A Girl’s Guide to Project Management
Posted by Alec on 21 November 2006
Thanks to Kate I found A Girl’s Guide to Project Management, a blog by Elizabeth Harrin, which has some excellent resources. I look forward to trawling through the posts over the next few days. There are even some references to Australian material… 
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On a separate note, do some women find it easier to be better project managers because they might have better developed social skills than many men? Or is that just sexist claptrap?
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Fred said
Hey Alec,
How about applying a bit of Quality to this post, and defining your terms up front
What do you mean by a “better” Project Manager????? Most of the female PMs Ive had the pleasure of working with are loved by senior management and hated by their staff, so depending on your proximity to the ozone layer, the better they were.
Anon
Alec said
I’m not sure who you are, let’s call you you ‘Bill’ for the time being
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Bill,
I was just making an off the cuff remark…
The comment you make about women project managers is actually something I have found more with male project managers. I guess it just shows that people are people.
I do find it easier to raise issues with female colleagues which is helpful in a project. Is it that because women are better at listening or because I feel less threatened? There must be a study grant in the somewhere.
Elizabeth said
Alec
Last night was the launch event for my book, Project Management in the Real World, and during the discussion after my talk I was asked exactly this questions: do women make better PM’s than men? As far as I know there’s be no study that concludes whether we do or not; the male/female studies tend to look at numbers and conclude there are fewer women than men working in PM.
However, one of the things I asked the audience to do last night was to write down one word on a post-it that was a skill a ‘good’ PM needed and the majority were those ’soft skills’ like listening, communicating, diplomacy that tradition and stereotypes tend to pin on women. Interesting then that the majority of my audience were men…
You’re right – there must be a research grant somewhere, but I’d hate to think what impact the results would have on our workplace lives.
Kate said
Alec, good to see you keeping gender issues on the boil
It is useful for all who manage projects to consider what behaviours & traits make a good project manager regardless of gender. As with all generalisations, individuals break the rule, and some women & men are crap at the ’soft’ skills as are some men. But technical competence in project managemet, plus ’soft’ skills together with political sense is what differentiates a great PM from the merely good. Seems like EQ plus IQ is what really counts in project management.
Alec said
Kate,
You’re quite right. However I suspect that members of the project team often behave differently depending on the gender of the project manager? Are women generally seen as less threatening or assumed more trustworthy than men?
Does that difference give women an advantage when dealing with customers and members of the team?
The other thing, to be a little contentious, is that because of the prejudice in the current system only the best women get promoted to leadership roles — whereas any men that hangs around long enough gets there without having to be so good
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