Yes, women workers do present problems, John. I'll admit that. Women scare me.
But now let's consider one of my pet peeves. Women.
Okay, now Walt, you've had your little joke. Give her to somebody else. I ask for a man.
If you treat her right, she might make you a darn good employee.
What do you mean treat her right? But I can remember the good old days when there were all men in my department, and we didn't have these problems.
Business is run by the rules of the male culture. And so men go to work, everything feels comfortable for them.
They behave in ways that are natural for them. And then the women come and complain that it's not fair to them.
And the men are thinking, I'll see anything amiss here. I mean, what are these women complaining about?
But men don't feel it at work. Men feel it at home. They feel these gender differences.
You know, when I start talking to groups about gender differences, the men, they just don't believe it's there,
actually tell a particular story, and it has to do with home life.
And men will come up to me during their break, and they'll say, you've been under my bed, you know my wife.
I mean, this is amazing to me. Men can see it at home.
It's very hard for them to see it at work because work is played by the rules of the male culture.
How was your day?
Pretty quiet. I did the washing this morning, cleaned the house, and I took Junior to the dentist.
And did the shopping. I put up 16 jars of jam this afternoon. Then I went to work on Junior's clothes.
I'm sorry stuff is late.
It's called the second shift, and it is changing. It used to be, 30 years ago, women did the vast majority of the work at home.
But now today, women do something like three times the amount of work at home that men do, but men are doing a lot more now.
So that's changing, and part of what's changing also is that fathers, new fathers today, expect to be much more involved in bringing up their children and taking care of them.
So, you know, those are positive things in terms of incremental soul movement.
Men live in hierarchies, and women tend to live in flat structures and share power equally.
But, of course, an organization, by its very definition, is a hierarchy.
And the other part is that men are more goal-focused. That is, kill the problem.
And women are more, let's look around at what is causing the problem with all our options.
So women are more process-focused.
You know, you ask a man, what do you think I should do about this? And he'll say, do X.
You ask a woman, what do you think I should do about this?
And she'll say, well, you could do A, you could do B, you could do C.
On the other hand, you know, I'd recommend D.
But men are thinking, what? This is motor math. Why doesn't she get to the point?
I mean, why don't you tell me what she thought D was it?
But that's an example of how women are seen as less than when they use their natural strengths.
So the hierarchy versus the flat structure and the goal-focused versus the process-focused
causes tons of problems in the workplace when we try to work together.
Women are more sensitive than men.
I'll say they're sensitive.
Men and women live in different cultures and have different rules about what they consider appropriate adult behavior.
And so when women, particular senior women, don't behave appropriately, that is, like a man,
then they're not included.
But women have a real hard time long-term acting like a man, and so they get fed up and leave.
And so that's the dynamic rather than there being some cabal somewhere that's trying to prevent women from moving up.
Men can be aggressive in a wide variety of ways.
Women, to be successful, must be aggressive, but within a narrow band of acceptable behavior.
Women can't look at her male calling and say he does these things, he talks this way, works for him,
so I'll do it because rules are different for women than they are for men.
And people don't even know that they hold these rules.
But a woman can't behave like a man and be successful.
It's just going to be really hard for a woman to be aggressive enough and not be perceived as a raging bitch.
It's very hard.
If you look at the numbers in organizations, both in the United States and in Europe,
from the bottom up through middle management, it's about equal numbers of men and women.
But when you look at senior executives, only 20% of senior executives are women and only 10% on the boards.
Those numbers have not changed in 20 years at all.
So that's where it's stuck.
It just is equal opportunity.
That's not about making the other gender bad or wrong or even assuming that they're keeping us down.
It's just equal opportunity.
