Ruling a boardroom with a rod of iron

FEMALE RUN companies are different, but not necessarily in the ways one would women would make a difference.

Female entrepreneurs are more autocratic in their management style than men, operate with fewer levels of authority, survive using hardly any written rules and with most information stored in their heads.

These are some of the early findings of a study by Ms Syeda Masooda Mukhtar, fellow in small and medium enterprise management at Manchester Business School.

"I admit I was taken aback myself," says Ms Mukhtar, who had tended to subscribe to the stereotype of the consensual, collaborative, female manager.

"These results are quite critical since there is a debate among policy makers on whether to treat female businesses differently." She reckons her study is proving that there are indeed gender differences, which may in turn suggest the need for adjustments in the formulation of public policy, for instance, on skills training.

When quizzed about management styles, nearly 63 per cent of women said they practised no delegation of authority in running their businesses. Only 48 per cent of the men interviewed said that was the case. These differences in management style held good across all sizes of companies surveyed, with the differences most pronounced among the few women running the (relatively) larger businesses.

Most of the women had n formal documented quality procedures, preferring informal techniques, such as memory power. The study claims to show that this does not make them worse managers; they appear to pay just as much attention to matters such as budgetary control or setting strategy objectives.

Ms Mukhtar started her research because there was a dearth of data on the subject of women running their own businesses, even though their numbers had clearly increased. In the course of her research, one government official told her it was regarded as sexist to gather separate information about female run companies.

Among the few pointers on the extent of the trend was that the number of women who are self employed had more than doubled, compared with a 54 per cent increase among men, according to Britain's Department of Trade and Industry's labour force survey.

Ms Mukhtar's study covers 5,710 companies and is a random sample of small and medium sized enterprises across all sectors and regions in Britain. All are members of the Federation of Small Businesses, the Forum of Private Business or the Rural Development Commission, and 6 per cent are run by women.

The female led enterprises do conform to some stereotypes - notably as regards their size. Average annual turnover is just £35,000 sterling, with only 3 per cent passing £1 million. Male run businesses in the sample, by contrast, boast an average turnover of £350,000 sterling.

Making comparisons within the same sectors, women tend to have a narrower product range, are much less likely to form limited companies and employ more part time staff. This does not necessarily imply that women are less successful or less entrepreneurial, Ms Mukhtar reckons.

They simply exhibit distinct characteristics and sources of motivation. They seem to go for stable, lower growth companies as a deliberate policy - which they run with a rod of iron. Men tend to achieve higher growth, but at the cost of a more volatile performance.

While the average life of the businesses in the sample is 10 years for men and three for women, Mukhtar claims this is largely because the women started more recently. When taken by age, the companies' survival rates are quite similar - and some 2 per cent in the female category had been around for more than 30 years.

Mukhtar suggests that a preoccupation with "growth" businesses - among banks and others - as the sole criterion of success may have been overdone. "I think banks have a very narrow definition as to what constitutes a successful business," she says.

If male and female entrepreneurs tend not to share attributes, they should perhaps not be judged by the same yardsticks, the study suggests.

Then again, one of the things Ms Mukhtar cannot gauge is which gender proves to be the more truthful when it comes to taking part in a survey.