CRO POV: Masculine/Feminine

Does corporate responsibility have a gender?

By Jay Whitehead

Comedian Steve Martin’s timeless joke, “in French, they have a word for everything,” comes back to slap my funny bone at least once a week. Of course, it probably hits me more than most. After all, I’m a citizen of both America and France.

When I was in French-speaking Belgium last week, I had a goofy argument with a local guy on the topic of corporate responsibility. He claimed that the concept is “feminine,” since in French, it is preceded by “la,” which indicates a feminine noun. As in “Il fait porter la responsabilite de notre corporation.”

The conversation was similar to many grammar-based arguments I have had at a French dinner table. While the topic itself can be remarkably trivial, the debaters are brutally serious, prone to pounding of fists on the table and the use of personal insults. Usually the loudest screamers have swallowed lots of wine.

Despite its potential nuttiness, I thought the feminine vs. masculine corporate responsibility question was worth investigating.

So I turned to the world’s top theorist on work cultures, Dutch Professor Geert Hofstede from Holland’s Maastricht University. His theory—cultures have five dimensions that determine acceptance of corporate behaviors: how the cultures distribute power, how much they value individualism vs. collectivism, whether the culture is masculine (aggressive, assertive) or feminine (modest, caring), how much the culture avoids uncertainty and whether the culture takes a long-term or short-term view. Using Hofstede’s paradigm, Americans are quite different from French and Belgians. The former—more than any other Western culture—distribute power broadly, embrace uncertainty, value individualism, take a masculine approach and act for the short-term. This combination creates a corporate responsibility-challenged environment. French and Belgians, by contrast, centralize power, tend toward collectivism, value modesty and caring over more masculine traits, despise uncertainty and take a longer-term view. Those cultures are corporate responsibility-friendly.

Maybe there is something to this “corporate responsibility as feminine” thing. Sure, some of my more macho corporate responsibility practitioner friends might find the characterization offensive. But I can think of worse things than working on the same side of the gender argument as Mother Earth.