| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : JUNE 14, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| BOOKS
Will the 21st Century Be a Woman's World? THE FIRST SEX The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World By Helen Fisher Random House 378pp $25.95 Must be the season of the bitch-goddess. In the past two months, four books have appeared extolling the evolutionary and biological underpinnings that make women equal--nay, superior--to men. If biology is destiny, say these accounts, women are built to win. It's not clear what end-of-the-millennium zeitgeist prompted this flurry of women's books that focus on something other than dieting. Could publishers have noticed that women are gaining economic power, starting up businesses, and moving into high-salaried professions in record numbers? Maybe they even decided that such women might be more than happy to plunk down $25 for a book that celebrates their strengths. Whatever the reason, there is suddenly a lot more ammunition on the women's side of the gender battle. In March came Just Like A Woman: How Gender Science is Redefining What Makes Us Female by health writer Dianne Hales (Bantam Books). She surveys a slew of medical and psychological studies to prove that the female is not a weaker version of the male: Rather, she is equal to but biologically completely different from men. Next came Woman: An Intimate Geography (Houghton Mifflin) by New York Times science writer Natalie Angier. It's a far more personal look at much the same research covered by Hales, but Angier draws a lot more women-are-just-plain-better conclusions. A typical over-the-top passage: ''In the clitoris alone we see a sexual organ so pure of purpose that it needn't moonlight as a secretory or excretory device...it is, in its way, a private joke, a divine secret, a Pandora's box packed not with sorrow but with laughter.'' Next came noted feminist Germaine Greer's The Whole Woman (Alfred A. Knopf), an angry follow-up to her groundbreaking book, The Female Eunuch, published 30 years ago. Greer's 373-page rant argues that feminists should forget about fighting for ''equality,'' since that just forces women to take on men's less-than-desirable behaviors. Instead, they should go for liberation, breaking away from male-dominated institutions altogether. Greer is mad as hell: She even thinks birth-control pills are a male plot to keep women from fulfilling their biological destiny as mothers. The book seems unlikely to win many converts. For achieving that goal, the best of the bunch is The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World. Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher covers many of the same studies used by Hales and Angier, but she gives the research a forward spin. Woman, says Fisher, is particularly well-designed to predominate in the 21st century's globalized, knowledge-based economy, thanks to the distinctive qualities of the female mind. Fisher posits that women are particularly adept at ''web thinking''--the ability to see the big picture. She backs up her claim with lots of studies showing that women, more so than men, tend to gather disparate facts, consider all the options, and place issues in a broad context. They are better at long-range planning, can intuit more from verbal cues and body language, and will consider more points of view. Men, she says, compartmentalize their attention, focusing on just one thing at a time while tuning out extraneous stimuli. Fisher labels this straightforward approach ''step thinking,'' which works just fine when all that matters is cranking out widgets. But, says Fisher, ''with the growing complexity of the global marketplace, companies will need executives that can assimilate a range of data, embrace ambiguity, and set business objectives within a broader social context''--in other words, women executives. Fisher backs up these assertions by citing studies into the structure of men's and women's brains. One region of the prefrontal cortex--the part of the brain that controls the ability to multitask--is larger in women, and the two halves of a woman's brain are more strongly connected--which may explain why women are better at integrated thinking. The biology is well-documented; the evolutionary theories behind it less so. Fisher theorizes that while cavemen were out hunting mastodons--a task calling for singular concentration--women had the more complex job of rearing children, requiring them to be ever wary of danger while stoking the home fires, preparing food, and keeping the tribe together. This seems a little too pat--and fails to account for all the disorganized women and unmotivated men in the world. Fisher also goes through contortions to explain why men dominate now but won't in the future. Because men are so singularly focused, they can devote all their excess testosterone to climbing the corporate ladder, while women want a well-rounded life. But as the baby boomers enter menopause, she says, aging women will get a testosterone boost, giving them the best of both worlds--valued web thinking plus pushy behavior. And, they won't have to expend energy birthing those babies. All of these gender-focused books get a tad overwhelming after a few chapters. Even the most ardent feminists might start wondering if there isn't at least one teeny thing men can do better than women. But Fisher et al. do make the valuable point that women have much to contribute to a company looking for out-of-the-box thinking. There is more to be gained from hiring them than the ability to hail diversity in the annual report. BY CATHERINE ARNST _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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RELATED ITEMS Will the 21st Century Be a Woman's World? PHOTO: Cover, ``The First Sex'' BOOK EXCERPT: Chapter One of "The First Sex" INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online | |||
