Good morning, Broadsheet readers! The Taliban has banned women's voices and bare faces in public, abortion will not be on the ballot in Arkansas, and women's creativity has been undervalued in the workplace. Have a productive Monday!
- Creative thinking. If you picture a creative genius, you may think of a flashy, Mad Men -style pitch. That resonant image of Don Draper coming up with the big idea that will save the day contributes to the cultural belief that men are more creative than women—something a 2022 study determined .
But when that study was published two years ago, City University of Hong Kong assistant professor Joohyung Kim and Northeastern University D'Amore-McKim School of Business professor Manuel Vaulont weren't sure if it told the full story. After all, what if men’s and women’s creativity was perceived differently by those around them?
Vaulont and his colleagues decided that instead of analyzing creative output, they would examine the behaviors that lead to creativity. They defined creativity as “the generation of novel and useful ideas.” The two behaviors most crucial to creative thinking are risk-taking and empathy, they determined. However, people often over-emphasize the importance of risk-taking and novelty, they said, and forget that creative ideas also need to be useful, requiring understanding of your community or customer.
They analyzed 700 studies with more than 265,000 individual participants. And while men are typically more willing to take risks, they found, women show more empathy. Plus, women’s empathy had a stronger correlation with creativity than men’s risk-taking did. By those measures, women have an advantage when it comes to creativity.
Their study both debunked an unfair myth—that men are more creative than women—and highlighted how women may have an advantage thanks to a more subtle style of creative thinking, one that prioritizes the community over the individual. “Creativity is not just simply about coming up with bold, new ideas but also about developing useful ideas that target the need of an audience,” Vaulont says.
This is hardly the first time that women’s different approach to business has led to an undervaluing of their skills. Take the early days of the pandemic as an example. Suddenly, empathy was a crucial skill for CEOs and other corporate leaders, whereas before the global crisis, toughness and other more stereotypically male traits were seen as more important for executives. This study reveals the same phenomenon for another key business skill.
Importantly, creativity is one of the human skills that can’t be replaced by AI. Across traditionally creative fields like advertising and editorial to creative problem-solving in other business contexts, it’s a crucial differentiator for workers in the decades ahead. For women to have been perceived as less creative as this skill becomes even more important in the workplace is an unfair disadvantage. In fact, women have just been thinking about how they can use creativity to solve problems for others—not just come up with a flashy idea for its own sake.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
The Broadsheet is Fortune' s newsletter for and about the world's most powerful women. Today's edition was curated by Nina Ajemian. Subscribe here .
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Most Popular
Comments / 0