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.
But I think it is not because boys are more collaborative, but because boys are taught not just how to fight, but when to fight. We start fighting when someone yells "fight", but more importantly we stop fighting when the bell rings. Then we hug our opponent and share a beer, because we've got a lot more in common with him than with the people sitting around watching.
I've never observed women being unable to compete - that's just a matter of technical competence. I have observed women being unable to stop competing when the bell rings. Losing is fine, holding a grudge isn't.
(To be fair, some men exhibit the same problem. Academia seems rife with them.)
When I've seen my SO in female-dominated workplaces, the constant strain of "collaboration" is exhausting. However, "collaboration" in this sense is usually playing a competitive popularity contest, and in the archetypal case this was achieved by bad mouthing people behind their backs. If you were able to talk to every girl individually, you'd eventually build a picture which painted everyone loathing everyone else. That wasn't true, but that's how they bonded ("You're my favorite in this office, I don't like everyone else" being said to multiple people). In my small sample size (< 4), this seems to be how a lot of female-dominated workplaces are.
I think the difference might be that the bell never rings for females, the popularity game they are playing is constant and exhausting. Men are able to see each individual flash point as an individual battle, and that it's usually a battle of ideologies rather than active dislike. Actively disliking someone is tiring; I can't keep it up for longer than a couple of weeks. The ability for guys to hug the opponent and share a beer is drastically underestimated, in my opinion. We don't often talk about positive traits of males in workplaces, but I think that is definitely one of them.
The difference is that women tend to form fewer, deeper relationships and men more, broader, and shallower ones. EvPsyc speculation suggests that its a more or less hardwired carryover from women gathering and agricultural family care and men collaborative hunting and early agricultural work gangs.
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.
Completely true. Men and women are equally competitive. The difference is that men compete explicitly and in packs (e.g. team sports) and women compete implicitly and within the group (any Hollywood high-school movie).
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.
My daughter was raised similarly to the girls in the article -- we bought gender-neutral toys, painted her room in neutral colors, and deliberately avoided buying any toys that swayed particularly one way or the other.
By the age of three, she had all but insisted that we buy her pink clothes and girlier toys, to which we of course caved (I mean, if she wants it, so be it -- we just weren't trying to influence.)
She's a smart kid, and she's into plenty of non-girl things (She's currently training mixed martial arts at the age of 8, and loves playing in the mud) -- but her school wardrobe almost entirely consists of decidedly non-boy attire, and her field hockey and lacrosse sticks are pink.
We weren't exactly TRYING to steer her away from it, and it was by no means an experiment on our part, we just didn't want to predispose her to girlie things without provocation, so it's in no way scientific -- but we definitely didn't steer her.
I have a male cousin who's parents absolutely refused to supply gender specific items. Going so far as to purposely ban toy weapons and other "kinetic and violent" items from the toy chest. By four he was turning anything and everything into a sword or a gun -- legos were assembled into firearms, airplanes were turned upside down and held by the tail as a mock gun, sticks and cardboard tubes were swords and clubs...finally after trying to put the lion back in the cage, at 7 or 8 they finally relented and let him join the rest of the world.
The whole exercise seemed like an utterly pointless endeavor to everybody else...boys will generally find kinetic ways of expressing themselves, girls will generally find non-kinetic but more social ways -- prompting or no prompting.
Most surprising is watching my female cousins and nieces grow up, several of whom were quite physically active (doing more kinetic type play activities, climbing, wrestling, etc.) until 5 or 6 when they all very quickly toned that part of their activity patterns and started upping their social patterns. I think this had to do with their development of more complex speech patterns.
How did he know what guns and swords are? There are plenty of outside influences that could pass on societal gender norms even if the parents avoid doing so.
Five or six is when kids typically enter kindergarten in America, where cultural influences from others abound. I don't know what the right explanation is, but I wouldn't discount culture.
Excatly. I am very wary of the whole "we were gender neutral with our kids and then the girl wanted a pink dress SO PINK MUST BE HARD-WIRED!" argument. I am pretty sure if we took a human child to a planet where boys wore pastels and girls wore primary colours and that is what the shops had, that is what the characters on TV advertised, that is what the kids in the playground wore - the girl wouldn't turn around and say "You know what someone should invent? A pink dress!".
You only have to look at historical non-western cultures - if you look at some of the African Tribes, men and women dress in bright primary colours. In India, gold, green and red dominate. If you look at historical Japanese kimonos, you see black and red and purple and gold and so on.
So, if pink for girls is cultural, and you didn't promote it to your kids, somebody else did. And they are passing all sorts of other messages too. You can't raise a kid in a box.
If you liked, you could look at historical Western culture as well. In the 1800s, both boys and girls wore white, and gender differentiation in clothing style was quite subtle for the first few years of life. Styles only began to diverge around 1900 and the pink / blue dichotomy only became really prevalent after WWII.
That doesn't prove all gender preferences are cultural, but color choice certainly seems to be.
I was browsing a book on etiquette published in 1905 a while back and stumbled across an interesting mention that "a parent couldn't go far wrong following the standard conventions and dressing a girl baby in blue and a boy in pink"; it stuck with me and I have been wondering when the conventions changed the other way around. [The quote is from memory and probably not exact, and I can't check it, because I can't remember the book's title.]
I think that this is probably the case. I can't say for certain if he was mimicking swordplay or just clubs (it's not too specific at that age). But he was definitely mimicking some type of projectile weapon quite often...and often with absurd pretend devices that bore no possible resemblance to a gun...like animal sound boxes and such. He'd just hold them at some specific angle and make loud "bang!" sounds.
Interestingly, he was home-schooled until about 9 (when his parent ultimately realized that it's actually not possible to absolutely isolate a child from the world and have them grow up healthy and well adjusted), so it's not like he was getting alot of this from other kids.
In general though, I think it's too easy to simplify things to "girls go with pink and dolls" and "boys go with blue and guns". I think it's far more likely to be "boys tend to go towards kinetic play as they grow older" and "girls tend to go more towards social play as they grow older"...and I think this appears to hold true cross culturally and I don't think it has a lot to do with social expectations. At least in my family, there's a pretty concerted effort to play with the masses of kids in the same games and pretty equally.
How did he know what guns and swords are? There are plenty of outside influences that could pass on societal gender norms even if the parents avoid doing so.
But of course. This is exactly what ojbyrne said at the beginning of the thread: "parents underestimating the influence of society vs their own influence".
By the age of three, she had all but insisted that we buy her pink clothe..
So are you saying the color pink is genetically programmed?
I mean, observing something general like being more cooperative versus more competitive could lend credence to the idea that some behaviors are genetically predisposed. Observing her say she wants to be like Barbie would lend credence to her watching and understanding more Barbie commercials than you imagine.
Oh, I'm not making any claims, just observations. Like I said, we hardly raised her in isolation -- by the age of two, she was engaged in social activities with other kids (co-ed), and watching TV shows targeted to her age group.
I have almost no doubt that it was a societal influence, it just took us for a loop, as it definitely hadn't come from us. Even saying that sounds somewhat insincere though, as it wasn't as though we were avoiding fairly traditional gender roles ourselves, but Mrs. Melton has absolutely no predisposition to wearing pink.
I think a substantial part of it is also parents missing the importance of their expectations. If you're aggressively trying to be 'neutral,' you've got some extreme in your mind you're trying to avoid steering your child towards, and your child can, over time, subconsciously pick that up.
I suppose that's possible, but we were trying to steer away from either extreme -- it wasn't as though we replaced her Barbies with GI Joes, we just bought Legos instead. We tried to ensure that all her toes were educational, even if it wasn't the focus of the toy (i.e., we didn't try to eliminate 'fun'.)
That said, we weren't doing anything in particular to keep her away from commercials, or limiting social interactions from her peers or anything, so there really wasn't much of a 'control' group whatsoever.
David Reimer[1] showed pretty convincingly that there are a lot of hard-wired traits in the genes. Is it 100% of the difference? Of course not. Is it at least 50%? I think the evidence points to that being the case.
Personally, I was always surprised at the difference in play between my boys and girls, even at VERY early ages. You can see the differences at under a year old, even if you are attempting to balance for societal pressures. I've spoken to enough parents who have experienced the same thing to firmly believe it is more than anecdotal.
I'm not sure how to paraphrase what he said about "hard-wiring" but it all rang completely true to me, as the parent of a 10 year old boy. The differences between boys and girls don't have to have value judgments attached to them, but the differences between them are far more than simply cultural.
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?
Shoes, clothing, make-up, houses, boobs, boyfriends, husbands... you name it. Women are just as competitive as men.
Something the article did not mention, that I have found to be true. We tend to collaborate with people we trust and fiercely compete with those we do not. Two women may get on fine together (no fierce competition only friendly competition) but two who dislike each other, will not get along and will try to outdo the other... just like guys. So I'm not sure it's 100% gender that determines the situation.
So the women in your example compete to see who can have the best boyfriends and husbands and possessions, right? While the men compete to see who can do the best job, run the fastest, hit the hardest, and win the football game or finish the job or beat the other guy at pool.
Women at the school yard are competing on who is winning the popularity contest, which is like a political campaign. You need to bring together all the money and the tools to win the hearts of the voters. The tools are an enabler, rather than the end-game.
Like you said, men simply need to bring the biggest X, where X is football prowess, muscles, humor, girlfriend. Then the job is done.
Among guys, the fighting is often playful and we can actually build a relationship during competition. I thought that among women, fighting is almost always destructive to a relationship. Guess I'll have to rethink that.
The evidence suggests that preference for competition comes from culture and not biology. Check out Alfie Kohn's book No Contest: The Case Against Competition for more details.
I've worked with you for six years and known you for 18, and you're just as competitive as anyone and more competitive than most. I don't think it's necessarily just time spent, but definitely there is a massive attitude difference...
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.
That's a good question. But cultures have inertia, so it's likely that even with women forming the majority of the workforce, "masculine" conventions will prevail for a while. This is especially true given that men still tend to hold more positions at the top of the corporate hierarchy.
yes i agree with your comment - men are now coasting - that is - they move on inertia - riding the male system designed 2000 years ago - but women have the momentum and therefore they will conquer the workplace within 50 years
i have been researching this topic lately and as i wrote here http://makebelieve1.wordpress.com/about/ women have kept alive from generation to generation the memory of a society where females were rulers of men
–all authority was vested in the woman who discharged every kind of public duty – the men looked after domestic affairs and did as they were told by their wives – men were not allowed to undertake war service or to exercise any functions of government or to fulfill any public office – such as might have given them more spirit to set themselves up against the women – the children were handed over immediately after birth to the men who reared them–
For the record, this book is pretty controversial. It theorizes about a society that may have existed over 6000 years ago. It references the Amazons - who were mythological - and there is quite a bit of disagreement in the academic community about the validity of the conclusions.
--there is quite a bit of disagreement in the academic community about the validity of the conclusions--
i read a book for myself and draw my own conclusions - the authority of an -academic community- means nothing to me - if you read the book and wrote your own opinion that would have been a valuable contribution instead of a reference to the authority of something that does not exist namely -academic community-
""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."
I'm in IT and six out of the dozen or so managers I've reported to in my eleven years here have been women. (We're definitely a serious outlier—there was at least one time when my entire five- or six-level management chain was female except for the CEO.)
I haven't seen much direct evidence for the competition-vs.-collaboration model in our organization, but there's one generalization I can make: for whatever reason, on average the women have been far more competent than the men. I've encountered several men up the hierarchy from me who were indifferent, ineffectual or incompetent, but none of the women have been, and the sharpest woman I've worked for could run rings around the sharpest man. I suspect this happens because women have to work twice as hard to be taken seriously in IT. The main difference here seems to be that they can eventually get real career traction.
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.
"Gender" denotes the things which are not the physical genital apparatus, and includes but is not limited to types of behavior or preferences or tendencies toward behaviors or preferences. Whether all differences between the sexes in such areas are "cultural conventions" or whether some are in fact "wired in" at a non-cultural level is a topic of endless debate.
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.
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.
The subject of sex differences is MUCH deeper than we know, so deep that for nearly anything new it as if Mother Nature was there long before we were. If you look like a really good candidate for being a good father and want her to be a good mommy, then likely you have something promising; for anything else very good for her, f'get about it. If she's not a mommy and soccer mom in an SUV, etc., then she can be a nurse, school teacher, HR staffer, customer service representative, retail clerk, pediatrician, OB/GYN, CPA, and a few more. How do we know? Just observe facts. Beginning to understand?
In this case, for that old theme of "The Great Natural Order", take it seriously.
Men: If you see your way clear to striking out in new directions on an adventure to do new things, then by all means go for it. When you get back with your fortune, then by all means sweep her off her feet with flowers, etc, and marry her and make her a mommy (maybe not in this order!), with a nice house with a white picket fence, her own SUV, etc. But if you bring her along on your adventure before you have your fortune, then far too soon she will be terrified and crying in her sleep. Remember the scene in the 1939 'Drums Along the Mohawk' with Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert when as newly married they reached their frontier log cabin, an Indian friend dropped by to pay a visit, and she went all hysterical; movie audiences understood right away, and so should hackers.
Candidate reason: For nearly anything we might try having women do what men now do, long ago there were things sufficiently similar and for those Mother Nature had her way: Mother Nature pruned weak, sick, and dead limbs on the tree. So, for anything we want women to do that is very different from the patterns of strong limbs on the tree, long ago women who did such things just are not our ancestors.
Try hard enough to go against those patterns of strong limbs on the tree, and Mother Nature will open a Pandora's box of monsters. I've seen some of those monsters; you can't win against them; don't open that box; don't go against those patterns; don't try to fool Mother Nature. You can learn this lesson quickly, easily from me now or with great pain as you throw much of your life away later.
I have to insert one crucial point so far omitted: Women are MUCH more emotional than men. So, whenever a man looks at some subject in ways that are rational, if the subject has to do with her own life mostly what will really concern her is what is emotional. Sorry about all that rationality guys: For her own life, her emotions overwhelm. It's not that she has no ability at rationality; she can be brilliant at rationality. It's just that for her own life her emotions overwhelm. The rationality is still there, and for subjects far from her own life can be fully meaningful and effective, but for her own life her emotions can and nearly always will overwhelm.
Chalk up this mechanism to Mother Nature. What fraction of men really understood that Mother Nature could have such a rationality blocking mechanism, that is, have her be brilliant at rationality and carry around that brilliance but in crucial ways not be able to use it? What fraction, guys? Getting an idea of what you are up against, how strong are Mother Nature's defenses?
Or, the Henry Fonda character, with his rationality, that he was comfortable with, saw his way clear to a good life starting with just that log cabin, but for the Claudette Colbert character, for that situation so close to her own life, his rationality was meaningless and her emotions overwhelmed.
One more big, huge point so far omitted here: I want to be short and clear and don't want to be crude, but in simple terms human females are herd animals. They are desperate to join groups, mostly of other females, and to be in the center of those groups, receiving approval. Then they feel MUCH more secure. If they can be the leader of such a group, then they can feel even more secure; so, they are social climbers. Yes, they are very cooperative within their groups and very competitive outside their groups: One of their main means for both is gossip. As in D. Tannen, gossip, especially expressing emotions, is how they form group bonds. Cell phones? Social media? Gossip -- female bonding. Hackers form bonds by sharing work (ever hear of open source?); women, sharing emotions!
For little girls and pink dresses, big skirts, puffy sleeves, flimsy and, thus, delicate cloth, pastel colors, tied up with ribbons and bows, a standard explanation is: Children are just desperate for adult competence, that is, want to grow up. Little girls quickly realize that they are little versions of Mommy, and boys, Daddy.
Ever look at pictures of girls and young women, just the faces, without clues to age from hairstyle and makeup, and try to guess the age? Tough to do, ain't it? E.g., Elizabeth Taylor was born in 1932; if just look at her face, JUST her face, in the 1943 'Lassie Come Home' and in the 1951 'A Place in the Sun', darned tough to say how many years are between them. Why? Mother Nature has arranged, the way her face is endearing at age 7-10 is much the same as at age 17. Net, Mother Nature wants her to be endearing and to have her husband care for her much (but not exactly!) like her father did.
The Claudette Colbert character had been very carefully cared for by her very strong father; then she expected the same from her new husband, the Henry Fonda character. To her that log cabin didn't look much the same, and that Indian friend was the last straw! Her emotions had her sense that she wasn't being cared for, and she went hysterical. Rationally Fonda knew that that Indian friend was GOOD to have; emotionally Colbert went hysterical. Actually, what she did was self-destructive; the level 102 course goes into that, but I omit it here (hint: It can create dependency and, thus, have reproductive advantage).
Remember the Dr. Carol Nadelson, "Traditional marriage is about offspring, security, and caretaking". A human female is supposed to be CARED FOR, first by her father and then by her husband. In particular, she is not supposed to be out there, on rationality and little more, facing dangers, taking big risks, being the first in something very new and different in information technology entrepreneurship. Mother Nature was there LONG before Silicon Valley. Sorry 'bout that.
Or, we shouldn't forget the old psychology experiment of the wire mother and the cloth mother. Well, a mother in lots of soft, flowing cloth is much closer to the cloth mother; a mother dressed up in a navy suit and carrying a leather brief case into a tall glass and aluminum office building is much closer to the wire mother. Guess which one will be the stronger limb on the tree, what good mommies will be more like, and, thus, what little girls will want to be like.
So, how does a girl of 3-4 get interested in pretty, pink dresses? A woman who is a mommy has likely strongly followed at least some of the standard patterns. So, a little girl sees from Mommy and other mothers and other little girls what little girls should look like and, thus, wants pretty, pink dresses.
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.