Three couples are at a party. The chip bowl runs dry. One man says: “I brought the chips.” The women are appalled. “No one wants to negotiate?” asks the man. “I must have missed the meeting.” The moral of the story? Women co-operate. Men negotiate.
Rob Becker’s long-running play ‘Defending the Caveman’ is not just a comedy about the battle of the sexes. It’s all true. Science is proving that men and women really do think differently. Technology has advanced to the point that we can now map those differences.
Mary Ovenstone is a psychotherapist who is doing her thesis on the neurological differences between the male and female brain. On a rainy summer’s afternoon in Cape Town, Mary talks about how understanding these differences can improve a business’s bottom line.
While over 98% of our brains are the same, the differences are significant. It’s really only been in the last 10 years that scientists have begun to understand the extent of these differences. Until now, all scientific research on the body and the brain was done on men, because of the difficulties posed by the female menstrual cycle, which changes women’s physiology from month to month. Scientists extrapolated the workings of the brain from these male studies. With the advent of functional MRI’s and SPECT scans in the 1990s, women’s brains could be scanned. Long-held beliefs about the human brain were overturned. For example, it was thought that there was only one language centre in the brain. In fact, there are six. The male brain uses one language centre; the female brain uses all six. The well-known adage that men are left-brained and logical and women are right-brained, creative and emotional has also been proved false. While men are left-brained to a large degree, women are both-brained.
The female brain receives input simultaneously from both left and right hemispheres. Women have a larger corpus callosum, the bundle of nerves between the right and the left hemisphere. This acts as a complete connection for the female brain. Feminine intuition is not a myth but scientific fact. Women have a larger insula, which means that they are more in touch with their gut instincts. Women have a larger hippocampus. They remember sensual and emotional experiences better than men. Women produce more oxytocin, responsible for empathy, attachment and intimacy. In essence, women can handle complex emotive processes, can multi-task and process all that mental complexity – and do it verbally.
In the male brain, the right and the left hemispheres are much more separate. While both sexes have access to both hemispheres all the time, the male brain focuses primarily on the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere is responsible for spatial awareness and abstract thinking. That’s the classic male brain. Men have very short attention spans when you try to get them to use the right hemisphere. Talk to them about your feelings and you’ll lose them after 10 minutes. They will start to tap or drum their fingers. Women think that they’re being rude or are bored. They’re not. They’ve just reached the end of their attention span and are doing something physical to refocus their brains.
The male brain is designed to make quick, expedient decisions, a vital skill back when survival depended on flight or fight. There wasn’t time to process emotions using words.
Women, on the other hand, have a whole range of emotions that they process and they use words to do it. Men don’t. A man will have an emotion, take it to the left hemisphere and want to solve it like it’s a problem. They have much more simple decision-making processes.
Rob Becker’s premise in ‘Defending the Caveman’ that men are hardwired to be hunters and women to be gatherers is borne out by the latest scientific research. While the men were off hunting or fighting, or farming, women were managing people and processes in their homes. Women are biologically predisposed to be good managers. That’s why everything in their brains is so connected because they’ve been managing things for so long.
“Gender is genetic,” says Mary. “We are born with our gender definitions. The average brain falls somewhere between the two extremes of a completely female and a completely male brain. Although there are men and women who have a ‘bridge brain’, enabling them to think more like the opposite sex, we all still have the hormonal system of our gender. Genetics, hormones, biochemistry – all those different layers work together to create the brain.”
Mary points out: “We’ve got gender definitions that have emerged from hundreds of thousands of years of gender separation. Now we need to define our gender in terms of the sex differences of the brain rather than in terms of cultural usage. It doesn’t change men into women or women into men but it broadens our gender roles in terms of sex definitions rather than gender definitions. We need to understand each other and begin to learn how to work together.”
A 19-year study of 215 Fortune 500 companies conducted by Roy Adler of Pepperdine University in the United States showed that the 25 firms with the best record of promoting women to high positions were between 18 and 69% more profitable than the median Fortune 500 firms in their industries.
In South Africa, according to Grant Thornton’s annual International Business Report (2011), 27% of senior managerial positions are held by women. However, these statistics have declined from 29% in 2007. The global average is 20%. South Africa ranks 15th out of the 27 countries surveyed.
However, Mary warns that if BEE is more important than gender in employment decisions, we will not necessarily get the most from our workforce.
Mary’s advice to men in the corporate world is:
“Men need to realise the value of the female, what an excellent manager she is. Most men in the corporate world today realise that if you want to get a job done, give it to the women because they are so good at managing. Most men see that but they don’t really want to compete with women. That’s where they get threatened. The drive to compete needs to be transformed into the urge to co-create the best outcome. Men do have a territorial imperative. That’s because of the vasopressin and the testosterone in the male brain. It makes the male brain more competitive, more territorial. They are hugely driven by status. But status for men is not about the kind of car they drive. It’s about the pecking order. Men have always had to jockey for the position of alpha male. It’s a natural thing. Men want to be the boss. Women have to stop criticising them for that. However, men shouldn’t turn around and impose their pecking order on women because women don’t think that way. For women, status is about being heard, being acknowledged. Women want to have arrived at the point where people listen to them. Once women get over their tendency to take everything personally and take everything on and begin to know their own strength, and feel confident about themselves, they are absolutely dynamite in business.”
Mary’s advice to women in the corporate world is:
“Think like a woman but learn how to talk to men. Women need to separate their feelings from their thoughts. To solve a problem, first, interrogate your feelings and verbalise them. Decide, ‘This is what I feel.’ Then, ‘This is what I think.’ Finally, ‘This is the action that needs to be taken’.”
This approach will ensure that women’s voices are heard and heeded by their male colleagues in the workplace.
According to statistics compiled by the international organisation of parliaments, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, for 2009, South Africa ranks fourth in the world in terms of female representation in national parliaments. However, Mary cautions that these women need to be schooled to function in these positions of leadership. While the government has led the way, it is going to take a long time for business to follow suit. “You have to have women who can function in such a way that they make money for shareholders, the primary focus of the corporate world.” Mary admits that she is encouraged by the global economic meltdown because it could become the driver for change. There has to be reasons other than shareholder dividends for business to exist – like good jobs and the provision of quality goods and services while safeguarding the environment. Women have always been concerned about people, processes, all the collateral elements as well as the end result. Such information is readily absorbed and processed by the female brain. Women, therefore, have an important contribution to make in business. “We’ve only just begun to explore what men and women can do together in the 21st century workplace.”