Boys Rules, Girls Lose - Women at Work

I have worked for many male and many female led organizations. Since life is too short, I only work for high achievers who do amazing things. Nevertheless, I have observed that the rules of workplace status differ between the two organizations. Actually, the rules of workplace status differ in every organization as the leader sets the tone. However, since we are generalizing, I wanted to express my thoughts to see what people thought.

Steve Blank describes this as a competition vs collaboration model. I think it's better to take it to the school yard and it's about play fighting vs. social belongingness which are each expensive strategies that require total investment and exclude each other.

Men (let's say) usually play fight to determine the pecking order. Aggression for men is like a status bubble sort: continuously comparing and swapping status with your peers. This strategy consumes energy continuously, but transactionally.

Women (let's say) often mistake play aggression for real aggression and respond inappropriately, thereby losing the game.

Women (let's say) have a different status game. While it's usually described as building relationships, I think that's not quite it play fighters build relationships too. The other game is about constantly demonstrating support of other people around you. This is more like neural networks: reinforce connections or prune them. This strategy also consumes energy continuously, but over time.

Men (let's say) often make a mistake of not responding correctly and come off as insensitive.

If we are truthfully generalizing, none of this really matters since every leader is different so you'll have to adapt skillfully to your situation. Trust me: gender is not a true signal of which strategy is in play.

Lessons:

1. Learn how to be acutely aware to your organization's status game and play accordingly.

2. When you're in power, make sure you create a productive status game and enforce accordingly.

I must admit, my experiences are rather the opposite. That is, men seem to collaborate more than women. At least with women I constantly see mobbing behavior, they can get really worked up about having people around they don't like. With men there seems to be more of a laissez faire attitude.

Purely anecdotal, of course...

That's strange. While some boys were undeniably competitive (mostly athletes, where they're expected to be), on the whole, my observations growing up were that girls were viciously competitive, following the maxim "it's a small world, so use your elbows a lot." They were also often cruel to each other, and in any case, keen to establish explicit hierarchies of social popularity and dominance. I am not sure they were in it for authority or power or respect per se - psychological desires often attributed to men - but they were definitely aggressive and competitive.

Most men I knew, meanwhile, easily made friends with each other, were not particularly standoffish, and tended to work together to achieve common goals rather effectively. Sometimes there would be a little bit of healthy competitive dynamic, but almost always within the context of a universally acknowledged, healthy group effort.

I think some of the stuff about "hard-wiring" is actually parents underestimating the influence of society vs their own influence. I once read a study that found that eight years old was the point at which children were influenced more by non-family sources than family sources.

Hm. Growing up, I spent most of my time on collaborative play (building giant lego structures and creating intricate dioramas with action figures), not competitive play (though I certainly liked competitive games, and still do).

I'm not sure that men really spend any more time competing that collaborating, compared to women - is there any evidence to that effect that's not anecdotal?

Boys rules, Girls lose? Do these theories still hold true? This year, for the first time in the US, the number of women in the workforce surpassed the number of men. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-... I don't believe this majority exists in blue collar jobs, but I could be mistaken.

Here's one tragic result of forced gender assignment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

plus anecdotes from friends and family:

""When I say there was nothing feminine about Brenda," brother Brian Reimer later recalled, "I mean there was nothing feminine:

She walked like a guy. Sat with her legs apart. She talked about guy things, didn't give a crap about cleaning house, getting married, wearing makeup. We both wanted to play with guys, build forts and have snowball fights and play army. She'd get a skipping rope for a gift, and the only thing we'd use that for was to tie people up, whip people with it. She played with my toys: Tinkertoys, dump trucks. This toy sewing machine she got just sat."

http://www.singlesexschools.org/reimer.html

Anecdote: I've had women bosses in 3 out of the 4 companies I've worked for (not IT shops).

In all cases, IT was a collaboration/support department, subservient to the "men's" departments like sales

And of course the CEO, president or equivalent was a man

However, I think the fact that the #2 person was a woman in all three cases is a win for women.

I wonder if it was subconsciously set up by the leader that way, maybe they feel less threatened by a woman as #2?.

Being in a department that's not in the line of fire hinders the possibility of advancement in the career ladder significantly, I've noticed.

I've read a very good book on the subject, Pink Brain Blue Brain, in which the author writes about what are the really physical differences between genders and which are social differences (basically nature vs. nurture). A good read for anyone trying to understand where science stands as of today on the gender gap questions.

The main theme of the book is, there are differences, but not as dramatic between genders as between two individuals; and much of the differences may be alleviated by paying attention to stereotypes when raising or educating children.

"Women can be equally competitive if they desire. It’s not a question of competency. Or a skill only boys have. If they want to succeed by competing they can. They just have to learn the rules and practice them."

It is hard to imagine that someone who decides that play fighting with sticks is important for their career will be better at it than someone who has been play fighting with sticks for fun since they were 8 years old and it is misguided to tell that person that does not have the competitive instinct that they can "succeed" in an environment of play fighting enthusiasts.

I think the competition vs. collaboration is a little off, but the general point about recognizing the rules of the game is spot on and very important. When you understand the rules you can choose to play, choose not to play, and may in some situations be able to change the rules to suit you better. (When you don't understand the rules and just have a vague sense of being treated unfairly, all you can do is whine, blame, and be miserable)

One of the most important take aways is understanding the rules of the game. It's important any time humans organize. A French professor I had in college gave me the sage advice, "Know the rules before you try to break the rules." It's a little out of context to the situation at the time, but still applicable nonetheless.

I think electronic medical records is going to help equal out the amount of women in IT type jobs. At the place I work now medical billing/EMR implementation there are about 40 women and just 3 men.

And yes the women all talk shit about each other constantly, and few get along genuinely.

> We started to believe that perhaps there was some hard-wiring about gender.

Uh... gender, perhaps?

Part IV

To be more clear, is pink hard wired? No. What is hard wired is that she wants to grow to be an adult woman and wants to fit into the group of other girls who want to grow to be adult women. In particular, she wants to fit into the group of other girls who want pretty, pink dresses. And notice, the adult women with the greatest influence on girls 3-4 are the ones who are MOMMIES. E.g., can't expect that a women, who for the past 5-10 years has been working 24 x 7 to be a mommy, would mostly communicate to her daughters that what women should do is to be information technology entrepreneurs. Sorry 'bout that.

Here's a guess: Use standard color graphics software and see how to make a pastel color: Take any saturated color and just mix in a lot of white. Done. So, saturated colors are more bombastic, and pastels are more sensitive. So, guess which is more appropriate for a human female?

But, fathers, there's another reason, comparably strong, she wants pretty, pink dresses: One of the A+, astounding talents of little girls is being able to be endearing and to elicit supportive, protective emotions and behavior from their fathers. A girl of 4 can totally outclass her father, wrap him around her little finger. How does she do this? She copies from women and other girls, runs experiments, and sees what gets supportive, protective behavior from her father. Quickly she figures out that being in a pretty pink dress and acting cute, sweet, meek, darling, adorable, precious, dependent, needing to be supported, cared for, and protected, smiling, having her eyes big, looking small by keeping her elbows at her side and her feet together, looking meek by keeping her hands together, being spotlessly clean, etc. gets back an ocean of support, protectiveness, approval, smiles, affection, more pretty, pink dresses, etc. from Daddy. She says, "Daddy, Daddy, will you get me X?". For X a hammer, gun, or toy truck, she sees it doesn't work. For anything pretty and pink, it does work. Age 3; pattern set for life. Mainly she does this work with her astoundingly effective emotional sensors and processors; always right along she knows what Daddy is feeling and likely thinking about what to do. Fathers: She can read your emotions, ones you never knew you expressed or even had, like a book. If you smile at her, even a little, when she looks a little prettier, and you WILL, then she will look prettier. Bet on it. Mother Nature does.

So, fathers, you've been telling your daughters in terms loud and clear to them that you want them to be cute, sweet, pretty, .... Or, she's nearly never so happy as when she can look cute, sweet, pretty, ..., because she knows that then she can get what she really wants -- supportive and protective behavior from Daddy.

So, fathers, to see why she wants a pretty, pink dress, in part look to your own reactions.

Again, just what is it about motherhood we're having such a tough time understanding?

It's not nice to try to fool Mother Nature.

Be not deceived: I've only touched on a little of what Mother Nature has, and I omitted the many monsters in Pandora's box. Don't mess around with Mother Nature.

Part I

I tried that: it was a super strong effort, didn't work, and was a disaster.

Too much in this thread is "dance 'round and 'round and suppose while the secret sits in the middle, and knows.". Since I've been there, tried that, "Oh he suffered terrible. Got the scars to prove it", I discovered much of the secret and will let you know some of the main points.

So, here's Girls and Women 101 for Dummies, That Is, Men. Hackers, listen up. Girls, not just like boys but softer!

Here are three simple explanations:

(1) Just what is it about motherhood people are finding so difficult to understand?

(2) It's not nice to try to fool Mother Nature.

(3) The strong parts of the tree are from the strong limbs, not the weak, sick, or dead limbs.

I know; I know; now it goes:

"Women, not just for babies anymore.".

Believe much of that, and I've got a great bargain on a bridge over the East River you'd really be interested in.

Warning: The ways Mother Nature has to fight back are intricate, strong, and deep beyond belief, well hidden, and very poorly understood. Why? Sure, now we want women to do men's work for more in economic productivity. A woman wants a nice paycheck as a source of financial security; her husband might also like the extra income.

I suggest that essentially just this desire for economic productivity goes WAY back, to whatever men and women did day by day over the past few hundred thousand years at least. The result was nearly always the same and remains so:

Women who did much on men's work were weak, sick, or dead limbs on the tree.

Or, for many thousands of years humans have tried to find, and occasionally have found, ways women could do men's work and for each way found Mother Nature quickly pruned out that part of the tree. By now Mother Nature has a huge catalog of well proven, fully effective, long never seriously overcome means to keep women from doing men's work. So, now for a woman to be good at men's work, the work essentially must be quite different from anything Mother Nature pruned out over the past few hundred thousand years. Lot's of luck finding such work now!

So just why don't women like real-time, object-oriented, multi-threaded, multi-processing software technology, with a dynamic inheritance hierarchy, active objects, transactional integrity, with an extensible hashing symbol table? Don't ask, but be sure Mother Nature knows!

"But, but, but, she has great grades in school, has a very high IQ, is very determined ...! She's AWASH in ability." Still, for nearly anything in men's work, better bet that Mother Nature long since found a way so that she couldn't do it. Do I have any strong, real world examples? Unfortunately, yes, some VERY strong examples.

Like we said back in Tennessee, "That dog won't hunt.". That's a fact, Jack, and that we don't have a detailed explanation for why doesn't change the fact.