Vancouver Sun: The 'real gender gap': a discussion that's overdue

(Excerpt) -- "The cutthroat aspect of the political arena erodes women, Pinker said. "I think the doors are open now, but I don't think women want to do it. They want to enjoy their lives."

This entire article is a silly pity party for how hard women have it while being the most privileged class in the history of humanity!

I could care less what women want to do.

I have a four year old grandaughter who is smarter than the female who wrote this drivel.

Not for the first time, I find myself asking whether women actually understand the nature and dynamics of the world of business at all. Pinker does nothing to persuade me otherwise. Business is fundamentally about making money, not finding nirvana. If the two happen to coincide, then you are dead lucky, but that is not the purpose of the exercise. And if the two were compatible, men with their massive, collective, age-old experience would have discovered how to meld them long ago, and we would all be living the good life.

At bottom, your business has to be profitable, which means delivering your product at the right quality, the right price and the right time. This in itself makes for improvements in everyone's quality of life, because successful businesses deliver what everyone needs at an affordable price. Of course you can improve your working conditions to make them more comfortable, but there is only so far this can go before it impacts adversely on the primary purpose; then something has got to give. You can have a workplace where everyone lies on hammocks sipping cocktails and listening to music, all in harmony with one another, but it won't last five minutes before you go bust and the music gets turned off, the drinks are poured down the drain and the hammock is repossessed. Real work demands some kind of sacrifice.

Men have always understood this, but so many women seem to struggle with the concept, insisting that if they are not happy at the workface, then the workface has to change to accommodate their desires and demands; otherwise they just walk away. It's nice to have that choice ladies, but somebody has to keep the wheels turning. Unpleasant aspects of the world of work are not a gigantic male conspiracy designed to keep women out of the top jobs, just an understanding of reality. Men can adapt to the demands, so why can't women?

Civilisation: man's greatest, and most unappreciated, gift to women

Research shows that male workers are better at cooperating (i.e. working as a team). The fact that the female brain pattern seems to show a greater inherent ability for neworking activities, has little if any bearing on functioning as a team in the workplace. The two are essentially unrelated. Men are superior in most workplaces primarily because they are task-oriented, more highly focused than women. What typically happens in a mixed workplaces is this:

The men work cooperatively as a team, as mentioned. As part of their behaviour within the male dominance hierarchy at work, they engage in a mild form of "hazing" - they wind each other up, partly as a means of ensuring unity of the team and testing their competitors within the hierarchy, and thus also as a means for the dominant members to continually reassert their places in the hierarchy. When women enter the scene, they (the women) feel a common natural bind or "sisterhood" with each other. They continually size up the males in the workplace for their "mate value", by assessing each male's place in the male dominance hierarchy; they assess his status. At the same time, women workers tend to be uniformly mediocre, partly because they are not as task-oriented as the males, and partly because their innate abilities and intelligence are somewhat mediocre compared to a large segment of the males (this is true of the populace in general).

The women frequently gossip with each other, mainly about others in the workplace and especially the men. They form their own "dominance hierarchy", and groups of alliances (which may change on a moments notice); but they do not compete within the male DH. In other words, the female workers are not competing with the males as such. The most attractive and youthful women are at the top of this female "DH".

Problems arise as follows: in one scenario, a male who is foolish or clumsy and does not fully recognize his own rank in the male "DH", will step out of bounds and make a go at one of the high-ranking women. This often consists of a simple act such as a compliment about the woman's looks. Now since women have an innate "cheater detection" mechanism to check this kind of behaviour by the male, the woman recognizes that the male has stepped beyond his rank. Thus her ire is aroused and this can result in a workplace harassment allegation. Whereas if a high-ranking male were to make a similar statement to the same high-ranking female, she would not only not be offended but often respond in a positive fashion.

Note that these processes, such as the "cheater detection", are mostly unconscious.

Another problem that arises is gross hiring discrimination against men. As mentioned, women feel a common bond with one another. Due to this, women who make hiring decisions are four times as likely to engage in same-sex hiring as are their male counterparts. Studies have shown this to be true. In fact, studies show that men show no preference in hiring of male over female (so much for the "old boy network"). These studies have been done in "mixed" workplaces, thus the results are not due to bias introduced by, say, a field being primarily dominated by women, such as secretarial work.

-ax