MEN LIKE TO SOAR, WOMEN LIKE TO STAY PLANTED, WHY THE POSTMODERN WORLD BELONGS TO WOMEN!

MEN LIKE TO SOAR, WOMEN LIKE TO STAY PLANTED,

WHY THE POSTMODERN WORLD BELONGS TO WOMEN!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© April 24, 2014

REFERENCE:

The global interest in these vignettes on “Six Silent Killers” suggest this book may be of some value.

Work and workers have changed dramatically, while management and the measurement of work have lagged behind. This cannot be blamed on management exclusively, for many workers would rather work hard than take risks and work smarter.

Being culturally conditioned to results, they want personal guarantees, to know what they are going to get for what they give. Nor are they likely to be inclined to take a three-, four-, or five-year apprenticeship in electronics, computers, or some other technician program, which pays them less than they would make on the assembly line of some automotive company. Within a company, they are unlikely to bid on a demanding job, which includes high risk and possible failure.

With medicine becoming a high-risk profession due to the rising tide of lawsuits, women are replacing men in medical school. In 1970, only 14 percent of medical school graduates were women. Today, half all medical students are women.

Women have shown they are more willing to take risks and work the process than men, as more than 60 percent of all graduate students are women, with more than 55 percent of all master’s degrees issued are to women.

In 1970, only 5 percent of women earned law degrees; now that number is 50 percent. There is even a greater gender imbalance growing in higher education for minority students. Among black students who earned bachelor’s degrees in 1990, fully 60 percent were female; among Hispanic students, 55 percent were female; and among white students, 53 percent were female.   All of these numbers continue to increase in the twenty-first century, while men wait for, God only knows.

This may have broader implications.

Women have always preferred to work smart over brute force. Women don’t have the physical strength. Their powers are more subtle. Moreover, women are less prone to be shamed into capitulation than men.

In my experience, an upper level female executive was demoted and given a non-functioning job. She maintained an office, but no longer had a secretary or a private parking space. Otherwise, she continued to draw the same salary and benefits. I would often pass her office, see her doing her nails, smiling broadly, or talking animatedly on the telephone. She continued to dress to the teeth and displayed all the aplomb as if she was still an active power broker.

In contrast, a male colleague of mine, once a revered chief engineer, was demoted because of a drinking problem. He suffered a similar fate with a totally different reaction. He was given an office, kept his parking space, but no longer had chief engineering duties.  What did he do?  He took on the role of rabblerouser, attempting to organize the engineers into a union. When that failed, he became a political activist, campaigning throughout the facility.

When that, too, failed, he became despondent, lost his sense of humor, seldom spoke to anyone, wore a permanent frown, and moped about. One day he had a heart attack at age 50 and died.

The female executive spent seven happy years in limbo, giving no indication that she felt any remorse at her demotion, or psychological damage, then retired at 65. Today, she is still going strong and still looks well groomed and beautiful.

It is no mere coincidence that women are adjusting to the new cultural demands more rapidly than men. Women are used to being in charge, not on mahogany row, not in command and control positions, but as mothers and wives on the home front.

Women, without titles or portfolios, have had to be the family problem-solvers with limited resources and have learned to make the most of what they have had to work with finding no benefit in complaining.

Limits, and not being taken seriously, are new experiences for men. Women have been saddled with this role for centuries.  From the age of four or five on, men learn the game of bullying and choose their leaders on that basis. Physical prowess, until age 18, commands the attention, respect, and following, especially athletic ability. Gradually, from that point forward, leadership takes on more of a cerebral and psychological character, but hardly intellectual. Men as doers, talkers, and shakers get noticed. With women:

The cerebral has always been more enchanting.  They have been used to giving men the credit when they came up with the ideas that solved the home front problems.  They have often listened to their most successful husbands and partners, their fathers and brothers act like spoiled children when the world failed to go their way, southing their feathers when their wings no longer could take them to where they wanted to go.

It has been their role to listen, to plant the seed of an idea into their sons’ or husbands’ or brothers’ heads, and watch them go forward with the idea without acknowledgment, soaring into the blue feeling no one could touch them.

It has been necessary to be real and to deal realistically with what they have had, not with what their husbands, fathers, or brothers dreamed of having.  They had to make do, and have done so, without being derailed for the lack of acknowledgment or appreciation.

Men like to soar like birds. Women prefer to feel the solid earth under their feet. Women have kept the culture extant by practicing the tenets of the culture religiously and consistently, and yes, courageously.

Men fall back on the culture when in dire straits; otherwise they ignore it. Women are unabashedly spiritual because they carry a soul with them wherever they go, out of which have come their sons and daughters.

Men argue the metaphysics of soullessness without evidence of having a soul. Where men and women are more alike than different is that their cultural conditioning finds them more driven to please others than to please themselves. With women, their drive is to please men. With men, their drive is please power, which usually resides with men.  This has handicapped women, who remain still more man-conscious than woman-conscious, perpetuating the myth that handicaps us all.

There is no danger of a unisex gender. It seems clear that the scales are turning toward many of the attributes that are commonly associated with women. These attributes are becoming essential to organization—listening skills, acceptance of limits, dealing pragmatically with reality, using the whole brain, being as comfortable in the abstract as the concrete, not needing to promote “action for action’s sake,” and not being afraid to respect and play hunches.

There is something else going on in organization that is less intimidating to women than men. It is the assertion of individualism in pursuit of collective identity. Collective identity is a mockery unless the individual first relates honestly and completely with himself. He must expand his consciousness without apology before he can relate meaningfully to others. Most workers don’t know what they want as they have spent their lives pleasing others:

It is more acceptable to be a grind or mediocre than to step out of the crowd and be great.

Only “geeks” love what they do regardless of pay.

Audacity is discouraged, as is conflict. A person who is willing to admit that he values his own opinion more than what others think about him is considered arrogant.  The mask of humility is encouraged.

Those full of pleasing self above pleasing others are put on notice that this is not acceptable.

Yet the mindset of pleasing others at the expense of pleasing self comes out of the cultural landscape of comfort and complacency, not contribution. The Culture of Contribution is a very different place. It is the land of giants, giant achievers, giant pains-in-the-asses, and giant contradictions. It is the land where giant inconsistencies rest next to giant consistencies, where there is no such thing as a status quo, and where giant breakthroughs are so common they don’t have a name.