Does your office need more “masculine energy”? Mark Zuckerberg seems to think so.
On a recent podcast interview with Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg said there is “feminine energy” ― which he does not define ― and “masculine energy” in corporations, and office culture is missing the latter.
“I think a lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered. Masculine energy is good, and obviously, society has plenty of that, but I think corporate culture was really trying to get away from it,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “I think having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive.”
Zuckerberg said he is surrounded by women as a father of three daughters and a brother to three sisters. In his view, his recent passion for martial arts has “turned on a part of [his] brain that… should have been there.”
Zuckerberg’s off-the-cuff comments about how hunting animals and learning MMA has transformed him also unwittingly reveal a retrograde and unimaginative view of what the working world should be. Usually, CEOs of major global corporations are not so brazen about using exclusive gendered work language in public, but Zuckerberg was clearly comfortable chatting with his fellow bro about gender ideology.
Soraya Chemaly, an activist and author of “Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger,” said the “yoga-speak” language of “masculine energy” hides how problematic and “ridiculous” Zuckerberg’s views actually are.
“He’s able to talk about masculinity and femininity like they’re a vibe, as opposed to institutional inequalities that he is actively perpetuating and deepening with his blather,” Chemaly said. This “touchy-feely” language of “masculine energy” also “ignores the fact that his company and his sector is overwhelmingly dominated by powerful, straight white guys.”
The truth is, corporate America does not lack masculine energy. Men lead 90% of Fortune 500 companies today. Men still earn 12% more than women on average, and that disparity widens for Black and Latina women when compared to white men. And at Meta specifically, men outnumber women and account for 62% of its global workforce, according to the company’s 2022 diversity report.
In other words, the energy has been decidedly male for decades, and will continue to be so for decades more.
“He’s re-instituting a structure of power that he clearly has always embodied and wanted, but for a brief time was forced by culture to suppress or deny, and Trump has given him permission to do that.”
– Soraya Chemaly, activist and author
If you’re confused as to why Zuckerberg is making this call to action for more “masculine energy” now, his recent actions offer clues. Zuckerberg’s comments follow Meta’s reported makeover for Donald Trump’s second term that is sending off-putting messages about which kinds of people are going to be welcomed to work at Zuckerberg’s company and to use his products. In January, The New York Times reported that Meta eliminated its chief diversity officer role and is ending diversity goals for hiring women and people of color, and is also revising speech policies to allow more criticism of vulnerable groups like immigrants and transgender people.
“You can say masculine energy and feminine energy, but that is not what [Zuckerberg is] doing. He’s re-instituting a structure of power that he clearly has always embodied and wanted, but for a brief time was forced by culture to suppress or deny, and Trump has given him permission to do that,” Chemaly said.
Let’s also take a step back and take Zuckerberg at his word. For him, the advantages of masculinity mean showing a fighter’s aggression, but this is not a trait women are freely permitted to express in offices. In reality, while men are praised for showing dominance and aggression at work, women are penalized for it.
David Smith, co-director of the Gender & Work Initiative at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, said that dominance is valued in leadership to some extent, but even “When men cross that line, they become labeled things like arrogant and abrasive.”
Arrogance may not make you well-liked, but you are still able to succeed. Women, however, face far worse backlash when their actions are seen as aggressive. “But even more so for women, the line is much lower, and you become pushy, bossy, abrasive … And so there’s this double standard,” Smith said.
Ironically, Facebook’s former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg articulated this double standard well in a 2015 opinion article about the challenges of speaking while female: “When a woman speaks in a professional setting, she walks a tightrope. Either she’s barely heard or she’s judged as too aggressive. When a man says virtually the same thing, heads nod in appreciation for his fine idea.”
If only Zuckerberg had taken these words to heart.
The Coded Ways Gendered Language Shows Up All The Time At Work
Usually, gendered work language is not as obvious as “masculine” and “feminine” personality traits, but if you work long enough, you’ll hear it all the time in job listings and performance reviews. Here’s how:
In job listings, words like “aggressive” and “dominate” keep women from applying.
How a job listing is worded will reveal who a company actually wants to hire, and which kinds of people will be able to succeed on a team. When companies say they want a candidate to “work hard and play hard,” what they really often mean are young men who can drink after work, for example.
A LinkedIn analysis of job listings drives home the consequences of gendered language. The 2019 report surveyed 12,122 full-time employees and 3,106 hiring managers worldwide and found that women were much less likely to apply when a listing desired an “aggressive” candidate. But there are inclusive adjectives you can use instead. Both men and women reacted equally positively to listing language such as “powerful,” “strong-willed,” and “confident.“
To make a job listing more inclusive for all, hiring managers should frame the job requirements around the problem that this new hire will be tasked with solving, and be less prescriptive about how it needs to happen. For example, dropping education requirements and subjective language like needing to “dominate competition” will make a listing more welcoming.
In performance reviews, men are more likely to be praised in terms that will get them promoted.
Your boss may not demand more “masculine energy” in your next performance review, but if you’re a woman, you’re more likely to get subjective feedback that will hold your career back.
In performance reviews, positive emotional traits like compassion are more likely to be assigned to women and task-oriented traits like being analytical are more likely to be given to men, according to a 2019 study published in the scientific journal Sex Roles that analyzed 81,000 military leadership evaluations.
In that study, men’s and women’s performances were judged the same by more objective measures like fitness scores and class standings. But men and women got wildly different feedback in reviews. Women were most likely to be praised as “compassionate” and critiqued as “inept,” while men were most likely to be congratulated as “analytical” and critiqued as “arrogant.”
“Behaviors that are often [seen as] more masculine tend to be outcome-related and … task-oriented,” Smith, who was the lead author for that study, told HuffPost. This can be bad for women because traits that suggest competence are “stereotypically associated with men and masculinity, and they’re, of course, therefore valued in that way, whereas with women, it tends to be more communal and relationship-oriented,” he said.
In other words, if your biggest praise is being labeled as compassionate, you are not going to get the corner office. What’s worse is that being called inept is a far worse critique than being seen as arrogant, because the former suggests you are unqualified.
A 2020 study that evaluated performance reviews at a Fortune 500 technology company had similar results. In this study, men and women had similar technical abilities but received radically different feedback. Men were more likely to get superlatives like being a “game-changer,” while women were more likely to get non-technical improvement feedback like “taking her career more seriously.”
So, how can managers and peers learn to stop this subjective language? It starts with being mindful that it can happen in the first place.
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If you’re using language about aggression or being compassionate, Smith said you should ask yourself whether you can provide examples of that behavior and connect it to real outcomes in terms of tasks, decisions, productivity or performance. Managers can ask themselves, “Would I use ‘compassionate’ for him the same way I used it for her?” as a gut-check, he said.
Learning how to be inclusive with your language takes time, but it is worth it. It means leaving the echo chamber of people who think like you and being open-minded to different ways work can be done, and by whom. And that’s the real type of “energy” we can all achieve.