French feminist Simone de Beauvoir could have really used the help of a few brain scans. “One is not born, but rather one becomes a woman,” she valiantly postulated in 1949.24 She thought she was defending her sex by asserting that our more masculine side was forced out of us by societal forces. She was right that women have spent much of their existence stripped of power, but she was wrong on the nature-versus-nurture argument. Sixty years later, we all know now it’s pretty much Mars versus Venus from birth, and these days, according to science and scans and studies, it looks as though Venus is rising. Sure this is still politically sensitive stuff—the president of Harvard got dumped over his musings that women may have different strengths. But we think we’re on safe ground: we’re not saying different—we’re saying better!
You see, we noticed something the intrepid researchers at the Families and Work Institute kept tripping across as they conducted survey after survey about what employees want. We women experience our jobs quite differently from the way men do. We think about the future. We anticipate consequences more. We spend more time mapping out the potentially negative impact of taking bigger assignments. We have much broader concerns about the way demanding jobs might disrupt connections to family and friends. The researchers knew they were on to something big, but they couldn’t really figure out how to quantify it. Were women’s different attitudes rooted in scientific differences or something less tangible?
We took the anomaly to some brainiacs and discovered that those female instincts, those thought patterns, are hardwired into the female DNA. And in a superior fashion, say some. “There is no question about it,” says Dr. Fernando Miranda. “Women. have much more sophisticated, much more evolved brains.” Miranda, a neurologist who studies these differences, echoes what much of the cutting edge research shows—women really are able to use both sides of their brain more easily than men. Men live mostly on the left side, or in the analytical sphere. But our left and right sides, the analytical and emotional spheres, are more connected, which explains, for example, why women tend to feel more ambivalent about hard-charging careers than men do. We’re constantly weighing two competing brain inputs. But it’s the same process that makes us consensus builders and valuable employees! “I’d much rather hire women than men,” Miranda confesses. “Men are wired to be oppositional by nature—more argumentative.”
The science is even redirecting the most militant women’s libbers. “Above all, the hormones women receive in the womb mean that, by nature, they do not want to be manic, one-dimensional workhorses who invest all their energies in one thing: their job (or hobby). Overall, they are less extreme than men,” writes British journalist and ardent feminist Rosie Boycott, at the same time admitting those words would have made her blood boil a decade ago.25
Bottom line? We are constantly in touch with our emotions, even when we’re not conscious of it, and we act accordingly. The pathways that let us focus on the future are simply more available. In addition, we’re not distracted as much by testosterone, that hormone of instant gratification and domination, which, according to Miranda, not to mention thousands of years of life as we know it, can really muck things up.
No, we women are instead heavily under the influence of the hormonal secretions of the hypothalamus. That’s the mysterious stuff that lets us smell a tiger at thirty feet and take him on if he threatens our young, or, in Womenomics-speak, lets us sniff out claustrophobic corporate culture from blocks away and jump ship if it threatens our family life. We viscerally understand from the start what the ladder represents—a grim, Kaf- kaesque climb that could cripple our relationships. Men, less neurologically able to project the future, focus more happily on the next rung.
Imagine the arguments Mme. de Beauvoir would have marshaled with that data.