I saw this over at Kevin Drum’s place.
I find it odd to realize that most men don’t observe something that is obvious to every woman I know: that there is a competitive male dynamic to groups that is completely different from the way female groups act. They don’t know, of course, because unless the group is overwhelmingly female, the dynamic of any mixed group always defaults to male, with women fading back into supporting conversational roles. Maybe it’s the kind of thing you can only observe by contrast to the extremely anti-competitive nature of female groups.
The easiest way to put it (and this is hardly original) is that men in groups are focused on their role within the group. Women in groups are focused on the group. Men gain status by standing out from the group; women gain status by submerging themselves into it — by strengthening the group, often at the expense of themselves.
I agree with Drum’s critique. By definition I never get to hang out in all female groups. I don’t really think too much about it, but when women are hanging out by themselves I suppose it is a little more Sex & the City than Entourage, although I think most people of both genders are far less superficial and sex-crazed. I agree that even a few men interjected into a group of women will tilt things into a more male-oriented group dynamic. But this idea that women are all so uncompetitive and selfless seems totally off-base to me. What do you think?
Talk to my ex, who’s a track star who’s set a few land speed records. She’ll tell you all about that “uncompetitive nature” of women.
or talk to the women at my job, where pretty much every single department director is female. Much more competitive than the men who work here.
Generalizations are dangerous. Which women? Which men?
My girlfriend and me. She is totally conflict averse (instead she just does what she wanted) and it makes me crazy.
Exactly. Whenever Kevin Drum writes about the sexes…well, let’s just say he ought to stick to politics.
I don’t agree with that analysis at all. If you’ve ever been the only male in an all-female office you know for a fact that women can be just as competitive and back-stabbing as men.
I believe a standard reference here is Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice.
Unfortunately.
One of the most trenchant critiques of Gilligan being that she legitimizes the idea that women should be nice and smile not matter how much they’re getting a grapefruit scrunched into their faces. Or a fist. Catherine McKinnon writes well about this issue.
I think women are just as likely to want a special kind of role in a group, but the social ideal is to submerge oneself selflessly – whereas society rewards men who stand out. So… I think there’s a lot of pressure to appear selfless and group-oriented. Women may indeed be more relational than men, but that’s different from being some kind of morally superior selfless angel – this is a common pedestal, and a dangerous one.
Of course all this is based on my own experiences and observations… as a cooperative, competitive woman. 🙂
To add: I’ve worked in a bunch of nearly-all-male offices, and some nearly-all-female jobs (libraries!). I’ve found much more support and cooperation in the female-dominant environments, and that in the male-dominant environments I pretty much had to act like an aggressive asshole to get anything done. That may be largely a business-world vs library-world dichotomy, but I still take away from it that I never ever want to work in a male-dominated professional environment again. I think it’s largely to do with business culture and social expectations rather than some sort of inherent thing.
There’s a lot of research that says otherwise-and a lot of first hand experience.
In reference to someone above who posted about Carol Gilligan’s “In a Different Voice” it strikes me that Gilligan came up with an interesting, yet flawed hypothesis based upon some wishful interpretation of one qualitative study. For a period of time in the 1990’s Gilligan’s research was trumpeted widely as definitive and authoritative, and at the extremes, became a sort of operating assumption of the 1990’s “difference feminism.” As a male academic broadly sympathetic to most feminist goals I could never see why this kind of research was even considered “feminist” as it seems to play into a wide range of patriarchal stereotypes. Yet some feminists seemed to want to build an entire paradigm around it.
I’m no expert on what goes on in feminist research these days-in part due to time-and in part because this kind of feminism turned me off both politically and academically. To even find this kind of conclusion palatable I think you implicitly have to buy into “difference” which means believing that Levi Strauss was actuall right despite the fact he was often empirically wrong. Which is another point, those who tended to advance this kind of hypothesis also tended to eschew any method of empirical rigor where evidence might actually be taken to undermine an hypothesis. So it slides into “viewpoint theory” as well.
As a male I have indeed observed that men and women respond in sometimes subtly different and sometimes interesting ways. But it makes more sense to me to think of men and women both sharing a broad range of human capacities with women more closely bunched on one end of continuous categories such as “nurturing vs. independent”, albeit with a lot of overlap.
large bucket of crap
you should see the dynamics in a group of leatherdykes trying to organize a bar night.
Heh. Or gay men trying to organize a wedding.
leatherdykes think like straight men and gay men think like women. Of course the question is, butch or fem?
I think this is a vast overgeneralization, although there is some truth to it. I’ve certainly seen that dynamic happen.
In addition, when an organization is run by a woman, there does seem to be a lot more inclusive decision making (which sometimes drives me NUTS! It depends how it’s done).
But when I hang out with men, I just never seem to have an issue. The topics I like to talk about are of interest to most men, and most women as well, although men tend to know more about history than women, as a vast overgeneralization!
It really does depend on the individuals. But I have seen the male/female split at parties and office functions, although much less now than I did 20 years ago.
Btw – this exchange in the post below, on Drum’s site, is priceless:
I don’t know how men’s groups works but I’ll take this critique as fact until someone says otherwise.
As to his definition of how women act in groups I believe he starts out with choosing words that carry a connotation that is somehow slightly derogatory or inferior-that may not have been his intention but given the words chosen that is how it comes off to me.
Instead it could have been written as ‘women gain status by being seen as team players, strengthning the group instead of trying to stand out at the expense of the group. Change a few words around and this could still be factual but sounds much more positive than what was written.
This doesn’t mean that women are very competitive because we can be. I think maybe that women pick and choose their battles as to when to be competitive and when not to be more so than men. Of course this is all subjective and everyone no doubt has different ideas on this because generalities by definition are usually shown to have little to do with a factual basis for anything.
In a male only group the chances are you will have more assholes than in an all female group. If that is what he is trying to say, I agree.
My ‘female at work’ experience is extremely limited because I work in a male only industry. There are NO females at work. But ironically it is ALWAYS the wife that is in charge of the project. The last house I did, in the seven months I was on the job I saw the husband ONCE (he was on the job for FIVE MINUTES), I saw the wife virtually every day. In all the years that has been true I have not had any problems with any wife being an asshole. I can promise you that would not be true if the husbands were in charge.
My wife owns an all female dentist office. Nobody can tell me the dynamics would not be different in most male run offices. I know better.
While it is true you cannot use generalities, you can use averages. And the averages say that if you run into an asshole, it’s a male.
nalbar
women have the alpha-female syndrom but I do recognize the fact that when men and woman are together, often the men ignore the women or somehow, the decibel level goes up. Of course, as someone else mentioned here, it is a generalization but it happens often enough to be noticed. I despise it with a passion.
Also, women are competitive and like I said, you have your alpha females who can probably demolish your alpha male in no time.. women are nastier and that alpha behaviour, male or female, is annoying as hell. The alpha behaviour I think in women can also show in passive aggressive behaviour…
Ingrid
this is how it has been for me.
I relate to this. However, I’ve only found male co-workers to be like this in generally male-dominant corporate environments. In gender-balanced or female-dominant environments, I find that this behavior goes away. Have you ever experienced this, Jo?
which is female dominated. The principal is a female. She was so controlling it was unbelievable. It took a lot of doing to get her to give the office staff a heads up on mailings etc. And even then we got them willy nilly. I consider her need to control somewhat pathological so I cannot say that I could tell the difference as I don’t consider that environment a pure test.
I could have posted something similar, in regards to work situations.
Maybe if you have a group of insecure asshole guys and a group of mealy-mouth subservient women interacting, then fine.
In my world, it’s the women who dominate and the men are mere ornaments, used simply as back-up for file retrieval. Harsh? Maybe, but pretty much true. They don’t thump their chests trying to outdo one another. They know how to speak with and to people.
The men in my world are the ones who are unwilling to get into any conflict, using psychobabble language to speak, even among themselves. Meanwhile, we females will get into arguments and dispute with regard to feelings knowing that we’re confident enough with each other to do so.
And so it goes, and goes, and goes …