A recent study from Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software, towed a familiar path. It revealed that adding women to software development teams not only boosted team performance but also reduced workplace delinquency.
“Companies should recruit more women to their development teams not only for obvious ethical reasons but because this will improve performance. Indeed, women software engineers significantly differ from men in terms of personality traits, which are related to higher job performance, ethics, and creativity. Men, despite having lower scores on emotionality, exhibit higher scores on the psychopathy trait, which may lead to a reduced level of team performance,” the researchers argue.
The thing is, should we training girls to enter “male” occupations or should we instead be simply themselves? It’s a notion that Roland Rust and Ming-Hul Huang believe will be at the heart of what they refer to as the “feeling economy” in their eponymous book.
The feeling economy
The feeling economy marks the transition from both the physical economy, where our economies were driven largely by brute force, into the thinking economy, where brains and logic were the determining factors, and into the feeling economy that will come to be dominated more by emotional intelligence, empathy, and creativity.
It’s a transition that is largely driven by improvements in technologies, such as AI and robotics, which mean that both physical and thinking economy work can be done more effectively by machines than by humans. It also means that it’s an economy that they believe will come to be dominated by women, who tend to be stronger in the kind of traits that will come to the fore.
“In the feeling economy, we expect that females will outnumber males for higher pay feeling jobs, such as healthcare and education,” they say. “In fact, those service industries are growing much faster than manufacturing, which is stagnant or declining.”
Skills for the future of work
It’s also noticeable that in Google’s famous Project Oxygen a few years ago, they found that of the eight skills associated with Google employees’ jobs, STEM skills were bottom of the pile in terms of importance. Far more important was the kind of soft skills that humans, and especially women, excel in.
And yet, as Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic famously pointed out several years ago, we still tend to recruit and promote men who are often wholly lacking in these skills. Hence, we tend to get men who are “self-centered, overconfident and narcissistic individuals as leaders”.
Which is wholly detrimental to our organizations, and even to society more broadly. During the pandemic, the compassionate leadership of the likes of New Zealand’s Jacinda Arden and Germany’s Angela Merkel were lauded after data from the World Economic Forum showed that countries with female leaders fared better.
Similarly, research from the University of Buffalo says that female leaders tend to fit the servant leadership mold that is so important in our current time better than their male peers.
Supporting innovation
This kind of servant leadership also plays a crucial role in supporting the kind of innovations that will be so important in the years ahead. The importance of the “pivot” has been a fundamental part of the entrepreneurial playbook for much of the near-decade it’s been since Eric Ries first published his groundbreaking The Lean Startup but the ability to adapt has been especially crucial during a pandemic in which so much of what we thought we knew has been tipped upside down.
While research suggests that we tend to think of men as more creative than women, the reality is quite the opposite. The dichotomy exists in large part because we falsely assume that innovation is simply having a “eureka” moment. A second study examined the various areas in which managers support innovation, including encouraging employees to pursue a broad range of knowledge, capturing any ideas they have, managing diverse teams, stretching employees, and providing feedback. Interestingly, across all eight of the domains, women outperform men.
The importance of psychological safety has been well documented due to the groundbreaking work of Harvard’s Amy Edmondson, but research from Cambridge’s Judge Business School shows that this is especially important during a crisis. Perhaps most importantly, the strong presence of women helped to provide the kind of psychological safety that is so important.
Holding women back
Despite the evident benefits women bring to teams and organizations, there continue to be numerous psychological biases that prevent them from contributing to their fullest.
For instance, research from Wharton’s Adam Grant revealed that it’s actually incredibly difficult for women to speak up with challenging ideas, whether involving innovations or otherwise. He reveals that when men do this, they tend to get praised in subsequent performance reviews, but for women, the reverse is true.
A subsequent Yale study shows that this effect is not diminished when women gain leadership roles either. Indeed, the leadership capabilities of powerful women were diminished the more outspoken they were.
If, as Rust and Huang argue, we’re entering the age of the Feeling Economy, then the skills women so often bring to our organizations will be more important than ever before. It’s vital, therefore, that we find ways to remove those barriers and those biases that so often hold women back.
OTTAWA – Canada’s unemployment rate held steady at 6.5 per cent last month as hiring remained weak across the economy.
Statistics Canada’s labour force survey on Friday said employment rose by a modest 15,000 jobs in October.
Business, building and support services saw the largest gain in employment.
Meanwhile, finance, insurance, real estate, rental and leasing experienced the largest decline.
Many economists see weakness in the job market continuing in the short term, before the Bank of Canada’s interest rate cuts spark a rebound in economic growth next year.
Despite ongoing softness in the labour market, however, strong wage growth has raged on in Canada. Average hourly wages in October grew 4.9 per cent from a year ago, reaching $35.76.
Friday’s report also shed some light on the financial health of households.
According to the agency, 28.8 per cent of Canadians aged 15 or older were living in a household that had difficulty meeting financial needs – like food and housing – in the previous four weeks.
That was down from 33.1 per cent in October 2023 and 35.5 per cent in October 2022, but still above the 20.4 per cent figure recorded in October 2020.
People living in a rented home were more likely to report difficulty meeting financial needs, with nearly four in 10 reporting that was the case.
That compares with just under a quarter of those living in an owned home by a household member.
Immigrants were also more likely to report facing financial strain last month, with about four out of 10 immigrants who landed in the last year doing so.
That compares with about three in 10 more established immigrants and one in four of people born in Canada.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
The Canadian Institute for Health Information says health-care spending in Canada is projected to reach a new high in 2024.
The annual report released Thursday says total health spending is expected to hit $372 billion, or $9,054 per Canadian.
CIHI’s national analysis predicts expenditures will rise by 5.7 per cent in 2024, compared to 4.5 per cent in 2023 and 1.7 per cent in 2022.
This year’s health spending is estimated to represent 12.4 per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product. Excluding two years of the pandemic, it would be the highest ratio in the country’s history.
While it’s not unusual for health expenditures to outpace economic growth, the report says this could be the case for the next several years due to Canada’s growing population and its aging demographic.
Canada’s per capita spending on health care in 2022 was among the highest in the world, but still less than countries such as the United States and Sweden.
The report notes that the Canadian dental and pharmacare plans could push health-care spending even further as more people who previously couldn’t afford these services start using them.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2024.
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
As Canadians wake up to news that Donald Trump will return to the White House, the president-elect’s protectionist stance is casting a spotlight on what effect his second term will have on Canada-U.S. economic ties.
Some Canadian business leaders have expressed worry over Trump’s promise to introduce a universal 10 per cent tariff on all American imports.
A Canadian Chamber of Commerce report released last month suggested those tariffs would shrink the Canadian economy, resulting in around $30 billion per year in economic costs.
More than 77 per cent of Canadian exports go to the U.S.
Canada’s manufacturing sector faces the biggest risk should Trump push forward on imposing broad tariffs, said Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters president and CEO Dennis Darby. He said the sector is the “most trade-exposed” within Canada.
“It’s in the U.S.’s best interest, it’s in our best interest, but most importantly for consumers across North America, that we’re able to trade goods, materials, ingredients, as we have under the trade agreements,” Darby said in an interview.
“It’s a more complex or complicated outcome than it would have been with the Democrats, but we’ve had to deal with this before and we’re going to do our best to deal with it again.”
American economists have also warned Trump’s plan could cause inflation and possibly a recession, which could have ripple effects in Canada.
It’s consumers who will ultimately feel the burden of any inflationary effect caused by broad tariffs, said Darby.
“A tariff tends to raise costs, and it ultimately raises prices, so that’s something that we have to be prepared for,” he said.
“It could tilt production mandates. A tariff makes goods more expensive, but on the same token, it also will make inputs for the U.S. more expensive.”
A report last month by TD economist Marc Ercolao said research shows a full-scale implementation of Trump’s tariff plan could lead to a near-five per cent reduction in Canadian export volumes to the U.S. by early-2027, relative to current baseline forecasts.
Retaliation by Canada would also increase costs for domestic producers, and push import volumes lower in the process.
“Slowing import activity mitigates some of the negative net trade impact on total GDP enough to avoid a technical recession, but still produces a period of extended stagnation through 2025 and 2026,” Ercolao said.
Since the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement came into effect in 2020, trade between Canada and the U.S. has surged by 46 per cent, according to the Toronto Region Board of Trade.
With that deal is up for review in 2026, Canadian Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Candace Laing said the Canadian government “must collaborate effectively with the Trump administration to preserve and strengthen our bilateral economic partnership.”
“With an impressive $3.6 billion in daily trade, Canada and the United States are each other’s closest international partners. The secure and efficient flow of goods and people across our border … remains essential for the economies of both countries,” she said in a statement.
“By resisting tariffs and trade barriers that will only raise prices and hurt consumers in both countries, Canada and the United States can strengthen resilient cross-border supply chains that enhance our shared economic security.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 6, 2024.
