"Foolish men who accuse women without reason, without seeing that you are the occasion of the same thing that you blame….." is what Juana Inés de Asbaje and Ramírez de Santillana, better known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz mentioned in their poem called "Foolish men you accuse" and who was a woman writer and a great precursor of gender equality in our country.
Men and / or women make up our organizations and we must analyze what the role of each of them is when promoting business networks that provide a clear competitive advantage.
Business networks
First, the concept of a business network must be specified; For this I quote Carlos López Cerdán: “ It is a cooperation mechanism between small and medium-sized companies, where the participating company, maintaining its legal independence and managerial autonomy, voluntarily decides to participate in a joint effort with others in the search for a common goal. ”.
From my point of view, a business network is a group of companies that agree to collaborate and share capacities in an organized way in order to improve the competitiveness of each organization, while respecting their individuality.
The benefits of establishing a business network are not reduced to the possibility of increasing sales, but to achieving an impact on the degree of competitiveness of our organization and this is possible given that we can access low-cost inputs, have more and better channels distribution and marketing, increase production capacity, improve positioning in the spheres of social and business power, etc.
The values that must permeate the network that we want to implement must be: Trust, loyalty, honesty and sincerity. Having all these values will create a force field in the organizations involved in the network, in such a way that it will be difficult for our opponents to cause us harm or affect the established collaboration.
Gender
Now we will address the issue of gender, which according to Daniel Cazés, gender "It is the category corresponding to the sociocultural order configured on the basis of sexuality."
In my opinion, gender is the set of social characteristics, attitudes and behaviors that a culture determines in men and women.
Sex
It is important to know how to distinguish the concepts of gender and sex, which is why below I mention the definition of sex according to the Dictionary of the Spanish Language: It is the "Organic condition, male or female, of animals and plants." Therefore we can affirm that gender is a social condition while sex is a biological condition.
Over the years and generationally certain attitudes and behaviors have been assigned that should govern individuals based on gender. These roles or roles depend on social values, traditions, culture, etc. For example, the “role” of a woman means that she will have to be a mother, that she will take care of her children, the hygiene of the home and the care of her husband. While the "role" of the man means that he will have to be the head of the family, polygamist, with a fixed job for which he receives a salary and will have to support the family.
What we cannot lose sight of is that in society there is a tendency to designate the female gender roles that limit her personal development as a human being and that this leads her to be passive, submissive and dependent on men.
In Mexico these roles have been established, largely by cultures such as "machismo." ¿ But who creates, promotes and encourages sexism in our society and organizations ? It is not an exclusive question of men or women, the answer to this question can be found in the poem by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz that I cite at the beginning of this text. Men as a race and not as a gender are the ones who have allowed this type of imposing and authoritarian behavior to permeate our society.
In this way, we can analyze organizations where traditionally and for many years gender has been designated social roles. Women are regularly assigned operational or administrative positions within organizations while men are managerial or managerial positions. But women have created a movement in recent centuries in which they have decided to rethink their social role and have fought to occupy positions of power and leadership in organizations. An example of this is that within the Millennium Development Goals established by the United Nations (UN) in objective three, it is established that governments should promote gender equality and the empowerment of women.
Implementing a business network brings with it various difficulties and especially in cultures such as Mexico, where “machismo”, distrust, envy, opportunism and resistance to change predominate.
To establish network alliances, it is necessary to analyze and identify allies and competitors. But should the business networks of what gender be integrated? From my point of view, networks should not be defined by gender, but by the benefits that the organizations involved can achieve. There are experiences with business networks that can lead us to think that the alliances of organizational leaders of the same gender understand and interact in a better way and this may be true but in no way determines the success of the network.
The characteristics of the networks should be the following:
- Collaboration, because the success of one, depends on men and women because the results need the contribution of all.
Footnotes:
- De Lama, Víctor; Anthology of Spanish and Hispano-American love poetry, Spain, Editorial EDAF, 2007.López Cerdán, Carlos, Business networks, experience in the Andean region, Peru, Minka 2003.Daniel Cazés; The gender perspective: guide to design, implement, monitor and evaluate research projects and public and civil actions, Mexico, National Population Council, 1998.Dictionary of the Spanish language (22nd ed.), Spain, Espasa Libros, SLU 2001, Daniel Cazés; The gender perspective: guide to design, start up, monitor and evaluate research projects and public and civil actions, Mexico, National Population Council, 1998.Briz Garizurieta, Marcela; The Mexican Council of Businessmen: Emergence and consolidation, Mexico, National Autonomous University of Mexico; 2002.
