Can Women Grow Success at Work?
October 7, 2008
Posted in:
Emotion and Work.
Michael Gurian and Barbara Annis reported the following in their book Leadership and the Sexes,
Catalyst Corporation has found that the group of companies with the highest representation of women on their top management teams experienced better financial performance than the group of companies with the lowest women’s representation. This finding holds for both financial measures analyzed: Return on Equity (ROE), which is 35.1 percent higher, and Total Return to Shareholders (TRS), which is 34.0 percent higher.
Do you know any companies where this might be true?
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The Brain Gender Gap
October 7, 2008
Posted in:
Emotion and Work.
I love quizzes of al most any sort. Where do I fall in the political spectrum? Do I like Venice or Florence better? Am I high maintenance (see Fountain of Youth Index). I found this test purporting to reveal the gender of my brain interesting.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sex/add_user.shtml
Turns out my brain is pretty evenly male/female. My husband’s brain is slightly female, one of my daughter’s is typically female and the other daughter is the most male in the family.
I’m not sure if this reveals a weakness in the quiz or in the underlying assumptions of hard-wired gender-ness. Or if it shows the folly of binary thinking.
What do you think?
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The Female Brain At Work
October 7, 2008
Posted in:
Emotion and Work.
I’ve always thought of myself as a pretty well informed progressive woman. But reading Louann Brizendines, The Female Brian, my sense of self-awareness was blown right out of the water.
We are all aware of the prevailing viewpoint that men and women respond to events in different ways the whole men-from-mars-women-from-venus dichotomy. But I was unaware of the profound neurological and biochemical differences between the genders. After all, I came of age in the feminist 70s, when we were meant to understand and spread the word that women were not inferior to and therefore, more or less, the same as — men.
According to Brizendine, The female and male brains process stimuli, hear, see, sense, and gauge what others are feeling in different ways. Our distinct female and male brain operating systems are mostly compatible and adept, but they perform and accomplish the same goals and tasks using different circuits Under a microscope or an fMRI scan, the differences between male and female brains are revealed to be complex and widespread. In the brain centers for language and hearing, for example, women have 11 percent more neurons than men. The principal hub of both emotion and memory formation the hippocampus is also larger in the female brain, as is the brain circuitry for language and observing emotions in others. This means that women are, on average, better at expressing emotions and remembering the details of emotional events. Men, by contrast, have two and half times the brain space devoted to sexual drive as well as larger brain centers for action and aggression.
Have you ever had an experience when you knew that a negotiation was falling apart because you correctly read the emotional character of the room but your male colleagues thought you were over-reacting?
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Aging With Grace
September 17, 2008
Posted in:
Aging Gracefully.
FIGURING OUT THE CHALLENGE of aging with grace is a tricky business. If you had to bet who was happier with their body, a 40-year-old woman or a 50-year-old woman, which would you guess? Most of us would immediately assume the 40-year-old. And we’d be wrong. How we handle aging with grace is different for each of us.
But some information I picked up from a book called The 100 Simple Secrets of The Best Half of Life, What Scientists Have Learned and How You Can Use It gave me new insight into how I could think about the aging process
What appealed to me about the book was the notion that I could use objective scientific data to help me improve the quality of my life and handle aging with grace.
One chapter in particular resonated with me. According to a 2000 study, People become about 1 percent more likely to hold a positive image of their bodies with each year of age after forty.
I know this is true. After years of highlighting my hair, when I turned 40 I was so uncomfortable about being old I dyed my hair jet black. God, what a disaster!
Aging with grace was the last thing on my mind. What I didn’t have the perspective to know at 40 was that our fifth decade is unquestionably the toughest to get through with any sense of physical self-esteem. Everything begins to sag and lose its vibrancy
Our 40s are the official no-man’s-land of age, neither old nor young. It’s confusing: should we cling to trying to look like we’re still in our 30s or should we give it up, join our elders and embrace the challenge of aging with grace
I think why we get comfortable with aging that we become happier with our body image as we get older. We discover that it’s not all or nothing. At 50 we know we’re actually more than half way through the game and that pretty much no matter what we do, we look our age (even if we’re lucky and we look like a good 47)
Other stuff, like staying alive, begins to matter much more than whether our bodies are hot.
There’s a middle way. Like most things, it’s not a black and white choice. We can do the things that matter for our health, such as exercising more, stopping smoking, or reducing our caffeine intake, and manage the things we do for pure vanity.
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