Women were made to work. That sentence should be taken literally, not in the metaphorical sense that drives everyday weepies on television. "You are a woman," the not-so-subtle message in such programmes goes, "and it is your lot to suffer, be discriminated against and abused, and go through it all with the stoicism of a Zen monk (fine, some tears are allowed)." Women, to repeat, were made to work. In all but the most strenuous of tasks, where they are at a biological disadvantage, they acquit themselves better than their male counterparts. And the very things that were once believed to make them poorer working stock than men are those that allow them to do so.

Consider childbirth. By her early twenties, a woman is physically and mentally equipped to be a mother. Surely, that has some bearing on why a 22-year-old woman MBA from any B-school is a few times as mature as her male batchmate who is still a bit of a boy. In any organisation that believes in equal opportunities, the former would be on the fast track to growth and the latter, on the not-so-fast one. Even after making allowances for a 12- to 18-month maternity break, the woman would be ahead. That may not have been the case in corporate India thus far (except in the case of a few companies such as ICICI Bank), but there are signs that things are slowly changing.

Then, in what must rank as a significant advantage in this age of S-Ox (as companies have started abbreviating the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the US that requires CEOs and CFOs to sign off on their companies' financial statements, a direct result of the spate of accounting misdemeanours that came to light in the early 2000s), women, it turns out, may not be as venal or corruptible as men. Women have seldom played the role of the hunter-gatherer, and are rarely the chief wage earners in their families (there are exceptions, but their numbers are still insignificant enough to be left out of any statistical analysis). Ergo, money is not as strong a motivator for most women as it is for men.

The money bit, and their role in raising children, makes women executives much more sensitive to issues larger than mere profitability. At one time, this may have flown in the face of the Type A logic of the typical profit-minded company. Today, when one bad decision that reflects gender-bias or utter disregard for the environment can result in bankruptcy, it is a significant advantage. Decisions made by a woman manager, or decisions she has had a hand in shaping, tend to reflect a concern for all parties involved: employees, consumers, the environment at large, and other stakeholders.

There have been, as you must be itching to point out by now Patient Reader, enough women in business who have 'gone bad'. Still, it is this magazine's belief that much of this may have been borne out of having to think like a man-once considered a pre-requisite for succeeding in business; "leave your gender at the door if you want to do well at work", women were once told-and playing by the all-too-masculine rules of a game that was once the exclusive preserve of men.

It is these, and not mundane things such as the ability to multi-task-something held by the more mediocre analysts as the key to the success of women-that takes women far close to the image of the ideal employee than men. Indeed, if it were an equal world, men, not women, would be the other sex in the workplace.