As I wrote awhile back, I was lucky enough to be invited to write the foreward to the of writing the 40th Anniversary edition of The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong. When it is officially published in a couple weeks, I will do a longer post. But I did have fun with an interview I did at Women for Hire. My main point, I suppose, is that although both women and men are at risk of being promoted to their level of incompetence, that since organizations generally hold women to higher standards than men (and look the other way when a man is incompetent), that there are probably more incompetent men than women in the workplace. It is jsut a hypothesis, but backed by studies on negative stereotypes of women and actions against them -- see Through the Labyrinth.
My broad observation has been that women typically make much better managers of people than do men, mostly because of women's stronger, innate ability to communicate and relate to other people.
Interestingly, in the Intl. Association of Business Communicators (www.IABC.com), about 80% of the 16,000 members are women. And compared to all the business people I've met in my lifetime, most of the women from IABC that I've met are among the most competent and most savvy business people. Period.
Thanks for an interesting post and congrats on writing the PP foreward.
Tom Roux
Editor-at-Large
The Business Insider Blog (http://www.TimRosaBlog.com)
Posted by: Tom Roux | March 25, 2009 at 10:46 AM