why are women less capable in some areas?

I work with quite a few women. many of them are quite pleasant to be around. and some of them are fantastically organized. but without exception, every single one of them is less capable of tackling the big picture issues.

i'm not being sexist. like i said, they are really good at pinning down the details of all the little tasks that accompany a major project. but they just can't seem to contribute anything useful when it comes overall strategy or thinking. when it comes to the larger conceptual issues, i find the men to to be completely engaging while the women tend to slow me down. as a result, i usually end up excluding them from the higher level conversations.

could this be a confidence issue that women share? maybe they're used to deferring to men when it comes to important decision making? or are their brains simply not equipped for tasks of this type?

Do you really expect any kind of serious answers to this in a venue like this?

I would really like to believe that this is a genuine question and not trolling - but I'm really not sure you're going to get any meaningful answers from a forum that seems to make a statement of pride about being "90% male".

oh god, masonic boom, dont take the bait

inb4 feminist replies

edit: oops

fucking Alzado does it again

no, i'm serious. it's quite frustrating.

i root for the women to succeed. i want them to be a part of the process because I think too many men chiming in runs the risk of resulting in a one-dimensional perspective. but the women always end up just spinning their wheels. it's almost cute. but it can be frustrating because we are often under a significant amount of budgetary pressure with very short deadlines. we need to be sharp and efficient. but you just can't count on a woman to be able to identify a solution to a complex problem. for follow through? you bet. the women will see every detail to its end. but they seem to be miserable at conceptualizing broader issues.

I mean, for a start, why do you frame the question as "WHY are women ... yadda yadda yadda" based on your limited experience. This automatically presupposes a certain kind of answer.

Why not ask "ARE women ... yadda yadda yadda" and let people draw their own conclusions?

Because I don't agree with your basic assertion in the slightest.

There are PEOPLE who are big picture thinkers. There are PEOPLE who are not. I don't know if there's a gender distribution, my personal experience doesn't show any.

Since you're only talking about women within one particular organisation, isn't it just as likely that your organisation has a bias that only hires women that fulfill certain roles - as that 50% of the human race somehow lack a certain character trait?

in general i try to root for women, i think it's great all the stuff they've been doing in the past few years, really advancing in the work force w/o performing sexual favors, that sort of thing, but there are certain areas that still get me, like how they got tiger woods and pretty much ruined his career. until we can learn to all get along there are just always going to be things like that and such.

90% is social factors, and then there's some differences in cognitive abilities, there's areas where women perform better than men and vice versa.

  On 2/16/2010 at 5:25 PM, Z_B_Z said:

oh god, masonic boom, dont take the bait

Actually, you're right. I walked right into that one. My bad.

OK, I'm going to say this and then leave it. Big picture thinking is one of the personality traits measured by the Myers-Briggs personality index. (Myers and Briggs, two psychologists with such adept big picture skills to come up with the whole massive idea of a personality index, coincidentally, are both female.)

You can read about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator

Some personality types are much rarer than others, but there doesn't seem to be much biological basis for distribution between genders.

There are, however, social constucts regarding gender that reward men and women for how closely their personalities and strengths resemble the expected gender constructs. This may shape behaviour and the expression of personality.

  On 2/16/2010 at 5:28 PM, Masonic Boom said:

I mean, for a start, why do you frame the question as "WHY are women ... yadda yadda yadda" based on your limited experience. This automatically presupposes a certain kind of answer.

 

Why not ask "ARE women ... yadda yadda yadda" and let people draw their own conclusions?

 

Because I don't agree with your basic assertion in the slightest.

 

There are PEOPLE who are big picture thinkers. There are PEOPLE who are not. I don't know if there's a gender distribution, my personal experience doesn't show any.

 

Since you're only talking about women within one particular organisation, isn't it just as likely that your organisation has a bias that only hires women that fulfill certain roles - as that 50% of the human race somehow lack a certain character trait?

I wish you were right, honestly. but i've been working for almost five years now. every single woman I've encountered has completely failed to pull her weight in the visioning stages of a project. and, i hate to say this, but when i know that my competitor is being steered by a woman, i know i've got them beat before i even get started. i know she's going to over think the problem, she's going to let her emotions about market factors act as a barrier to her ability see efficiencies, and she's going to take the competition personally. it happens every time.

and you're right that I'm guilty of leading with my conclusion, but i'm fairly certain this is a universal truth.

women are better at sucking dick, but then are they?

something about left and right side of the brain

  On 2/16/2010 at 5:34 PM, Masonic Boom said:

 

(Myers and Briggs, two psychologists with such adept big picture skills to come up with the whole massive idea of a personality index, coincidentally, are both female.)

 

yeah that sounds more incidental than coincidental

  On 2/16/2010 at 5:36 PM, triachus said:

something about left and right side of the brain

well yeah, that's what i'm wondering. there's got to be some sort of physiological cause of the problem, because i've never doubted their work habits or motivation.

  On 2/16/2010 at 5:34 PM, LOL Alzado said:

and you're right that I'm guilty of leading with my conclusion, but i'm fairly certain this is a universal truth.

Your opinion is no more a universal truth than the idea that male babies prefer blue and female babies prefer pink.

The end. Now please stop trolling.

these are some incredibly interesting points you have been bringing up LOL Alzado. I wrote a paper on something similar to this for a Sociology class in undergraduate studies. A lot of the conclusions I came to supposed that women simply have differently-aligned brains, chemical interactions, which leads to understanding of certain areas and almost complete ignorance in others. A lot of surveys I researched showed that the introduction of intense education on the subjects women failed to comprehend (such as strategic planning, multi-tasking, and mathematics) was only able to increase their abilities in those fields by a minuscule amount.

I think further scholarly research may reveal why women are better overall at cooking whereas men are far better at organization, abstract thinking and logistical planning.

  On 2/16/2010 at 5:34 PM, Masonic Boom said:

(Myers and Briggs, two psychologists with such adept big picture skills to come up with the whole massive idea of a personality index, coincidentally, are both female.)

yeah, but isn't the creation of an index really just the tedious task of interviewing hundreds of subjects and organizing the data that you get from them? i would expect a woman to excel at something like that. i personally wouldn't have the patience for it. but see? good for them. it might not change the world, but it's important work nevertheless.

I've noticed that a lot more women are in positions of responsibility in the years I've been in the workforce, and I really support this kind of progressive thinking in business. One problem I've encountered is that often the only authority women can really hold over men is due to fears that the woman will act irrationally and in many cases openly weep when things go awry. When this works I say bravo madam, but I'm not sure if this is really the proper way to increase profits in the modern market.

  On 2/16/2010 at 5:40 PM, LOL Alzado said:

  On 2/16/2010 at 5:34 PM, Masonic Boom said:

(Myers and Briggs, two psychologists with such adept big picture skills to come up with the whole massive idea of a personality index, coincidentally, are both female.)

yeah, but isn't the creation of an index really just the tedious task of interviewing hundreds of subjects and organizing the data that you get from them? i would expect a woman to excel at something like that. i personally wouldn't have the patience for it. but see? good for them. it might not change the world, but it's important work nevertheless.

exactly. Someones got to do it

I probably should add that I work for a company that specializes in marketing gangbang anal pornography to the hotel industry.

  On 2/16/2010 at 5:40 PM, Smettingham Rutherford IV said:

 

I think further scholarly research may reveal why women are better overall at cooking whereas men are far better at organization, abstract thinking and logistical planning.

i think that would depend on the type of cooking... women would excel at following a recipe whereas when big picture on the fly creativity is needed i think a man would be better suited

lol azaldo pummels some gentleman with a football, then shakes hands.

masonic boom fails to see the larger picture.

Carolla on the difference between men & women in the workplace

[youtubehd]0_zA5Tcfp9c[/youtubehd]

it would be interesting to have research done on why women are so emotionally volatile. Women crying in my experience has been expected almost daily in the workplace. I think women have to express their frustration with a work task through crying/tantrums than men do, who tend to internalize the frustration and focus that energy upon the task at hand.