WHY DO WHITE MALES DOMINATE THE CEO SUITE

(interesting thoughts)

1) CEO’s organize the voluntary organization of invention, financing, production, distribution, and trade, into patterns of sustainable specialization and trade. He specializes in organizing humans using incentives – not traditions, not rules, no threats, not patronage, but incentives.

2) “Pareto is Everywhere Unavoidable.” So we would expect that CEO’s would come from a random distribution of the upper 20% of the group of candidates in their industry – because everywhere in human society, the upper 20% controls the property (assets) that allow them to influence others sufficiently to organize the voluntary organization of production in to patterns of sustainable specialization and trade.

3) Communication is challenging for all humans across two standard deviations of intelligence, because frames of reference vary significantly at every standard deviation. A CEO must organize the at the median of the distribution. The operational culture must be organized for the many. At other than outliers, we should expect very smart people both to avoid industries with broad distributions of ability, and categories of problems consisting largely of low trust and impulsivity, and to have some difficulty in managing industries with those of lesser ability (as is the problem in medicine, where very smart doctors interact with staff largely at 95 or below.). The construction industry is a very low trust business, as are most labor industries. Finance, medicine, science, and engineering fairly high by comparison.

4) Trustworthiness with the money of others is the most important qualification of a CEO, followed by work capacity. Most people not only prefer not to think about their work around the clock, but cannot do so. And work capacity followed by loyalty. People can form trust networks most easily with people like themselves. We demonstrate this selection in all areas of life, but it is most evident in areas of risk.

5) People risk capital with those that they best understand (just as investors invest in what they best understand.) The more risk, trust, and loyalty required in an industry the lower should be its distributions (). The more empiricism meritocracy, wealth, and limited risk in an industry (technology for instance) , the higher should be its distributions. Or as we have learned from the study of millionaires, it is very often because he is trustworthy, diligent, and hard working person of good character who can maintain networks of loyalties regardless of his social and economic status. And this is what we see.

The reason for white male dominance of the C-Suite is his distribution of talents in the population, his sortition across industries, his mixture of verbal and analytic intelligence, and his western tradition of high trust, legal, and ‘scientistic’ thinking at all levels of society. Or even more simply: the distribution of talents in a population and the constitution of the population suggest that white males would be much more likely to obtain a position for largely cultural reasons: the whole population has been trained for many, many generations to function as a middle class (leadership), and the majority of the population has in fact originated in the middle class gene pool.

Some inheritances are priceless. Some privileges are earned by one’s ancestors. In the case of white males, some of that inheritance is wondrous: The enlightenment, chivalry, common law, the absence of strong central government, and the universal militia. Some of which is best left unsaid in polite company: the delay in reproduction until able to form a nuclear family, and the ostracization of single mothers from every walk of life. The prohibition of the underclasses from reproduction through restricted access to land, and the systematic culling of the population by hanging a troublesome one percent per year over a millennia expanding the genetic middle class into all classes of work, and long term instances of plague that created scarcities of labor.

White males also effectively make up the majority of the world’s natural aristocracy, not only for historical, military and institutional, but for cultural and genetic reasons.

So CEO’s arise from the distributions of talents in their industries, while professionals arise from the distributions of talents in their fields. For this reason CEO’s should constitute a fairly broad distribution in order to manage the voluntary organization of production in an entire population.

Some of us come to very different conclusions in our research because we value results more so than we value symbolism and intellectual fashion. But then our occupations do not prohibit the production of outputs that would offend potential customers in the academy. So some intellectuals are ‘lucky’ enough to be free to state the science rather than obligated to justify wishful thinking. 😉

Affections.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine