely to be pro-women, or simply doomed to spend their careers missing half of what is going on around them?

The more useful interpretation is that proximity changes what we notice and therefore changes the information we use to make decisions. Having a daughter might bring certain experiences, conversations or inequalities much closer to a male manager’s everyday life, but parenthood is only one very accidental way of creating that proximity, there are plenty of other ways leaders can do it deliberately.

Most of us are prone to mistaking our own experience for something far more universal than it really is. Our friendship groups, workplaces, neighbourhoods, algorithms and professional networks tend to contain people who share at least some of our assumptions, and the more senior you become, the easier it is for that world to narrow without you really noticing. You spend more time with other senior people, more time with advisers and more time consuming information that has been filtered, summarised and packaged for people at your level, while the distance between you and the customers, employees and communities affected by your decisions gets bigger.

There is a big difference between having data about people and being close enough to people to understand the reality behind that data. An organisation can know that a particular customer group is growing, that one group of employees is leaving faster than another, or that attitudes are shifting in a certain market but someone still has to interpret all of that information. If the people doing the interpreting are socially or experientially distant from the lives being described, there is always a risk that they fill in the gaps with what they already know.

We talk a lot here, about Organisational Lag, which is what happens when the world changes faster than an organisation is able to keep up with it, but perhaps part of that lag is created by distance as much as speed. If everyone around the table reads similar things, lives in similar places, earns similar amounts of money and socialises with similar people, then entire parts of society can change quite substantially before anyone there really feels it.

The practical answer is that leaders need to become much more deliberate about getting closer to experiences that do not mirror their own.

That might mean going to an employee resource group session even when it was not designed with you in mind, having proper conversations with people several levels away from the executive team, spending time with customers who are not the easiest or most commercially attractive ones, or using reverse mentoring as an actual opportunity to learn rather than another programme to mention in the annual report. It can also be as simple as noticing who you regularly speak to, whose opinions you naturally seek and who is almost completely absent from your working week.

The gap between intention and experience can remain intact when nobody is close enough, or comfortable enough, to challenge the original assumption.

The same thing happens inside organisations all the time. Leaders can genuinely believe they are building something for employees, customers or communities while remaining surprisingly distant from the people they are building it for, and that distance makes it much easier for good intentions to survive long after the reality has moved somewhere else.

Of course, proximity on its own is not enough, because simply being around people who are different from you does not automatically make you curious, empathetic or open-minded. You can sit in an incredibly diverse room and still only listen to the people who agree with you, which is why proximity only becomes useful when it comes with enough curiosity and humility to let someone else’s experience alter your own view.

So perhaps the question for leaders is how close they actually are to lives, experiences and perspectives that do not look like their own. Who are they close enough to understand properly, who are they still trying to understand from a distance, and where might that distance be distorting what they think they know?