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Are women more responsive than men to management training?

Recent research has suggested that women may be more interested in pursuing their own personal development and in taking part in management development training than their male counterparts.
The evidence for this hypothesis is circumstancial and not entirely objective but none the less exists.
It has long been said by some observors that in general women take their management role more seriously than men and that they approach it more dilligently, conscientiously and with more inter-personal sensitivity than men.
We do know that most measures of personality, as demonstrated in Psychometric profiles, produce differing norm group results for behavioural indicators for men and women.
We are aware of the research into "Alpha male" characteristics demonstrated more often by men than by women in high profile Organisational leadership roles.
We know that their is an imbalance and possibly a bias operating against women being promoted to the higher management levels in Organisations and that this cannot be argued away by a mere reference to womens biological role in bearing and raising children.
When coaching both men and women in Organisations my own experience has been that their is no significant, observable difference between men and women in the seriousness with which they approach their work lives and the mental attitude and commitment that they put into dealing with their work/life issues and objectives. There are of course sigificant differences in response between individuals but this does not seem to relate to gender specifically.
When DPL recently ran a series of Team Leader Development Programmes we attracted much more interest from women than from men - from business populations that consisted of at least as many male as female Team Leaders. In fact in the very latest programme we have only one male participant out of a group of 9 participants!
Is it that the women are more open minded, keen to learn and to develop themselves?
Do they see it as a way of helping to compete better against their male counterparts?
Is it that their managers feel that these women are more in need of skills development than the men?
On the programmes that we have run it would be true to say that overall we get a more open minded and constructively questioning approach from the women than the men - and that where we have occasionally got resistance from participants about concepts or approaches that we are aiming to put across then it is by and large the men who adopt the cynical stance than the women. (Or is it that the women are more careful about how openly they express any disagreement? Certainly recent studies of emotional intelligence demonstrate that women in general are more self aware and flexible in their responses to others.)
In conclusion I do not think that a clear case has been made to prove the hypethesis that women respond better than men to management training but that there is some circumstancial evidence to support this contention which could benefit from further study.
If you would like to get more involved in this area of research or practical work then please contact us at DPL.