Men and Women

When I was a mid-level associate in a big law firm, almost all my immediate colleagues were male. In some ways, I really enjoyed working with men – their frank, no-BS approach; their easy-going attitude; the fact that they were pretty easy to read. However, several things used to frustrate me no end about the men’s world that was my workplace. Here are a few:

Procrastination. My male colleagues loved to fly by the seats of their tailor-made pants. No one ever seemed to want to get started on the newest piece of work on our plates. Diligent little me, driven by deadline anxiety, would proactively generate outlines, first drafts, and various other efforts aimed at pushing things forward. I might as well not have bothered, as no one was ever interested in looking at them until very late in the piece. We never got things done ahead of time, and many times we went right down to the wire, pressing “send” in a haze of adrenalin and exhaustion and takeaway pizza and coffee fumes. I would have liked our team to start on new assignments the moment they came in the door and I would have loved for us to have finished them with hours or days to spare. I got the feeling that my male colleagues preferred to wait until the adrenalin kicked in, and didn’t see the need to waste time starting early when they knew they could get it all done in a final mad rush.

Time-wasting. My male colleagues loved to sit around and “strategize” or “brainstorm”; an awful lot of talk about everything else under the sun crept into those meetings. Although many of those colleagues had wives and children at home, I felt like the only one in any hurry to get things done quickly and efficiently during the day so as to make a quick getaway at night. I would get so impatient sitting in conference rooms or in other people’s offices, wondering how much longer I’d have to listen to three guys debating the pros and cons of the newest Apple product, but if I tried to turn the discussion back to the task at hand I’d be called a Goody Two Shoes, and the Apple debate would anyway be argued to completion before people turned their minds back to work. I understood the need for those moments that build camaraderie and good relationships among co-workers, but so often I felt that the timing was all wrong.

The [precious few] times I got to work on all-women teams I couldn’t believe the difference in efficiency and productivity. I felt that we were streets ahead of men in this respect. It seems to me that women prefer to slog away like Goody Two Shoes and then beat a hasty retreat once the work is finished, but men get bored with the task at hand and seek fun distractions at frequent intervals.
 

Teasing. Men seem to love to tease each other, relentlessly and mercilessly – poking fun at the chubby guy; mocking the guy who can’t find a girlfriend; humiliating the guy who can’t catch a football thrown the length of the corridor. Privately, I found it mean and cringe-making, but I knew better than to say anything. You knew you had been accepted by your male colleagues when they started teasing you with nicknames like Goody Two Shoes, or when they included you in a series of co-worker South Park characters they were creating (cheekily giving your tiny-boobed character a t-shirt saying “Hooters”).
Women seem to be on a different wavelength when it comes to office humour.*

* One time I did conspire with a [male] colleague to put a life-size cardboard cut-out of Darth Vader in our boss’ office. I did it to be cheeky, yes, but not to be mean. In fact, I was sure my boss would secretly love to be compared with Darth Vader. I wasn’t wrong.

On the home front, I have to admit that it’s more or less the same things that really get my goat – in particular, the difference in my husband’s and my sense of time, urgency, and detail. I have a deep-seated need to plan things far in advance in minute detail while hubby is keen to wing it (his solution, in a crisis situation, being to turn to me and ask anxiously, “do you have any snacks for the kids?” or “do you have a tasteful guest gift we can take to the friends whose hospitality we will be enjoying in less than 30 minutes from now?”)

Lately, the first world has been hung up on gender equality. More men putting in more time at home; more women making their way to the top of the corporate ladder.

I firmly believe that women are more than capable of doing what have traditionally been men’s jobs. I also firmly believe that men are capable of caring for children, doing housework, and cooking.

What I don’t believe, though, is that men and women are the same. On the contrary, we couldn’t be more different. It follows that men and women would take different routes towards accomplishing the same task, and that in order to work together, at home or at work, we need to allow each other to be and to work differently.

Have we really been trying to do that?

It seems to me that, thus far, in the corporate workplace we’ve taken what is an essentially male-focused model and tried to fit women into it, and in the home we’ve taken the role of wife and mother and encouraged men to take it on. Consciously or unconsciously, we want corporate women to behave like men in the workplace, and we want men to behave like women at home, and yet, if they do we feel confused and uncomfortable, because they are no longer behaving like the woman/man that they are.

This is just not going to work in the long run – not if women want to be organized and efficient at work and go home early to their families, while men still get to fly by the seat of their pants and enjoy the thrill of the pursuit and the ultimate catch; not if women want to live in an orderly household with clean laundry and outings unspoilt by foreseeable disasters, while men are still able to romp good-naturedly with their kids (preferably with sport on the tv in the background) and focus less on laundry and more on changing lightbulbs, washing the car, and fixing that broken tile in the bathroom.

Maybe this frustration about fitting in, and (perhaps worse) having to welcome someone who feels like an outsider into “your” space, is one of the biggest reasons we aren’t seeing equal representation of men and women in top positions in the workplace, or as managers on the home front.

We need to have different ideas of teamwork and equality. Equality doesn’t mean doing the same things in the same way. We have to let each other be different.

The question is, of course – how on earth are we going to do this?