Evolutionary differences between men and women

Dear Bob …

Nobody has mentioned this (in the discussion about diversity in the workplace):

In general —

1) Men are more aggressive, and women are more defensive

2) Men crave power and women crave attention.

This was brought about by evolution.

To protect the young and to find a supportive mate, for the women.

To acquire resources, and multiple wives for the men.

Because of these differences, the integration of women into a male dominated workplace is more difficult than racial integration. If an Asian or African male performs as well as his peers, the Caucasians, will soon forget his race. But a woman is always a woman.

– A woman in the workplace

Dear WitW …

I’ve avoided the evolutionary arguments because they’re averages at best, and unproven besides (not the theory of natural selection — the posited human behavioral differences).

Business decisions about staffing should be based on the individual, not the group average for all the obvious reasons.

For example: Who do you consider more aggressive — George McGovern or Hillary Clinton? Gordon Brown or Margaret Thatcher?

Even if the evolutionary hypothesis does turn out to be correct (and I suspect some variation of it will prove to be valid), human behavior is far more plastic than that of most species, which is to say the impact of learning and experience is far higher than in, for example, wolves.

Which leaves you with:

• Enough genetic variability within genders that the male and female bell curves for each of the behavior dimensions you listed will overlap significantly, and,

• Bell curves that are even further expanded due to the impact of learning and experience, causing them to potentially overlap even more.

• Or, in societies that choose to segregate the roles of the two sexes, to overlap less because of how men and women are socialized during their formative years.

Societally, the extent to which men and women are the same or different is more a matter of choice than a matter of genetics.

So in the end, any evolutionarily derived differences between men and women aren’t relevant to a discussion of how to treat individual men and women in the workplace, or in how to interpret their behavior.

Gender … and race, and ethnicity, and Generation Something-or-other membership, and Myers-Briggs score … are all far poorer predictors of behavior than getting to know the individual.

– Bob