PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

6. A HARD FACT OF LIFE
do not expect another sex to start taking over from women. Yet a
fundamental change may still occur.
The definition of an executive may evolve, for example. Innovative
management favors moves away from the traditional hierarchical structure.
Companies are experimenting with removing power,
responsibility, and decision making from the top and delegating it to
unit managers and the people close to the customer. The niche of executives,
as we have defined it so far, may cease to exist before it becomes
dominated by women. Alternatively, women’s advance may be prevented
from following its natural path to the end. From 1988 onward
the trend seems to follow a milder slope (Appendix C, Figure 6.3). This
break may be evidence that there is a quota assigned to genders by some
social mechanism.
Ten Years Later
The little circles in Appendix C, Figure 6.3 tell the story of
what happened during the ten years that followed my original
study. The graph at the top shows that the number of information
workers kept increasing to the detriment of the number of
noninformation workers as anticipated. The little circles follow
closely the natural-growth pattern. But a small discrepancy toward
the year 2000 seems to insinuate that perhaps not
everyone will become an information worker at the end, just as
cars failed to replace all horses.
The graph at the bottom shows a similar discrepancy. The
50-percent point for the substitution of women for men executives
had been estimated around the year 2000. The little
circles seem to indicate that this point may be reached much
later. In fact it looks more reasonable now to expect that men
and women may end up splitting the executive scene fiftyfifty.
The women-for-men substitution process may very well
be aiming at a ceiling at 50 rather than 100 percent of the executive
market. After all it would be an equitable attribution of
quota.
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