Macho Cultures Are Fairer for Women

In the past decade, and long before Dilma Roussef was elected the country's first female (and wildly popular) President, Brazilian women have been on the rise. As in many other countries, women now outnumber men in the country's universities. But the female edge in education (63% vs 37%) in Brazil is at the top of the scale, next to Sweden's.

Just as significantly, there has been a big move of women into the paid labor force in Brazil, and in Latin America more generally. "The female employment-to-population ratio in Brazil," writes the ILO, "increased by 3.8 percentage points between 2000 and 2010. In Chile, the increase was 9.6 percentage points. The regional increase in this ratio was 6.3 percentage points, more than twice the movement observed in the region with the second largest increase, North Africa."

How will Brazilan society cope with this shift in gender roles? Paradoxically, the evidence suggests that macho cultures and gender balance actually mix rather well.

In the 2012 Grant Thornton survey of the gender balance in senior executive roles, for example, Brazil had 27% women and 73% men, compared to the US with 17% women and 83% men. On this basis, Brazilian business leadership is already more gender balanced than the US.

How come? I think that businesses in the USA and the UK have fallen into the trap of trying to negate the differences between men and women in order to achieve equality. British and American managers try to treat everyone the same — and equally.

But because men and women are different in a host of potentially powerfully complementary ways, this well-intentioned strategy has only served to eliminate women from the leadership pipelines in many companies, except for the few who adopt masculine leadership styles.

The Brazilians never fell into this trap. Rather than seek equality through sameness, Brazil accentuates differences between genders. Brazilian men are about as macho as you can get while the feminine stereotype is celebrated by both genders.

Brazil's diversity-celebrating ethos seems to help women rather than hinder them. Macho men don't mind having women bosses as long as the women bosses are women. So Dilma has a 77% approval rating, and the national oil company, Petrobras, has just appointed a woman, Maria das Graças Foster, as its CEO. And Brazil isn't alone. Argentina and Chile have both had women presidents.

My experience on this trip confirmed my guess. The executive team I worked with in Sao Paolo was vastly more interested and open to the opportunities of gender balancing their company than the teams I had spent time with the week before in Dusseldorf and London — they saw gender balancing as a competitive advantage and an opportunity, whereas the developed world so often approaches gender issues as a problem.