Page 208 - Cultures and Organizations

184 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

The Future of Differences in Masculinity
and Femininity

At the time of the IBM surveys, 1960–70, MAS and fertility (the number
of children per family) were negatively related for the wealthier countries
but positively for the poorer countries. Masculine cultures meant larger
families in poor countries and smaller families in wealthy countries. 90
Anthropological studies of traditional cultures had also concluded that
populations increased most in societies in which females were subservient
91
to males. In the ensuing decades, birthrates in most countries, except
the very poorest, dropped considerably. Fertility is still related to national
92
poverty, but the relationship to masculinity is no longer signifi cant. 93
Instead, we found a relationship with indulgence versus restraint, which will
be discussed in Chapter 8.
Lower fertility in the wealthier part of the world means an aging popu-
lation. Figure 5.3 showed that masculinity scores decreased with age, so
an older population will shift toward more feminine values. When birth-
rates fall, this trend also implies that women will be both available for and
needed in the workforce (as there will be fewer young men). This too pre-
dicts for the wealthier countries a shift toward more feminine cultures.
Technology imposes changes on the work people do. In the wealthier
countries, the information revolution is moving on, eliminating old jobs
and creating new ones. Jobs that can be structured will increasingly be
automated. What remains are activities that by their very nature cannot be

automated. These are, in the first place, the jobs that deal with the setting
of human and social goals, with defining the purpose of life for individuals

and societies. This category includes all political and organizational top-
leadership functions. In the second place, they are the creative jobs, those
concerned with inventing new things and subjecting them to criteria of

usefulness, beauty, and ethics. A third and sizable category of jobs that
cannot be automated comprises those that deal with unforeseeable events:
safety, security, defense, maintenance. Finally, there is a large category of
jobs whose essence is human contact: supervision, entertainment, keeping
people company, listening to them, helping them materially and spiritu-
ally, motivating them to learn. In these jobs computers can be introduced
as resources, but they can never take over the job itself. For all these non-
automatable jobs, feminine values are as necessary in performing them as
masculine ones, regardless of whether the job incumbents themselves are