By Nikki Waller: 9/27/16
Men and women work side by side, tackling the same business problems, sitting through the same meetings and walking the same hallways.
But a new study on working women suggests that the common ground ends there. Men and women experience very different workplaces, ones in which the odds for advancement vary widely and corporate careers come in two flavors: his and hers.
Data show that men win more promotions, more challenging assignments and more access to top leaders than women do. Men are more likely than women to feel confident they are en route to an executive role, and feel more strongly that their employer rewards merit.
Women, meanwhile, perceive a steeper trek to the top. Less than half feel that promotions are awarded fairly or that the best opportunities go to the most-deserving employees. A significant share of women say that gender has been a factor in missed raises and promotions. Even more believe that their gender will make it harder for them to advance in the future—a sentiment most strongly felt by women at senior levels.
My Commentary: Indeed, men and women being biologically different do experience the world and the workplace differently. However, this wsj article does not say exactly why. What they do say or offer is some data from a study which looked at their perceptions of the workplace through the rat race lens rather than the 'real' reason why they 'men/women' actually 'see' the workplace differently.
The real platform of departure for understanding the difference is much deeper. Certainly, money and prestige drive both genders into the workplace; but, in order to truly understand differences in how they see the workplace one has to get at the root cause... and that is to firstly recognize that men and women are in fact different socio-biological entities! To prove this, lets look at another article put out by ngn.
Men and Women Really Do See Things Differently: Differences may be rooted in hunting, gathering.
By James Owen for National Geographic News: 9/6/12.
Men and women really don't see eye to eye, according to a new study.
Females are better at discriminating among colors, researchers say, while males excel at tracking fast-moving objects and discerning detail from a distance—evolutionary adaptations possibly linked to our hunter-gatherer past.
The study, led by Brooklyn College psychology professor Israel Abramov, put young adults with normal vision through a battery of tests.
In color experiments the men and women tended to ascribe different shades to the same objects. The researchers think they know why.
"Across most of the visible spectrum males require a slightly longer wavelength than do females in order to experience the same hue," the team concludes in the latest issue of the journal Biology of Sex Differences.
Since longer wavelengths are associated with "warmer" colors, an orange, for example, may appear redder to a man than to a woman. Likewise, the grass is almost always greener to women than to men, to whom verdant objects appear a bit yellower.
The study also found that men are less adept at distinguishing among shades in the center of the color spectrum: blues, greens, and yellows.
Where the men shone was in detecting quick-changing details from afar, particularly by better tracking the thinner, faster-flashing bars within a bank of blinking lights.
The team puts this advantage down to neuron development in the visual cortex, which is boosted by masculine hormones. Since males are flush with testosterone, in particular, they're born with 25 percent more neurons in this brain region than females, the team noted... evolution at Work?
The vision findings support the so-called hunter-gatherer hypothesis, which argues that the sexes evolved distinct psychological abilities to fit their prehistoric roles, the team says.
Noting that men in the study showed "significantly greater sensitivity for fine detail and for rapidly moving stimuli," the researchers write that their hunter forebears "would have to detect possible predators or prey from afar and also identify and categorize these objects more easily."
Meanwhile, the vision of female "gatherers" may have become better adapted recognizing close-at-hand, static objects such as wild berries.
John Barbur, professor of optics and visual science at City University London, noted that females are often "worse off in terms of absolute chromatic [color] sensitivity than males."
But when it comes to noticing subtle differences among shades of a color, women do tend to come out on top, as they did in Abramov's experiments, said Barbur, who wasn't part of the new study.
My Commentary: Indeed, men and women are different socio-biological entities. They were created that way (or evolved that way for the evolutionary minded). Now, if men win more promotions, more challenging assignments its because they, according to the science of evolution, showed "significantly greater sensitivity for fine detail and for rapidly moving stimuli.
And, if women perceive a steeper trek to the top, its because they may
have become better adapted to recognizing close-at-hand, static objects such as
wild berries. This is the socio-biology at work and for a purpose. Women as much as men exhibit their natural instincts in dynamic social relationships.
Without a doubt, the steeper trek perception women have is directly correlated to their ability to move slower or cautiously in order to perceive close at hand static objects which means that women see the workplace in the same way. And, thus they approach the workplace differently from men. Women have a different mindset. So, its not that they really are being treated unfairly but more likely they are not able to defend their position to men in the 'rat race' workplace as being useful and profitable.
If they could defend this attribute of the steeper trek perception, it still may not be appreciated in a fast paced challenging 'rat race' workplace... which does not necessarily take its time to look at the long term affects in view of the needed short term gains.
You can argue that both men and women are valued differently in the workplace and that can and should be appreciated but the world of work 'rat race' which is the paramount reality according to Albert Schultz, is not patient. It demands results because money/cost effectiveness and profit wait for no one... especially, in a global reality where many cultures have men in the workplace and use men more often than women in the workplace to get ahead in the rat race.
PS... This difference between men and women both biological and social has been noticed.
In 2015, a Marine Corp Study concluded that gender integrated (men and women) combat formations did not move as quickly or shoot as accurately; and, that women were twice as likely as men to suffer combat injuries. That study was rejected. Why? Because it did not comport with the Obama administration's political agenda. That same year, the Dept. of Defense opened all combat jobs in the U.S. military to women and Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter committed to "gender-neutral standards" to ensure that female service members could meet the demanding rigors involved in quantifying for combat. Since then, the Army has been working for a decade to put in place the gender -neutral test promised by Carter. But after finding that women were not scoring as highly as men and under fierce pressure from advocacy groups, the Army threw out the test. Now, there is no test to determine whether any solider can meet the fitness requirements for combat...~ Thomas Spoehr, director of the Center for National Defense at the Heritage Foundation.
ONLINE SOURCES:
https://graphics.wsj.com/how-men-and-women-see-the-workplace-differently/
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/120907-men-women-see-differently-science-health-vision-sex
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