THE differences between men and women emerge in infancy, before culture can have an impact. When you see these differences in societies and cultures as various as the Japanese, the Americans, the Zulus, the Inca or Inuit, and in other primate species, you realise that they are real and that they evolve for very specific reasons.
The most surprising of these differences lies in the way men and women think. All of us think, collect data, put it into patterns, and come up with options. But when women think, they collect more pieces of data, they put them into more complex patterns, they see more alternative outcomes, they weigh more variables to make decisions, they tend to synthesise, generalise and contextualise. They tend to think in 鈥渨ebs鈥� of factors, not straight lines. I call this 鈥渨eb thinking鈥�.
Men, on the other hand, tend to compartmentalise, to get rid of data they regard as extraneous, to focus on what they think is important, and to take a more causal, linear pathway to the goal. I call this 鈥渟tep thinking鈥�. Obviously both sexes do both all the time, but women tend to do web thinking more routinely, and men do step thinking more routinely.
Advertisement
I wrote The First Sex: The natural talents of women and how they are changing the world because I knew that men and women were different, and that those differences have evolved. Since one of the great 20th-century developments was women moving into job markets all around the world, I wanted to know the impact women would have. What I discovered is that the job market is changing in ways that reflect the female mind.
For millions of years, women worked. They came home with 60 to 80 per cent of the evening meal: a double-income family was the rule. Women were relatively much more powerful than they are today 鈥� almost as powerful as men overall 鈥� but as we moved into the agricultural revolution male roles became much more important than female roles.
At the beginning of the industrial revolution, men and women left the fields for factory work, but it wasn鈥檛 until after the First World War, with the rise of modern businesses, that doors started to open again.
When you look at the modern world of work, you see the difference between evolved step and web thinking reflected everywhere. You need both: they are both good ways of thinking, but there are things about the 21st century that make it especially good for web thinking. The buzzwords in business have been about depth and breadth of vision, depth of thinking, plus the ability to deal with complexity and uncertainty. Women can live with the ambiguity that is a major feature of our complex world, for example, while men find it harder because they are more cut and dried, more rule-bound.
Web thinking also favours long-term planning. There is an astronomical difference between men and women in the way they handle the long-term expectations of the stock market, for example. In one study of 35,000 clients of a major brokerage firm, three-quarters of the women had no short-term goals for their cash; they were all long-term. Men, however, tended to want to churn their account constantly.
Though we still have hierarchical organisations, more organisations are using teams to solve problems 鈥� and women are very skilled at team work. Women also see an organisation as an integrated, multi-layered whole, composed of patterns and relationships. Imagination is a part of this, and women have it in spades. Women screenwriters write more complex plots, with multiple relationships and multiple endings. And coupled with women鈥檚 outstanding linguistic skills, some of the new communications industries and technologies will be a natural fit for women. Women already make up 53 per cent of American writers, 54 per cent of editors, journalists, and technical writers, and around 50 per cent of middle management in television.
The power structure is changing, too. Non-profit organisations are multiplying: in the US, 50 per cent of CEOs of non-profits are women, and 67 per cent of their officers with budgets are women. These are the people who spend the money. Everyone expects these organisations will be as powerful as formal government and industry in shaping and swaying world opinion.
When the male mind is working perfectly, it works very well because it is a more compartmentalised brain and more focused. But for every man at the top there are an awful lot of men at the bottom. Women are sturdier animals because they have the most difficult job on Earth: raising tiny, helpless babies and performing a multiplicity of tasks concurrently. As the 21st century unfolds, we will see just how important those evolved talents become.
