The workplace should be segregated. Maybe.

And one more thing — what makes a productive, innovative work environment is having people with all types of brains and interests and talents working together. Since when segregating people with similar skills made a good recipe for success?

Assuming this hypothesis is true, where are the list of jobs that women are naturally better at?

Ha ha. The formula works for Penelope again: 1) think of the most outrageous statement that will anger and insult the most people possible, 2) look up some links to support it, and 3) make sure sex is included somewhere. What doesn’t work anymore? Despite its undeniable entertainment value I can no longer read the blog of someone who promotes hurtful and ignorant stereotypes for her own gain.

Whatever we are authentically called out to do personally, is I believe what is most important for an individual in their lifetime. Regardless of what others think is good for us or what’s expected of us or others’ notions of right or wrong, it helps if one consistently turns inward for their answers, even as one weighs others’ advise/opinions. Thanks for the interesting post, Penelope. It was great reading. It is always helpful to be aware of different points of view (through the comments section as well) based on research or personal experience.

Obviously you wrote this article for the traffic but you could have thrown your gender a bone and at least pretended you gave a shit about women’s careers; you could have written it with an upward slant toward lifting women up instead of writing about all the things women can’t do. (Where’s the list of 15 best careers suited for the female brain? Where was that in your SEO terms or tag line?) Which, as I’m sure you know because you’re not a total douchebag, is bullshit science anyway. As a previous commenter stated, that study is freely available in its entirety on the internet and has been roundly discredited and never replicated. Science not replicated is not science and someone supposedly as smart as you should know that and know better than to post it as factual and write an article around it. Seriously? Seriously? Seriously. You’re just as bad as any of these criminally anecdotal commenters old Chris here is crucifying in the thread for telling their stories of companies full of female math and science PhD’s.

Thought provoking – the commentary even more than the post.

On the one hand, I agree that people should learn to seek out what they are gifted at, in order to succeed in both the workplace and life. It would be pointless, for instance, for me to attempt to be the next Olympic Ice Skater – no amount of training would fix my bad ankles and poor coordination!

And I also believe that the perception that women are not good at certain skills has its basis in some facts, though perhaps not in the same way this post assumes.

And I do believe that both biology and culture draw women who are mothers to sacrifice themselves in order to do what is best for their children (after all, how would the species survive without that instinct?), and that means that often after a woman has kids she will sacrifice her career, if she has a husband who can bring home enough for her to spend more time focusing on the children.

On the other hand, many of the points made in prior commentary are of utmost importance when considering such an inflammatory topic:

1) Sociology does not equal biology, and sometimes the lines cross too closely for us to know what is what.
There certainly are differences in the way men and women process information – biology has provided plenty of evidence for that. However, maybe that just means we need to teach it differently.

For example, I was never able to learn math from my father, who is gifted at it, but when I had a talented female teacher, the light “clicked” – and in my first bachelor’s, which was for teaching English (a very “feminine” field), I took Calculus for fun. I found the women explained the math in a totally different way, and it made sense – and I aced all my higher level maths, even Probability and Statistics for Engineers, which I had to take when I got a second degree in Computer Science.

My layman’s theory here is that while every person has different learning styles, perhaps the differences are stronger between the sexes. That means I am just as capable of higher level learning as my brother – as long as I figure out “how” I learn.

2) Sexism DOES exist in the workplace, and the academic, technical, and hard science arenas are some of the places where it is still most rampant.

I’ve experienced it from men who honestly didn’t think they were sexist – but kept wanting to push me to help desk and documentation instead of programming and databases, because “that’s where my talents were”. It took encouragement from some women mentors and male professors for me to stay in the field, especially knowing that I have chosen a field where I will forever be one of very few women. I have had to fight for respect and acceptance – and I earned it based on ability alone. But the men in my field are automatically respected – it’s just “assumed” they know what they are talking about.

3) It is dangerous – I would say even rather irresponsible – to throw around stereotypes (even if there is some foundation for them) that have the potential of holding someone back from their full potential. If women are less aggressive and confident in the workplace than men (this is a generalization that most could agree with, though as always there are exceptions.) then when a talented woman encounters an article such as this she may be discouraged, thinking perhaps her grandpa was right all along, and God did make us different, and maybe she really should be a kindergarton teacher or stay home with her babies and do laundry.

And that is dangerous, because it means we lose potential minds simply because they are fearful of pushing into the hard, cold, world of “men’s” jobs.

4) Just because many woman want to stay home with their kids, doesn’t mean all do. Women who don’t have children don’t have the need to sacrifice their careers, and they can push to the top of any ladder if they want to. Women who do have children want what is best for them. And in some cases, what is best for children is to work hard in a lucrative career. And sometimes what is best is to stay home and do laundry. Everyone’s family looks a little different.

And woman who sacrifice their careers in the short term may fully plan on returning in the long run. And while it can be hard to “catch up” in the scientific and technical fields, it’s certainly possible. Many women whose kids are grown have made the choice to return to school so they can launch or revive their career. It’s not “either / or” and “having it all” doesn’t mean having it all at the same time.

So in short:
True – there are differences, and they matter. BUT – caution in propagating stereotypes is wise, because they may be inaccurate and they may hold back someone with potential.

I find this whole post extremely insulting to women in general and the conclusions misguided and ill-founded. Especially as a female PhD in the Sciences (from Stanford) and a woman who has always been better at math than most of my male peers and as a mother of a female child with Asperger’s. So many points you made are wrong and completely unfounded! Why on earth would you make blanket statements about what women can or cannot do?

Penelope,

You are obviously very “brave” to address a “true stereotype” about women (as an entire GENDER) based on a couple of scientific studies.

Since you are so “brave,” I challenge you to write a similar post about race, referencing scientific studies on the correlation of race to intelligence as noted in the book “The Bell Curve” by Harvard Psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein.

Let’s see how brave you are about that.

Didn’t anybody watch PT’s cartoon? She’s just following her well-established formula. A post saying that the workplace should NOT be segregated would only appear on a sucky blog.

The established ways companies split up roles along gender lines (“men skills” and “women skills”) is really just about paying some people (women) less to produce more overall. Why take care of your own phone calls and appointment scheduling (administrative assistants), your own employee issues (hr staff) or collaborative efforts (lower paid team members) when you can just hire a woman to do that work for you and at a bargain at that! As a result, the general pace of the organization increases and men make more money while doing less than they ever had to before.

Oh Penelope,

In short, shame on you. So many women in highly competitive working environments would agree with me here… and so many men as well! Your stats do not all directly relate or support your concept, nor are they invaluable compared to other stats that are produced that can easily combat what you are saying..such as this one here published by USA Today and the White house here http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2011/03/obama-report-women-lag-in-pay-gain-in-education/1.
It’s women and people like you who allow the social hierarchy where men abuse women to remain. Because of you things remain this way despite the fact that there are more women in the world than men and ALSO more women in the world with degrees in higher education then men…which means that JUST LIKE men, women can do WHATEVER THEY WANT TO DO WITH THEIR OWN LIVES….and should ignore people like you who will prefer to keep them down and tell them otherwise….You should be seen and not heard…since you know you’re a woman and all :P. Shame on you…shame shame…I hope you learn an invaluable lesson from all this…and I hope it’s the one you NEED to learn.

I wish I’d never read this post. I’m currently trying to decide between scientific and business fields and this lends absolutely no insight into my dilemma. Please consider the possibility that the status quo is changing as women become more educated and more involved in math and science. I expected more than just a rehashing of tired, age-old stereotypes from this blog. I’d expect that a self-proclaimed exception-to-the-rule would be able to articulate the frustration that women face a little more than just saying “you’re not in the boys club because you don’t belong Here” that I hear from so many women who manage to make it in, rather than support. The sexism in boys’ clubs is real, regardless of those at the highest end of the bell curve (which isn’t even applicable in most science and engineering jobs).

Oh God, you guys (no pun intended). She is just a mediocre (at best) blogger trying to drum up controversy to get more attention and readers on her blog. There isn’t even a need for argument about this drivel. Everyone with half a brain knows this is an attention-getting mechanism by a silly blogger weakly supported by biased, faulty science. She is ridiculous.

Oh, Penelope. I greatly admire your pieces – honest, bold, personal, informative.

But this strikes of the same old limiting stereotypes I’ve heard for years. And you do more damage than good by perpetuating them.

So many commenters said it better than me. So I’ll use their words to convey my thoughts:

“Most of the neurological “science” about sex differences is very, very sketchy. Not surprisingly, it tends to justify and support social norms.”

“Congratulations on singlehandedly providing men with information to discriminate against us.”

“But it is dangerous to reduce diversity by enforcing gender norms based on biological research.

Why? Because it’s at that point where the research is no longer rooted in biology, but in social psychology. You are now talking the language of expectations, socialisation and norms.”

This was a dangerous and limiting piece and I expect more from you. You should be able to see through the ruse of these “tests.” You should also recognize how much we’re working AGAINST the conditioning of generation upon generation – how can we possibly know what areas in which we excel as women when we’re in a new and uncharted territory, still finding ourselves and feeling confident enough to even KNOW our interests?

Lastly, humankind is just too diverse to make these kind of vast assumptions. I have several male friends who want nothing more than to go home to their kids – more so than their wives (it’s possible – I swear.)

I know many women who ashamedly tell me how they’ve NEVER wanted kids. I know men who are so creative, they can’t balance a check book – their minds just don’t work that way. I know MANY women who are fast and hard number crunchers. I live with a female geologist who is the forewoman for her team. And the list goes on and on….too much variety for this kind of generalizing.

And what does it get us anyway? Let’s say all of these tests were 100% gospel accurate. Then what? Should I base my career choice on it? This article discourages, not guides, me.

I mean, of course, SOME women feel uncomfortable in male dominated work settings…who the hell wouldn’t? That doesn’t mean you don’t adjust or find your voice eventually. In addition, perhaps women are more willing to ADMIT they feel uncomfortable. Discomfort should stop us?

Eck. These arguments have tired me out for years. Bottom line: I don’t think they serve anyone. They’re polarizing and limiting and stale. I’m very different than you and I’m a woman. In turn, I could be more like a man in certain regards. And the beat goes on.

Any sentence that starts with “Men are” or “Women are” instantly shuts me down. And for good reason. It’s usually always sexism hidden under so-called “facts.” It never makes me feel any good.

Penelope,
My opinion is none of this is gender based, it is all sociology based. Replace gender with race, is it race based? do you come to the same conclusion? I think the biggest problem I have is with the Title and the opening sentence.

Wow, I couldn’t disagree more.

I am a talented computer programmer and I am getting my masters in Applied Mathematics. I am good at what I do and although I have decided a PhD is not for me — I easily could get one.

And you think I picked the wrong career — because I am female! I strongly disagree.

I don’t find this to be offensive, but I do think it is silly to limit oneself based on gender. If you want to be a mathematician, then go for it, and don’t bother with the question of ‘will I fit in’. If you let other people’s opinions define what you want to be, you will not get very far. Do what you want and forget the rest.

That being said, there are other factors related to gender that might limit one’s choices, eg. physical strength, dexterity. But if you can work with them or work around them–that is ‘adapt’–then gender should not limit your choices. Here is an analogous example: I’m a legally blind research scientist and computer programmer. I wanted to be an astronaut. With good eyesight I might have made it, but you need to be a pilot first. Obviously, this is a limitation I cant’ overcome. But I can certainly do my current job without major limitations. Gender is not something that should limit your choices.

Also, this post perpetuates a problem that has been observed in childhood education, that of 5th grade girls in general being just as capable or more capable in math than 5th grade boys, whereas by 10th grade the reverse is true. This is not innate; its a matter of teaching. You’ve commented on this yourself, so why perpetuate a fallacy?

Lastly, molding the workplace to accommodate one gender or the other is really unacceptable these days. The workplace has to accommodate both genders.

Joe

I suppose you were hoping to get a reaction. What a load of crap. I suppose one person dropping out of your audience does not really matter you but I just wanted you to know that I enjoyed reading what you had to say for several months. I have absolutely no interest in anything further you have to say. I have unsubscribed and will no longer be supporting brazen careerist. This was insulting not just to men and women but to humanity.

Penelope,
I appreciate your candor, however, in this statement you have conflated women with mothers:

“…women want to be with kids more than men do. That explains Pew’s findings that most women want part-time jobs rather than full-time jobs after they have kids…”

Pew’s results that speak to this are based on a cohort of *mothers*.

This is a perfect example of social values clouding complex issues.
Imagine how this functions in the judgement of employers, employees, and coworkers, male and female alike?

Please devote more time to research on this topic and speak cautiously, because people are living the consequences of these ideas everyday. I personally don’t agree with you in the broader sense of your argument, but beyond my personal opinion, I feel there is a need for stronger control of terminology here.

Things like gender (as opposed to sex) are extremely subjective in a society as large as ours, and there are great consequences to people who are fighting a tide a gender norms, because their dreams, or paychecks depend on it.

In additions, even though “woman” and “mother” are both engendered terms (although mother has a biological component), they are very different things in our culture.

It does a tremendous disservice to women to lump women and mothers together and present it as a study population.

This statement may at first sound plausible to someone who isn’t already thinking critically about this but WOW:

“However women are less likely than men to choose competitive environments due to millions of years of evolution encouraging women to mitigate risks to protect themselves for their children. (Tons of studies support this, but my current favorite is from Anne Campbell, psychologist at Durham University in England.)”

There are so many things wrong with this statement I scarcely know where to start.

Lets take:
“… women are less likely than men to choose competitive environment…”

Trunk hasn’t convinced me that women choose less competitive environments. The studies she cites show me that competitive environments lack women. It’s also not stated whether women are not competing with men, other women, or both. Hmmm.

But let’s take that as the premise: women don’t like competition.

Somehow, ‘competition’ becomes …what? Hunting? Hunting large animals? This is perceived as competition because of the evolutionary anthropologist tendency to equate man-provided meat with evolutionary fitness. So women aren’t competitive because they don’t hunt giant things (which has not been shown one way or the other in the archaeological record) – and this is where it really gets good – “…due to millions of years of evolution [even better] encouraging …”

I can be relied on to get snarky when someone doesn’t understand evolution or natural selection, but wants to use it in support of their ideas. Especially when those ideas tell me that women aren’t wired to compete, they are great listeners, and they love love love Sex in the City.

I will start with that ol’ devil evolution.

Evolution does not encourage. Evolution acts on the individual, not a society, it’s passed through genes. Natural selection is probably what Trunk means, but again, this means that some genetic trait makes you more fit (even if it is a mutation) and the environment (whatever it happens to be at that time) favors you particular genetics. There is no goal of evolution: it cares not what you do.

The measure of fitness is the number of live fertile offspring you bare. According to Ev-psych peoples, in men, this is constrained by your ability to knock-up women. Different male strategies include child investment (caring for few kids well) or having loads of babies with many women and hoping lots of them live to carry on the tradition.

Females are [evolutionarily] constrained by food. There are lots of reasons to make a distinction between food – and large meat packages presumably provided by males. Isotopic studies and osteological ones show (depending on the culture) sometimes men had better access to meat than women. This might mean that they are getting peckish out on hunting trips and bring home what’s left, or it might mean that men and women prepare and eat food in different spatial locations. In these situations, there is no reason to think that women are waiting on that gazelle they were promised. Supporting this, researchers have found instances where hunter-gatherer scheduling revolves around what women were bringing to the table, rather than the men. Women fed themselves and their children, and men’s contribution you can be sure varied by place, time period, individual, season, the status of the prey population and the particular day. Ev-psych people will also tell you that building good baby brains depends on an a good omega3:6:9 ratio. So the gazelle is important, but so are fish.

The best way to see the difference between what Trunk suggests and what anthropologists suggest is this: each society has different strategies, and although evolutionary thinking attempts to explain why these are chosen or successful, no one group (or individual) need choose the same strategy.

Biological anthropologists have been at the question of why menopausal women live long in societies when they are no longer contributing to the fitness of males. This field is lousy with lots of really smart people not able to put a simple answer on it. The answer some say, has to do with the usefulness of women without children as child care personnel. Others say that you would then expect to see a greater survivorship of the grandchildren, which is not always the case. You could also argue that men were not the only ones determining the survival of women. But I am straying from the main point of irritation – “evolution”.

The bottom line is that according to Trunk, individual women who didn’t compete, had more children than those that did compete and were able to feed those children better than one’s that did, so that their children went on to have children, but that these children were not competitive either because it was genetically passed down from mother to child – apparently only on the X gene, because then the male children would be up the river – or maybe she’s saying they were. These women were also more attractive males who competed, because they didn’t like their hunting skills being upstaged or some such thing – and that when they had children with these super competitive high-fiving hunter guys, the hot hunter genes were only passed on to the males.

If you read Campbell, it has more to do with “guilt receptors” than straight up alleles, but what she is arguing goes against other frankly more plausible, principles held high by other Ev-psych people. It all comes down to mate selection, and why Campbell thinks women behave differently (supposedly less promiscuously) than men. My take on it is that Campbell is not half done explaining her ideas – which will take better data than what I’ve seen and her entire career.

But then Trunk goes on to drop these doozies:
“…to mitigate risks [and] to protect themselves for their children.”

For most of the 20th century, old fogey archaeologists made unsupported statements about hunter-gatherer women having too many child care responsibilities to do anything materially substantial, like chip away at flint and chase dragons. It isn't that they were wrong, per see, it is just that these leading theories were as yet, unsupported, and also biased. These were unsupported, in that, it was preposed as a likely scenario that suited an untested model and not considered further. It was biased, in that, male anthropologist weren’t thinking a wink about what women might have been doing. It wasn’t even put forward to explain any particular phenomena, simply the belief that gender roles were what archaeologist thought they were. This was used as a jumping off place for years. The model was this: clovis points were left by men roaming the globe after big things as evidenced by big bones, they killed these things off, so that's why we don't have them anymore,… and we aren't exactly sure where the women were at the time now that you mention it…

It is complicated by differential preservation. Baskets and plants do not often (although they can if you know where to look) survive the archaeological record.

As books like “Engendering Archaeology” were written, people started to design studies that could get at gender. The results of these vary by place and time and do not suit any one model of the division of labor. Most importantly, there is no reason to think that “evolution” was involved, egging things on from the sidelines.

People also found better ways to study hunter-gathers, as well as “gatherers”. In general, all hunter-gatherer peoples mitigate risks. Not just the females. Risk mitigation is not just about avoiding getting run through by the tusk of a woolly mammoth. Large animals aren’t just dangerous, they’re highly mobile (also used to support why women are envisioned as having to stay put). Risk mitigation is also about chasing slower animals, making better hunting implements and going to the good spot to fish, because Frank had really good luck there last year – sticking with what works or finding something more reliable. A switch from rabbits to turtles is a form of risk mitigation and subsistence intensification. Also, for 99.9 percent of man’s existence minimizing risk was about mobility. When times got tough, you moved on – and everyone went. It’s all about trade-offs. The same could be said of a modern woman in a highly competitive male dominated field. She will do it when the benefits outweigh the water-cooler talk.

So it's not that people are saying that women hunted big things (that probably didn’t happen very often at all. It is just that the picture is only beginning to unfold, and it isn't as simple as the one painted exclusively by the (predominately male) anthropologists of yesterday. Anthropologists and archaeologists of both sexes are contributing nicely to this on-going discussion. And whatever drives the division of labor, it isn’t the result of “millions of years of evolution”. But I’m not done.

Recapping Trunk:
Women are choosing not to compete

Competition is synonymous with danger

This choice is made because the X gene carries an allele that finds danger abhorrent.

This genetic change happened through evolution, by which she means selection, mutation or drift. And somehow wasn’t passed to men.

Men like competition because hunting prowess (and the rush school kids get when they win at kickball) is genetic, but is somehow not passed on to the female offspring of males, unless they play modern sports – and win.

The conflation of evolution with selection makes me cringe, because evolution in the truest sense is not directional. However, statements like the one Trunk has made are often used to support the idea of progress, or that things have "evolved" that way because it's better and how it should be.

Lastly, we have this old tired statement:
"to protect themselves for their children.”

People have used demographics, ethnographic studies of modern hunter-gathers, and archaeology and found that child care does not explain away the sexual division of labor in different societies throughout time.

Child care is often allotted to other people. Grandparents and siblings are studied in regards to this. A single woman can look after many children. In some societies women travel great distances in their foraging routines sometime with children and sometimes by using child care.

‘Tons of studies’?
This is absolutely untrue. Tons of studies do not support any such thing. I will say that some die-hard people will take an old line that men did this and women did that. No one I would listen to is saying that genetic differences lie at the root of it. Not even the Ev-psych people, who would love to say as much.

I actually put much stock in Ev-psych, but I don’t understand why researchers that deal with such hard evolutionary outcomes, such as reproductive endocrinology and population genetics, always insist on using non-metric shabby self-reproted online survey data from sex-addled undergraduates.

For a hilarious take on Campbell’s particular brand of Ev-psych read this:
http://neuroanthropology.net/2008/07/18/girls-gone-guilty-evolutionary-psych-on-sex-2/

And since I’m at it, here are the Pew findings, which don’t say any such thing:
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/536/working-women

Finally I would like to point out that Bitchmagazine.com reports that women are making great strides in the field of competitive eating, so there: http://bitchmagazine.org/post/zero-summing-it-up-what-about-the-men

Cheers.

I think men and women should be segregated in the workforce. If they were both sexes would get more work done because having people of the opposite sex in the same office is a distraction.

I have worked for four different organizations since graduating college and at every single one of them somebody was always sleeping with someone else in the office. The first place I worked the manager was having an adulterous affair with the married bookeeper that everyone in town including many of our customers knew about.

At the second place I worked my female supervisor was having an adulterous affair with the Chairman of the Board of Directors. At the third company I worked for the Manager was having an affair with this woman who worked in another department. She was in her mid 30s and married to an elderly guy who probably wasn’t sexual anymore so she had a boyfriend at work. Her position in another department got deleted due to corporate downsizig so he fired my boss so that he could give his girlfriend my bosse’s job.

At the last place I worked one of the employees in the office who was a blonde bombshell was having an affair with the much older manager of our office who was married to the daughter of one of the owners of the company. The manager’s girlfriend rapidly rose through the ranks to become a partner in the firm. They had lunch together every day, went jogging together. The manager’s wife (who was a beast) heard rumors sbout the affair so she prevailed on her daddy to get the CEO to transfer the blonde bombshell to an office overseas. It was just like some sick soap opera!