Sex and Business
Shere Hite Pearson 2000

Too many books about business subjects act as if logic and common-sense, once further refined and purified (by the author’s insight), give an exclusive basis for commercial success. We are not here to dispute the primacy of logic - merely to comment, for the purpose of this notice, that a tendency to logic should not always be taken as pre-ordained state inside any organisation. Anyone who has ever worked in anything from an MNC to a retail outlet to a charity will be able to recollect all manner of strange doings.

You know the kind of thing : eccentric promotions; the receptionist with the personality of a camel who is about to receive a long-service award; office parties that annually involve some measure of late-night hospitalisation; the boss-as-boor who still thinks training is only for the weak; the director who slaloms back from lunch each day; the man from the Technical Dept. who obviously cannot, well, tech anything; still more eccentric, inexplicable promotions… . As human constructs, companies seem able to resist a good deal of logic. Our business gurus offer platonic ideals of how corporate life ought to be; of course, that is their job. But good logic has to confront an immense variety of chaotic human practice. And, consequently, business theory needs a continuous dose of in-between, real-world, not-quite-sure-yet literature.

In this very spirit, let an unconstrained crack of applause break out for Sex and Business. The transformations in work-place cultures that come in the train of our post-feminist times and in the wake, specifically, of so many more women at senior levels imply something of a bumpy adjustment for companies, for work relationships, for society at large. There is no easy, obvious way of analysing this process (what Shere Hite calls the “major realignment of gender positions”) and what we therefore have here is a mix of market research, executive interviews, case studies and creative writing. All of which makes for a rather compelling read - one in which the absence of perfectly rounded conclusions subtracts nothing from the value of the endeavour.

The interviews that the author records with some of Europe’s CEO’s are simply brill. For you catch in the small print all kinds of revealing hesitations about the role of women - senior women, powerful women - within the contemporary structure of so-far successful companies. Everyone will subscribe - it’s the comme il faut of the new man - to the theoretical notion of equality. But listen to how Shere Hite digs out the troublesome small print of everyday attitudes, the peas under the maitresse, all the yes-buttery of the apparently liberal attitude.

Here is one German CEO :-

“I admire women I see on airplanes…who are struggling with children and also managing to deal with a difficult husband, a complicated man. To manage a husband and a complicated man shows great intelligence!”.

And a Spanish CEO :-

“We hope that in a few years there will be many women at the top…. Generally, men are not yet ready to take an equal place with women at work, nor to have an equally important working wife, not yet in Spain”.

And another Spanish CEO, responding to a question about why men may be reluctant to promote women :-

“If the woman is pretty, there would be a big problem. People would say things. If she is capable and uglier, it’s easier”.

It’s not that Ms. Hite sees herself as someone of sufficient feminist elevation to be able to expose such festering male treachery. The good thing about the book is that she lets the facts - the attitudes and the anecdotes, the postures and the posturing - speak in order to define the phenomenon of modern gender relations. She is not here to punish; she is here to reveal. Some in the research community are snobby about her methods. But not us. We admire all this poking and prodding. This is a kind of analytical jazz, all mood and tone and departure. Not everyone’s delight; but we find great value in it.

And we like the humanism of it all. Hite explores how the thrust of great social changes provokes all kind of telling little conflicts - about roles and relationships - in the lives of real men and women. The baggage of our individual pasts can pressure us into confusion and prejudice; and life between women and men at work can be rich in power struggles of the pettiest but, at the same time, profoundest kind. Ms. Hite is at her best in her reportage of real-life cases of vexed workplace intimacies, the clinching of new rules, the birth of new etiquettes between women whom social change has endowed with new power and men whom social change has threatened with new kinds of redundancy.

Sex and Business is a very rich discourse about how companies and individuals are having to adjust to the still unfinished revolution in gender relations that characterises our age. We thought it nicely quirky, tremendously energetic and extremely well-researched. Best of all, it puts in order all the questions that the human resources community should put to itself about gender-relations management in the next decade.

“Too many people, all their lives, live out a play-enacted version of themselves, a shadow-self tailored for public consumption, displaying ‘appropriate’ social behaviour in public life; while underneath, in private, an undergrowth of confused feelings of joy, fear, eroticism and pain exist, all jumbled together”.

Most forms of research force people into categories and types and percentages. As Shere Hite accepts, life in our private spaces is nothing like as malleable. It is hard to get out the real flinty truth of things. And this, Sex an Business, is a real good effort at doing just that.