Time for the Gender Talk
by Connie Glaser
Connie Glaser is one of the country's leading experts on leadership and communications. Her best-selling books have been translated into over a dozen languages. A dynamic speaker at corporate and business events, she may be contacted at connie@connieglaser.com |
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I recently had the opportunity to attend The Wall Street Journal’s Women in the Economy Conference. The Journal convened an executive task force of 200 top leaders in government, business and academia to examine the forces that hold women back in the workplace — and develop a viable action plan to create new opportunities.
Without a doubt, the most provocative speaker at the conference was Dr. Sandra Witelson, a neuroscientist and brain expert from McMaster University in Canada. Witelson challenged the notion that men’s and women’s brains are the same — and went on to discuss how these brain differences can affect skills, behavior and decision-making in the workplace.
For decades, whenever comments have been made about the differences between male and female brains, those remarks were usually interpreted as meaning that women’s brains were inherently inferior to those of men. But clearly that’s not the case.
Nine years ago, Harvard researchers discovered that men’s brains were, indeed, larger. However, the same study found that the areas of the brain responsible for problem-solving, decision-making and regulating emotions were actually larger in women. Researchers also found that the female brain has more connections between the two hemispheres, and women have 11 percent more brain cells in the area called the planum temporale, which has to do with perceiving and processing language.
Researchers at UCLA have also found distinct differences in the ways men’s and women’s brains react to stress. For males, the most common reaction is “fight or flight”; for women, it’s “tend and befriend.” This may explain why, when a woman feels frazzled, she wants to sit and talk about it. But when a man gets stressed, testosterone orders the brain to drop everything and react as quickly as possible.
The decision-making process also may pit men and women poles apart. Women’s brains tend to operate as “gatherers.” They prefer to explore multiple possibilities, weigh multiple variables and consider multiple outcomes. According to anthropologist Helen Fisher, women tend to “integrate, generalize and synthesize.They tend to think in webs of interrelated factors, not straight lines.”
Men, on the other hand, tend to focus on finding a quick answer. They don’t want to linger in the decision-making process; they want to complete the task. Not surprisingly, these decision-making differences can often create conflict at work. Men may think women are trying to undermine a business meeting when women want to discuss, process and clarify an issue. These differences in style can result in impatience, frustration and costly misunderstandings — on the part of both men and women.
No question that tensions around gender differences exist in the workplace. And too many companies have learned the hard way that not acknowledging these differences can cause tremendous liability. Isn’t it time to put these issues on the table and address them directly, rather than pretending they don’t exist?
Bottom line: Organizations best able to abandon the “battle of the sexes” in favor of a collaborative and inclusive team approach will emerge as leaders in the years to come. By acknowledging and leveraging the differences between men and women we can build a more vital workplace with a strong and diverse foundation.
Isn’t it time that your company had the Gender Talk?
