Male of Female - Who Delivers The Best Service Quality?

Over the past year a number of high profile women chief executives in the services sector have been asked or forced to resign on the grounds that the organisations which they lead failed to deliver the necessary standards of service to their customers. Some desk research did not uncover a similar pattern among male CEO’s, although plenty of them have been forced to resign for other reasons particularly in the financial services sector. This raised the question about whether men or women deliver the best service quality and at what level? The most interesting fact to emerge so far is that a straw poll among a relatively small sample of academics and business specialists was mystifyingly inconclusive – “ Why would I ask such a question?” and a search on the internet produced no published work on the topic. Given that the comparison between the relative performance of men and women appears to be debated in most other areas it is curious that this should be a factual vacuum.

So is it an irrelevant issue and is the group of high profile female failures a coincidence or are their other reasons? Could it be that women have had to struggle with all of the other leadership issues, like vision, culture, finance, process, politics etc.to reach the top in a largely male dominated environment that they have taken their eyes off the raison d’etre of their organisations, service quality? Service quality is a leadership issue so has the poor performance of their organisations been simply that their lack of focus did not identify it as a priority and is that a failing that can be solely attributed to being female or not?

And what of other levels of performance?  Do female managers do a better job than their male counterparts in managing service quality? Are there instinctive qualities that they exhibit in managing the customer experience which make them more naturally suited to such roles? In a white paper which I wrote a few years ago based on interviews with highly successful women they felt that they had higher natural levels of empathy when dealing with customers and staff and that factor had been a valuable contributor to their success.

 Are female staff better at delivering higher standards of quality at the operational level? The straw poll I conducted suggested that the answer to that question was highly dependent on the product or service in question and hinted that men probably did better in the more technical product/service areas. From my own experience I have had outstandingly high levels of service from female staff in both the motor industry and telecommunications sector and appallingly bad service from their male counterparts in the same sectors with the converse being the case in financial services.

So is there a gender performance issue here or not?  Circumstantially nobody I have asked, beyond the instinctive emotional response,  has a clear opinion and is quick to identify a range of qualifying factors before giving an answer?

Or is it an area worthy of some professional research which may uncover data that could create significant competitive advantage in some sectors or at some levels of management? If so would such outcomes encounter an implementation barrier by breaching equal opportunity legislation?

Philip Forrest