Board Gender Diversity: Mother Nature and Hunter Nature
$ 38.5
Description
Abundant literature has demonstrated the critical institutional and social impacts on board gender diversity. This study applies the evolutionary cognitive theory that emerged in neuroscience to explain how the millions of years of evolutionary history have shaped gender cognitions more significantly than the thousands of years of institutional tradition. We conjecture that the labor role division between women as mothers and men as hunters over a deep-long evolutionary history has a profound impact on human neural mechanisms. Such division has led to the following cognitive differences between genders and contributed to the current gender gap on boards:
1) women's focus on building relationships versus men's focus on building tools;
2) women's strong sense of fairness and social compliance versus men's strong drive to win; and
3) women's risk-conservativeness versus men's risk-aggression.