A Manifesto of Men in Business
A Complex View from the House of Beautiful Business
The following text is the product of a meeting of men as one part of a larger session on issues of gender and identity in business that was held at the beginning of this month in Lisbon at the House of Beautiful Business. It reflects the confluence of the ideas they expressed at that session, before engaging in meetings with the women and non-binary members of the House. Another statement, reflecting the perspectives of all members of the session, is forthcoming.
Not all of these ideas perfectly match the perspective of each man who participated, and as you’ll see below, uncertainty and ambiguity was the most common theme of the day.This introduction, what you read here in italics, represents only my individual voice.
Some will question the need for a statement on gender and identity issues from men in business. They may ask: Haven’t men had enough time to speak already? The irony is that, although speech by men in business has held a privileged status, the kinds of ideas we shared with each other, as we met amid the roots of a giant fig tree in the city’s Garden of the Stars, were uncommon in their content. Gender is commonly treated as merely a women’s issue, as if women are the only people with genders. Issues of gender and identity affect us all, and if we’re going to make progress with them, many different perspectives will need to pitch in to do their fair share of the work.
Yesterday was International Men’s Day. Yet, in spite of the fact that I have been extensively researching and writing on issues of gender in business this year, I had no idea that this event was taking place, until a woman I met in Lisbon pointed it out to me. This gap in my own awareness marked out one of the strange contradictions of what it means to be a man in business: Although masculinity is the default identity of business culture, men in business themselves rarely take time to think about the implications of this masculine identity — for others or for themselves.
The treacherous landscape for men as they begin to reconsider their masculinity is laid bare by International Men’s Day itself, which is dominated by a web site created by the Fatherhood Foundation. The Fatherhood Foundation is an organization in Australia that has worked to advance a narrow, discriminatory version of masculinity, seeking to deny equal rights to men and women who do not comply with its right wing fundamentalist Christian vision.
There is a considerable risk, even as we attempt to express an inclusive set of values for gender and identity in business, that we will be co-opted into a reactionary, anti-feminist movement such as that promoted by the Fatherhood Foundation. However, the risk if we do not speak out is even greater. As men concerned by the conventional forms of gender in business, we can no longer allow the voices of traditional oppression to speak for all men. The masculine domination of business has played a large role in the creation of abusive gender system, and so, as men in business, we have the responsibility to speak out in favor of a more equitable future.
The Manifesto
From one perspective, gender issues are very simple. Men are in power, and as a result, everyone else is disempowered. We must acknowledge that men created business as a masculine structure that cast women as an antistructure. We ought to hold women in respect, and we don’t do that well. We don’t do it enough.
We need to make room for others.
Looked at from another angle, issues of gender and identity are more complex than they are often portrayed to be. The story of gender cannot be told in just two parts, male and female. There are also others, those who defy this binary distinction, some with different modes of existence that are beyond the imagination of conventional thinking. Whether we understand these gender perspectives, they are valid for those who live them, and our interactions with them must be nuanced and respectful.
Because of this complexity, we experience identity as an emergent property. From the combination of relatively simple components, our identities rise into new levels of irreducible complexity. Even if we are cisgendered men, we can’t be categorized simply as one type or another, because we are always exploring previously unknown facets of our identities.
We are fluid, and it’s a confusing experience. If you aren’t confused by identity, you don’t understand what identity is.
In order to deal with this fluid complexity of identity in business, we need to slow down more often. Of course, there are times in business when we need to move quickly. When that’s the case, we need to find ways to keep business as fluid as the identities of the individuals with which it engages in commerce. We cannot allow our speed to stiffen our attitudes.
Yet, in contradiction with the need for a human pace and fluid responsiveness, businesses are demanding ever increasing degrees of efficiency from their employees, contractors, and partners. Even as their mountains of data about us reach new heights, they put less and less effort into understanding the people whose lives they claim to measure.
If we are to deal with the problems with gender and identity in business, we must reverse this trend of automated algorithmic alienation, and restore human attention to the individual. Our identities are not frozen. They move. They bend, and so, people in business need to learn to ask of each other, and of their customers, not the simple question, “Who are you?” but the more provisional question, “Who are you today?”
We wonder if it is possible to have a Business Romantic vision that does put others in weaker positions than ourselves, because our models of what it means to be Romantic have traditionally been associated with rituals of gallantry, such as opening doors for others. This association represents only one short-sighted version of what it means to be gallant, however. The truly gallant man, and the truly gallant business, will ask whether people want the door opened for them before he presumes to act. What’s more, we are ready to admit that sometimes, we might like to have someone else open the door for us.
The key to showing respect is to ask, rather than presuming to know what another person wants. Not all women want the same thing. Not all men want the same thing. When we ask, we acknowledge and maintain the fluidity upon which all healthy commerce depends.
Too often in business, doors are being opened without a moment’s hesitation, without genuine consent, as we bring our unwanted gaze into others’ private chambers. The sexual harassment exposed by the #MeToo movement is just one aspect of a larger campaign of harassment by businesses against their employees and customers.
We ask ourselves the question: Are we men ready to accept a genderless society? We discover, to be honest, that the answer is not universal. We come from different cultures, and experience diversity even within those cultures. In many places, we discover that business is still a masculine-dominated sphere.
As we behold this bewildering reality, and consider it in our awkward grasp, we realize that the traditional, masculine-dominated structure of business is in many ways a negative experience for men as well as for others. Conventional masculinity makes our identities narrow and stiff, when alternative forms of manhood could flow more freely in other directions.
We admit that we don’t understand all the parameters of how this is going to work. Nobody does, and everyone, male, female, and otherwise is going to deal with this in clumsy ways.
As we witness each other’s explorations of the new, ambiguous, fluid dimensions of gender, the best way for us to move forward is to begin with a question for each other: How do you perceive what is happening?
These struggles aren’t just about gender. We are struggling over the right of every person, in all aspects of their identity, to be known on their own terms, according to their own experience, instead of accepting our assigned roles within static personas that make for convenient marketing shorthand, but are thin shadows of the realities in which we live.
Though our experiences diverge from the roots of our common humanity, there should be space enough for us all to prosper.
