Editor-At-Large: Women make better bosses. Believe me

Say goodbye to David Brent, the boss we loved to hate. Ricky Gervais revealed last week that he will not be writing a third series of The Office for BBC2. I could hardly bear to watch more than five minutes of his alter-ego at a time, so painful were the memories that flooded back. Having been a boss, spending most of my working life in large organisations full of male executives, I found The Office a bit too close to home for comfort. Now, a survey conducted by Professor Beverley Alimo-Metcalfe of Leeds University, presented recently to a conference of psychologists, reveals what we secretly knew all along: women make better bosses. After polling more than 2,000 health service and local authority workers at middle to senior management level, she concluded that most people thought women bosses knew how to inspire their staff and create a better climate for learning and development than men.

Isn't the monstrous David Brent just like a lot of men you have to put up with at work, humour gently and pretend they are super-attractive, witty and personable, in order to rise up the slippery pole of career advancement? Of course, getting promoted if you're female means you not only have to be brilliant at your job, but you also need to develop and finely hone a whole new set of skills in order to blend in with men.

After many years in corporate life, I can laugh at any number of their unfunny jokes, ignore all the keys and coins jangling in their pockets (not to mention their floppy middle bits bursting through their shirts), I can feign interest in cricket and football scores, and even stand at a bar and look enthralled while hearing about a gas-guzzling macho new car. I can also waffle on at length about the best route from Leighton Buzzard to Billericay and how to avoid the M11 at all costs. I've spent hours in team-building exercises, sported stupid T-shirts with the rest of my management colleagues, and trained myself to gaze enraptured at hour-long power-point presentations with hundreds of columns of indecipherable figures and incomprehensible graphs. I have been trained to write bullet-point-packed meaningless memos, and issue equally ridiculous lists of objectives for my poor staff.

What Professor Alimo-Metcalfe has hit on in her research is that the standards and models currently used by industry to rate bosses and their performance is based on American leadership models, which tend to be derived from studying white, middle-class men. Having developed a different kind of questionnaire, based on such factors as "showing genuine concern", "encouraging change" and "being honest and consistent", she came up with a very different view of what is needed to be a good boss.

The current "received wisdom" of what we need in management results in monsters such as David Brent. It's not surprising we find him hilarious – he's an all-too-familiar breed. In 10 out of 14 categories, Professor Alimo-Metcalfe found that female bosses were seen to perform better than men, and they were equal in the other four.

If we look at the FTSE 100 female index for 2001, we can see what an under-used resource women managers are. Out of 1,166 available seats on the boards of our top-performing companies in the UK, a pathetic 58 women hold non-executive directorships and 10 are executive directors. So don't talk to me about a glass ceiling: it is concrete, titanium, bomb-proof, with lone pioneers such as Marjorie Scardino constantly touted as proof of some invisible change. In 2001, the figures I've just mentioned mean that only 7.2 per cent of all FTSE board directors are female. Don't write in and tell me that 57 per cent of Britain's businesses have one female director: a meaningless statistic as we know that most new small businesses are started by brave women anxious to work outside a structure created by and run by white, middle-aged men.

A few years ago I made a speech at the Edinburgh Television Festival where I derided the four Ms (male, middle-class, middle-aged, mediocre) that dominated management in the British media. We may have women in more positions of power in television, radio and publishing in 2002, but it simply isn't happening elsewhere. Marks & Spencer is held up as a role model with a 27 per cent female board, but hang on a minute, aren't at least 60 per cent of its customers female?

Alan Wells, director of the Government's Basic Skills Agency, is deeply concerned that small children who spend hours in front of the TV or PlayStation aren't bothering to speak properly to their parents. It seems the "daily grunt" has replaced a chat over the meal table, and he suggests that schools should offer parents classes in how to talk to and play with their offspring. This is another example of the nanny state so beloved by New Labour. Why pick on toddlers? Does anyone have any language skills any more? Try the new David Cronenberg film Spider, starring Ralph Fiennes. A more depressing 99 minutes would be hard to come by as our man grunts, mumbles, snuffles and twitches his way around the East End of London in the late 1950s and mid-1980s.

Even more amazing is the weird accent of Gabriel Byrne playing a working-class plumber. I thought for a moment I was watching a Paul Merton spoof, complete with the manic manufacture of roll-ups every 45 seconds. In some respects Spider really is beyond parody. It all seemed like a depressed Canadian's view of Britain, and is perhaps intended as anti-tourist propaganda. I expect Cronenberg will be setting his next opus in glorious, colourful, chatty Vancouver.

Finally, I was no fan of Philip Glass (who has composed the soundtrack to the new Stephen Daldry film, The Hours) finding his early work tedious, but I have been converted. Jean Cocteau's 1945 version of Beauty and the Beast is my favourite film – I've seen it dozens of times since I was 10 – and Glass presided over an extraord- inarily moving performance of it at the Barbican in London on Wednesday. He has written a new score, and opera singers perform the soundtrack in front of a large screen showing a beautifully restored print. Cocteau's work is not only magical, it also possesses a timeless quality. Glass has created a new form of opera, combining cinema and orchestra, substituting his sound effects for those in the original. After a while we ignored the bits that weren't in sync with the screen, and were transported into a beautifully complementary world of sound and surreal imagery. My only complaint is that this was a one-off performance in the UK, and I strongly recommend the compilation CD of Glass's film music, which also includes his score for Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi.