By Helen Fisher

Random House

(C)1999 Helen Fisher
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-679-44909-4

CHAPTER ONE

Web Thinking

Women's Contextual View

"What man has assurance enough to pretend to know
thoroughly the riddle of a woman's mind?" -- Cervantes

God created woman. And boredom did indeed cease from that moment." Friedrich Nietzsche was no feminist, but he apparently appreciated the female mind. He was not the first. Women have been adding zest, wit, intelligence, and compassion to human life since our ancestors stoked their fires in Africa a million years ago.

    Now women are about to change the world. Why? Because during the millions of years that our forebears traveled in small hunting-and-gathering bands, the sexes did different jobs. Those jobs required different skills. As time and nature tirelessly propagated successful workers, natural selection built different aptitudes into the male and female brain. No two people are the same. But, on average, women and men possess a number of different innate skills. And current trends suggest that many sectors of the twenty-first-century economic community are going to need the natural talents of women.

    Please do not mistake me. Men have many natural abilities that will be essential in the coming global marketplace. Nor have men been laggards in the past. They have explored and mapped the world; produced most of our literature, arts, and sciences; and invented many of the pleasures of contemporary life, from the printing press to light-bulbs, sneakers, chocolate, and the Internet. Men will continue to make enormous contributions to our high-tech society.

    But women have begun to enter the paid workforce in record numbers almost everywhere on earth. As these women penetrate, even saturate, the global marketplace in coming decades, I think they will introduce remarkably innovative ideas and practices.

    What are women's natural talents? How will women change the world? I begin with how women think.

    I believe there are subtle differences in the ways that men and women, on average, organize their thoughts—variations that appear to stem from differences in brain structure. Moreover, as discussed throughout this book, women's "way of seeing" has already begun to permeate our newspapers, TV shows, classrooms, boardrooms, chambers of government, courtrooms, hospitals, voting booths, and bedrooms. Feminine thinking is even affecting our basic beliefs about justice, health, charity, leisure, intimacy, romance, and family. So I start with that aspect of femininity that I believe will have the most ubiquitous impact on tomorrow.

    In this chapter I maintain that women, on average, take a broader perspective than men do—on any issue. Women think contextually, holistically. They also display more mental flexibility, apply more intuitive and imaginative judgments, and have a greater tendency to plan long term—other aspects of their contextual perspective. I discuss the scientific evidence for these female traits and the probable brain networks associated with them. Then I trace women's outstanding march into the world of paid employment and conclude that women's broad, contextual, holistic way of seeing will pervade every aspect of twenty-first-century economic and social life.

The Female Mind

"When the mind is thinking, it is talking to itself," Plato said. Everyone has tossed around in bed at night churning over a business problem or a troubled love affair. Images appear, then vanish. Scenes unfurl. Snippets of conversation emerge from nowhere, dissolve, then repeat themselves. A rush of anger engulfs you. Then pity. Then despair. Then rationality takes over for a moment and you resolve to do this, then that. On goes the debate as clock hands wind from three to four. A committee meeting is in progress in your head.

    "The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways," wrote the British philosopher Bertrand Russell. Both men and women absorb large amounts of data and weigh a vast array of variables almost simultaneously.

    Psychologists report, however, that women more regularly think contextually; they take a more "holistic" view of the issue at hand. That is, they integrate more details of the world around them, details ranging from the nuances of body posture to the position of objects in a room.

    Women's ability to integrate myriad facts is nowhere more evident than in the office. Female executives, business analysts note, tend to approach business issues from a broader perspective than do their male colleagues. Women tend to gather more data that pertain to a topic and connect these details faster. As women make decisions, they weigh more variables, consider more options and outcomes, recall more points of view, and see more ways to proceed. They integrate, generalize, and synthesize. And women, on average, tolerate ambiguity better than men do—probably because they visualize more of the factors involved in any issue.

    In short, women tend to think in webs of interrelated factors, not straight lines. I call this female manner of thought "web thinking."

The Male Mind

As a general rule, men tend to focus on one thing at a time—a male trait I first noticed in my twenties. At the time I had a boyfriend who liked to watch the news on television, listen to rock music on the stereo, and read a book—presumably all at once. In reality, he just switched channels in his head. When he was imbibing from one modality, he tuned the others out. Not I. The flashing of the TV screen, the throbbing music, the printed words: all of these stimuli swamped my mind.

    Men are good at compartmentalizing their attention. Just ask a man who is reading the newspaper a simple question. Often he doesn't hear you. When he does, he appears to rouse himself as if returning from a different planet. Men tend to tune out extraneous stimuli. Their thinking process is, on average, more channeled.

    Faced with a business problem, men tend to focus on the immediate dilemma rather than putting the issue in a larger context. Unless facts are obviously pertinent, men are inclined to dispense with them. Then they progress in a straightforward, linear, causal path toward a specific goal: the solution. As a result, men are generally less tolerant of ambiguity. They like to weed out what appears to be extraneous, unrelated data to focus on the task at hand.

    This capacity for focusing attention is particularly evident in the male attitude toward work. As psychologist Jacquelynne Eccles puts it, many men show a "single-minded devotion" to their occupation.

    Charles Hampden-Turner, a business consultant and member of the Global Business Network in Emeryville, California, believes that American business managers epitomize this male perspective.

    He and his colleague Alfons Trompenaars conducted research on the values and business practices of American male and female executives. Men, Hampden-Turner reports, tend to analyze business issues in distinct parts, such as facts, items, chores, units, and other concrete segments. They often view a company as a set of tasks, machines, payments, and jobs—a collection of disparate components. Female executives, he believes, see a company as a more integrated, multilayered whole.

    I call men's focused, compartmentalizing, incremental reasoning process "step thinking."

Juggling Many Balls, Wearing Many Hats

Janet Scott Batchler has described this gender difference succinctly. She writes feature films with her husband and partner, Lee Batchler. She says of her spouse, "He does one thing at a time. Does it well. Finishes it and moves on. He's very direct in his thought processes and in his actions. And he deals with people in that same focused way, meaning exactly what he says, with no hidden agenda. I'm the one who can juggle a hundred balls at once, and can realize that other people may be doing the same thing, professionally or emotionally."

    The scripts that Hollywood film writers create illustrate these different ways of thinking vividly. The scripts that men write tend to be direct and linear, while women's compositions have many conflicts, many climaxes, and many endings.

    American's national pundits express this gender difference, too. Essayist Barbara Ehrenreich declares flatly, "Women historically don't compartmentalize as well as men."

    When political scientist Roger Masters of Dartmouth College asked men and women about their political views and then showed them videotapes of politicians with various facial expressions, the sexes' responses were noticeably different, too. Masters concluded that "information about a leader and the nonverbal cues of the leader are integrated more fully by women than by men."

    Spokeswomen for the National Foundation for Women Business Owners say that American female business owners stress intuitive thinking, creativity, sensitivity, and personal values. Male business owners stress focused thinking, methodical processing of information, and concrete analysis of data. They report that "women business owners are thus more easily able to switch among multiple tasks."

    Demographers for the United Nations Development Programme have documented this gender difference in many cultures. In 1995 they canvassed the working habits of men and women in 130 societies. In places as different as Norway, Botswana, Argentina, and Mongolia, they report, "women in particular have developed a facility for juggling many activities at once."

    As women around the world do multiple tasks simultaneously, they are mentally assessing and assimilating an abundance of data— engaging in web thinking.

Web Thinking in Childhood

This feminine way of mentally processing information begins in childhood. In the classroom, boys are more task-oriented. They concentrate intently on one thing at a time. Girls have a harder time detaching themselves cognitively from their surroundings. When playing on the computer, boys are likely to head straight for their desired goal, while girls tend to browse through a host of alternatives before settling on one. And when asked about themselves, boys stress the particulars, while girls are more inclined to locate themselves in a broader, more contextual environment.

    Classic examples are Jake and Amy, participants in the well-known study of rights and responsibilities conducted in the early 1980s by psychologist Carol Gilligan of Harvard University. Jake and Amy were both bright, ambitious American eleven-year-olds in the sixth grade. When Jake was asked how he would describe himself, he discussed his talents, his beliefs, and his height—a set of discrete, particular, concrete facts. Amy, on the other hand, placed herself within the context of the wider social world. She said she liked school, she saw a world full of problems, and she wanted to be a scientist so that she could help others.

    When these youngsters were asked about a situation in which responsibility to oneself and responsibility to others conflicted, they also responded differently. Jake replied: "You go about one-fourth to the others and three-fourths to yourself." Jake compartmentalized the task; he divided his responsibility into parts and allocated specific amounts in specific ways. Amy's reply was contextual, characteristic of feminine web thinking. "Well," she said, "it really depends on the situation." Then Amy launched into the multitudinous variables one must consider before acting. As Gilligan points out, "Amy responds contextually rather than categorically."

    This gender difference continues into adulthood. When Gilligan queried college students about their concepts of right and wrong, women were more willing to make exceptions to rules, probably because they weighed more variables and saw more possibilities.

    When men and women are given Rorschach inkblot tests and asked to examine these blotches of splattered ink, men tend to talk about the details that they see. Women integrate these minutiae into larger patterns and talk about whole creatures they envision instead. When men and women write stories, men are more likely to discuss the contests they have won, or when they received a free vacation or caught the biggest fish—concrete, isolated events. Women write about people, places, or embarrassing situations, tales that encompass a broader social context.

    When psychologist Diane Halpern of California State University at San Bernardino did a comprehensive analysis of hundreds of studies examining men's and women's verbal, mathematical (quantitative), and visual-spatial abilities, she concluded that the tasks that each sex excelled at required different cognitive abilities. Women's skills all required "rapid access to and retrieval of information that is stored in memory." Men's skills required the ability to "maintain and manipulate mental representations." These differences reflect web thinking versus focused linear thought.

    "All thought is a feat of association; having what's in front of you bring up something in your mind that you almost didn't know you knew." Poet Robert Frost perfectly captured the triumph of mental association so characteristic of the female mind.

Crossroads of the Mind

Web thinking versus step thinking; an emphasis on the whole versus a focus on the parts; multitasking versus doing one thing at a time: scientists are far from understanding, even properly defining, these subtle differences between women and men. But they do know where in the brain these thinking processes take place: the prefrontal cortex.

    The prefrontal cortex is the front (anterior) part of the cerebral cortex—the outer rind of the brain. It lies directly behind your brow, occupying approximately one quarter to one third of the entire cerebral cortex. It is far more developed in humans than in even our closest relatives, chimpanzees; in fact, it does not fully mature in people until the teenage years.

    Yet the prefrontal cortex is essential to human thinking. In fact, it is known as the "central executive" or the "crossroads" of the mind. It acquired these names because it has many specific regions. Each region processes different kinds of information, and each connects with many other regions of the brain and body.

    Doctors first listened in on the traffic at this crossroads in the 1930s, when they began to treat depressed patients with the procedure known as a prefrontal lobotomy. Surgeons worked a scalpel into the skull and sliced the brain from top to bottom, severing the prefrontal cortex from all other brain parts. This cured most patients of their depression. But the patients acquired new problems. For example, they could no longer perform several simple parallel tasks at once.

    More recent studies of patients with injuries to the prefrontal cortex have confirmed that damage to this area makes multitasking impossible.

    From these now-discredited operations, as well as many other studies of the prefrontal cortex, scientists have learned that this part of the brain also controls your ability to keep track of many bits of information at once, to order and weigh these data as they accumulate, and to find patterns in the information. Moreover, it enables you to predict outcomes from the patterns, display mental flexibility, reason hypothetically, manipulate contingencies, and plan for the future? All of these tasks are aspects of web thinking.

    Other regions of the prefrontal cortex govern the brain functions associated with step thinking. These areas enable you to focus your attention, encode data in serial order, plan sequentially, construct hierarchical plans of action, and process data linearly—all aspects of step-by-step, compartmentalized thought.

Genes for Web Thinking

Could regions of the brain's prefrontal cortex vary between women and men, predisposing more women than men to assimilate larger chunks of data, think in webs of factors, and view the world more contextually? Could other areas of the prefrontal cortex also vary by sex, predisposing more men to focus their attention on fewer bits of data, compartmentalize this information, and think sequentially?

    New data on the brain support these possibilities. In 1997 neuroscientist David Skuse of the Institute of Child Health in London and his colleagues examined girls and women with Turner's syndrome, a genetic disorder in which the girl or woman possesses only one X chromosome instead of the normal two. They also collected data on normal men and women. From this ingenious and complex study, they concluded that a gene or a cluster of genes on the X chromosome influences the formation of the prefrontal cortex.

    What is even more remarkable, Skuse established that human patterns of inheritance and bodily interactions cause this gene or cluster of genes to be silenced in all men—but active in about 50 percent of women. In other words, this strand of DNA expresses itself only in women. Moreover, when this gene or cluster of genes is active it builds the feminine prefrontal cortex in specific ways, giving women an advantage at picking up the nuances of social interactions, as well as remaining mentally flexible.

    These data suggest that about 50 percent of women are genetically better equipped than all men to coordinate multitudinous bits of information—the basis of web thinking.

    There is more evidence that the prefrontal cortex is constructed differently in women and men—architecture that could affect the ways the sexes organize their thoughts. For example, scientists have established that at least one region of the prefrontal cortex is larger in women. This difference, they believe, is due to male hormones that bathe the brain at critical periods before and after birth.

    Whether this size difference in part of the prefrontal cortex has any influence on women's holistic approach and on men's more linear view, we do not know. But this sex-linked difference could conceivably relate to variations in how men and women "think."

Women's Well-Connected Brains

Other parts of the brain also show structural variations that could play a role in women's web thinking. Of particular relevance are the cables of tissue that connect the two hemispheres of the brain.

    One such tissue bridge is the corpus callosum. It is composed of some two hundred million fibers that link the two brain halves from the forehead to the back of the head. A least one section of the corpus callosum is somewhat thicker in women than in men. The second main tissue bridge that connects brain hemispheres is the anterior commissure; it is 12 percent larger in women than in men.

    Tests of stroke victims, patients with other brain injuries, and normal subjects indicate that these thicker connecting links in women allow for greater communication between the two brain hemispheres. In males, the two brain halves are less in touch; each side operates more independently. Perhaps women's well-connected brains facilitate their ability to gather, integrate, and analyze more diverse kinds of information—an aspect of web thinking.

    The human brain is also somewhat "lateralized." This means that some mental functions are carried out predominantly in the left hemisphere, while others take place largely in the right. The male brain, however, is more lateralized than the female brain; each hemisphere is more rigidly dedicated to doing one task or another.

    Psychiatrist Mark George of the National Institute of Mental Health proposes that this brain structure may enable men to focus their attention more intensely than women. I would add that women's less lateralized (more integrated) brain probably helps them to embrace the larger view. As psychiatrist Mona Lisa Schultz of the Maine Medical Center puts it, "Because women's brains are less lateralized, they may have access to this area in both the right and left hemispheres. They don't see things as cut and dried, the way men do."

The Evolution of Web Thinking

It is not difficult to surmise how and why men's step thinking and women's web thinking could have evolved.

    A million years ago ancestral men were building fires, chipping stone hand axes, and hunting big animals in East Africa. As they pursued these dangerous beasts, men had to concentrate—peering from behind a bush, crouching near a water hole, slipping past a sleeping leopard in a tree, trailing cantankerous wounded creatures, then attacking when the time was right.

    Century after century of this perilous work must have favored those who could focus on the task at hand. Those who didn't pay strict attention were gored, trampled, or eaten. So as our male forebears tracked warthogs and wildebeests, they gradually evolved the brain architecture to screen out peripheral thoughts, focus their attention, and make step-by-step decisions.

    Women's facility for web thinking most likely also arose from their primordial occupation. Ancestral women had the hardest job of any creature that ever trod the earth: raising long-dependent babies under highly dangerous conditions. In order to rear helpless infants, ancestral mothers needed to do a lot of things at the same time. Watch for snakes. Listen for thunder. Taste for poison. Rock the sleepy. Distract the cranky. Instruct the curious. Soothe the fearful. Inspire the tardy. Feed the hungry. Mothers had to do countless daily chores while they stoked the fire, cooked the food, and talked to friends.

    Psychologists argue that contemporary women learn to do and think several things simultaneously. Just watch a working mother in the morning, dressing children, packing lunches, feeding goldfish, pouring cereal, and arranging day care on the phone—all at once.

    But I suspect that women's talent for contextual thinking—and the related skill of multitasking—evolved in deep history. Thousands of generations of performing mental and physical acrobatics as they raised helpless infants built these outstanding capacities into the architecture of the female brain.

Web Thinking in the Office

This feminine faculty of web thinking may give women an advantage in the morning whirl of getting children off to school. And it certainly will help them as they tackle complex business puzzles. But it can also cause problems in the office, as the following story illustrates.

    An office manager was trying to decide which worker to promote to an important job, a young man or young woman. He gave both candidates a vexing business puzzle with three potential solutions, A, B, and C. He asked both aspirants to see him the following morning with their appraisals of the situation.

    The man came in first and told the boss that he had thought it over, considered all of the aspects of the situation, and selected solution B. When the young woman entered, she said thoughtfully, "Well, solution A would be the best—if issues one or two can be solved first. Solution B would be most appropriate if issue X gets solved instead. Solution C is definitely the best alternative if—" The boss did not want to hear such a web of reasoning. He looked at her in dismay and said, "I think you should try another line of work."

    Because women, on average, do not think in a linear, step-by-step fashion as regularly as men do, men often regard them as less logical, less rational, less concrete, less precise, even less intelligent.

    This gender difference can cause real troubles when the sexes work together.

    "The road is all," Willa Cather wrote. Many women would agree. How you arrive at a conclusion is important to most women. Women are "process-oriented." They are "gathering." They want to explore the multiple interactions, the multidirectional paths, all of the permutations of the puzzle. So women regard men as careless, unimaginative, or "tunnel-visioned" when they ignore what women think are important aspects of a problem.

    Men get frustrated when women raise a host of variables that the men regard as superfluous. To most men, the immediate goal is more important than the process of arriving at the decision. They are "hunting"—focusing on the solution. They don't want to linger in the process; they want to complete the task. So men think women are trying to undermine a business meeting when women introduce what men see as piles of unnecessary data.

    Because of this gender difference in perspective, people of each sex often regard those of the other as poor team players.

Web Thinking in the Future

Why can't a man be more like a woman? Why can't a woman be more like a man?

    Because each sex is playing with a different deck of evolutionary cards. Both web thinking and step thinking are perfectly good ways of making decisions, depending on the circumstances. Both can be logical. Both, I think, are lodged in the gendered brain. Both emerged in a time long gone when the sexes did different jobs. And both decisionmaking styles are employed by each of the sexes at one time or another. As Christie Hefner, CEO of Playboy Enterprises, said during a speech in New York City in 1998, "The best managers are those who adopt both male and female strategies for doing business."

    Still, for generations American executives have admired and rewarded those who analyzed issues on a component-by-component basis—the atomistic approach. An example is the common American obsession with the bottom line.

    This focus is changing. As the information age and globalization develop even greater momentum, business leaders are becoming obliged to weigh and integrate more and more factors as they make decisions. Some business consultants have even begun to recommend ways to avoid linear thinking and acquire the holistic point of view.

    Peter Senge, former director of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT's Sloan School of Management, has advised thousands of American business managers on preparing for the future global market. Among his clients have been Ford, Procter & Gamble, and AT&T. His recommendation: systems thinking. "Systems thinking," Senge explains, "is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots."

    Certainly linear thinking will remain an essential tool in the business community, particularly among the leaders of industry in capitalist societies. To make key decisions, these individuals often need to compartmentalize issues and focus their approach. In a crisis they are obliged to disregard much of the context of the situation in order to move assuredly with a single-minded view. Linear thinking is often dynamic thinking.

    But the feminine propensity to look at business problems contextually, to concentrate on the whole of an issue rather than its parts, is becoming more and more valuable. As businesswomen weigh more variables, consider more alternatives, pursue more options, and introduce new issues, they will bring balance and innovation to the office world. In fact, executives note that one of women's outstanding contributions to corporate America is their introduction of more varied, less conventional points of view.

Women's Mental Flexibility

A related gender difference is how the sexes reason. Psychologists have established that men tend to think and plan according to abstract principles more regularly than women do. During committee meetings, for example, men argue more abstractly and make more categorical statements of right and wrong, while women use more examples and personal experiences—contextual data.

    Men also tend to become wedded to these abstract principles.On average, men are more rule-bound, probably because context is less meaningful to them. Women are more inclined to make exceptions, probably because they can visualize a wider range of alternatives.

    This feminine mental flexibility has a genetic component. Mental suppleness, David Skuse and his colleagues report, stems from the same gene or genes on the X chromosome that produce other aspects of feminine mental acuity. As you may recall, this string of DNA is silenced in all men and expressed in about 50 percent of women.

    Feminine mental flexibility is not always an endearing quality, of course. Women are notorious for changing their minds. But I am convinced that women's mental malleability will become an essential asset in the coming global marketplace. Peter Drucker, the eminent business analyst, and many other business experts believe that companies today must be able to alter plans, products, and services quickly and frequently to keep pace with their competitors.

    As competition increases, the demand for flexibility should escalate. Women's innate mental elasticity should become a valuable planning asset.

Women's Intuition

"A woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty," Rudyard Kipling wrote. Kipling was voicing a classic perception about women's insight. At least since the ancient Greeks appealed to the oracle at Delphi, folklore has reflected the view that women are the more prescient seers.

    Today this feminine gift can be explained. Women's intuition is a composite of several female traits. As I point out in chapter 4, women are far keener than men at noticing the creases in your clothes, the tension in your voice, your tapping foot, the faint annoyance on your lower lip. Women pick up more messages from your posture, gestures, emotional expressions, and voice. Then, with their uniquely constructed and well-connected brains, women are more apt to assimilate all of these disparate little facts faster, achieving what appears to be a clairvoyant view.

    In fact, "women's intuition" is probably another aspect of feminine web thinking—arising from the prefrontal cortex where the brain assembles and integrates information.

Gut Thinking

But intuition is more than rapid assimilation of myriad data. People regularly describe intuition as a gut reaction.

    Even this can be explained. The prefrontal cortex and all other brain parts are widely connected to one another and to bodily organs via specific circuits. Neurologist Antonio Damasio of the University of Iowa College of Medicine calls these brain-body circuits "body loops." He believes these brain-body connections produce that "gut reaction" that people report as they get a "hunch."

    He and his colleagues demonstrated this brain-body connection in an experiment involving gambling. They hooked up subjects to a device that measures responses of the skin. Then they encouraged them to gamble with decks of cards. Some of the subjects were normal healthy adults; others had incurred injuries to the prefrontal cortex. All were given four decks of cards to work with, as well as several gambling tasks. None was told that two of their decks had been stacked to ensure heavy gaming loses.

    The healthy subjects soon developed a "hunch" that they were playing with two kinds of decks, two "good" decks and two "bad" decks. As they began to get their first inkling that certain decks were riskier than others, their skin began to respond. Concurrently with this skin response, they unconsciously began to avoid playing with the risky decks. Only later did they become fully aware that two of the decks were rigged. Nevertheless, their bodily responses had already begun to help guide their behavior.

    What is equally telling, the individuals with a damaged prefrontal cortex never registered any skin response—and they continued to select cards from the "bad" decks. Their brains had failed to integrate data from their body loops.

    Damasio proposes that the skin, stomach, heart, lungs, bowels, and other body organs send subliminal signals about the environment to the prefrontal cortex. He calls these body cues "somatic markers." He believes they help the rational mind make decisions. In short, gut reactions add emotional value to the brain's rational list of potential options—and help steer behavior.

    "All learning has an emotional base," Plato said. He perceived the relationship between the rational mind and the feeling body. With their facility for collecting and integrating myriad stimuli in the brain, women may pick up and assimilate more of these body cues—the handmaidens of intuition.

"Chunking" Data

Intuition also comes from stored experience, says psychologist Herbert Simon of Carnegie Mellon University. As a person learns how to analyze the stock market, run a publishing company, diagnose an illness, or play professional bridge, he or she begins to recognize the quirks of the system, see regularities, and organize these patterns into blocks of knowledge—what Simon calls "chunking." With time, more patterns are chunked. And linked. And these clusters of knowledge are stored in long-term memory.

    Then, when a single detail of a specific complex pattern appears, the experienced person instantly recognizes the larger composition, bypasses the time-consuming step-by-step analysis of each segment, and anticipates and predicts things that others must figure out with plodding sequential thought. The chess master, for example, sees individual chess moves as tiny details of a larger military plan. The primatologist analyzes a baboon's yawn within the larger context of baboon social life. Simon believes that intuition stems from the ability to call upon organized, stored expertise.

    "From long habit the train of thoughts ran so swiftly through my mind that I arrived at the conclusion without being conscious of intermediate steps." So says Sherlock Holmes as he explains one of his deductions to the less quick-witted Watson. Thus did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle accurately describe this thinking process, chunking data.

    Men and women most likely chunk data in much the same way. But each sex probably excels at chunking different kinds of facts. I would expect men to chunk knowledge about football because men spend more time watching football. Because women excel at reading people's faces and processing the nuances of social interactions (more on this in chapter 4), they are probably better at chunking—and intuiting—the nuances of social exchanges.

    Men do use their intuition. When journalist Roy Rowan interviewed the chief executives of some of America's biggest corporations in the 1980s, many conceded that they used their gut reactions regularly, particularly when making important decisions. Rowan concluded, "The last step to success frequently requires a daring intuitive leap."

    Businesswomen are somewhat more intuitive, however. A 1982 survey of more than two thousand corporate managers discovered that female managers score higher than male managers on scales of intuition.

    Why have women developed a keen intuitive sense? It is not difficult to surmise. Ancestral women were constantly obliged to decipher the needs of their prelingual, highly dependent young.

    I saw a contemporary instance of this at an airport while I was waiting in a coffee shop for a flight. It could have taken place a million years ago. Two women were sitting in the booth behind me with an infant. The child began to wail. "I just changed him," one said. "I know he isn't hungry," the other replied. Together the women reviewed dozens of possible reasons for the tears, trying to intuit the solution to this primordial human puzzle: a baby.

    Psychologists and business analysts currently believe that intuition plays a productive, if often unrecognized, role in managerial decision making. As the expanding global business community thrusts more executives into situations where they must size up foreign clients and colleagues, assess unfamiliar markets, and travel in novel environments, intuitive judgment may well become more highly valued—giving women a business edge.

Women as Long-Range Planners

"Women are the best index of the coming hour," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. The American philosopher correctly discerned another feminine faculty that is related to web thinking: women's keen sense of future possibilities.

    Both men and women have some ability for planning long term. I have found no concrete evidence that either sex is more skilled at this essential task. However, a few business analysts do believe that women are apt to think long term more regularly, while men are more likely to focus on the here and now.

    Men, for example, more frequently pile up business sessions back-to-back, sacrificing valuable respites they might have used for reevaluating their progress and considering future moves. Career women, on the other hand, take more time to catch their breath, reflect, and contemplate between meetings or appointments. Five minutes here, ten minutes there: women squeeze in time to assimilate what is happening around them and envision the future. Women "keep the long term in constant focus," says business journalist Sally Helgesen.

    Women's tendency to think long term is particularly visible in their attitude toward their own money.

    When Terrance Odean and Brad Barber, economists at the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Davis, examined the trading records of some thirty-five thousand clients at a large brokerage firm, they found that men traded 45 percent more often than women did. Odean said of women, "They don't churn their accounts the way men do." In fact, three out of four female investors have no short-term investment goals, as a 1997 Gallup poll of six thousand investors done in collaboration with PaineWebber demonstrates. Women also put more money into retirement plans, thinking of the distant future.

    This feminine attitude toward money is a winner in all but the worst financial markets. The National Association of Investors Corporations reports that women-only investment clubs earn a 21.3 percent average annual return on their purchases, while men-only clubs make an annual return of 15 percent. NAIC also notes that women pay more attention to the overall operations of the companies they invest in and ride out market fluctuations more regularly. A financial planner in Washington, D.C., summed it up: "Women don't have a racetrack mentality about risk. They say, `I'm not in it for the big kill, I'm in it for the long haul.'"

Biology of the Long-Term View

Women's long-term view of money might be explained by contemporary social realities. In order to rear their children, women move in and out of the job market more frequently than men do. So they have smaller pensions and fewer retirement benefits. Women also live longer. So women are considerably less confident than men that they will have enough money to live comfortably in their senior years.

    But women's propensity to think long term may also stem from feminine brain architecture. Why? Because long-term planning is unquestionably a mental process lodged in the prefrontal cortex of the brain—as an accident in the summer of 1848 vividly illustrates.

    It was late afternoon along the Black River in Vermont, hot and sunny. Phineas P. Gage, a young construction foreman for the Rutland & Burlington Railroad, was preparing to blow up a rock escarpment so that his gang of railroad workers could lay ties. He had drilled the hole in the rock and placed the powder and fuse inside. Then he began to tamp at the hole with a three-foot-seven-inch iron bar.

    Alas, Gage had forgotten a crucial step: covering the powder and the fuse with sand. The explosion erupted in his face. Worse yet, the iron rod, a little over an inch in diameter, entered with its pointed end into his left cheek and exited from the top of his skull, then sizzled through the air until it landed a hundred feet away.

    Miraculously, Phineas Gage survived this accident. He talked to those around him as he lay waiting for an oxcart to take him to a nearby inn. He even sipped a cool drink on the porch of the hotel as the doctor examined him. With the exception of being blind in his left eye, he seemed to be physically restored in about two months.

    But Gage's personality had changed entirely. A tranquil, competent, persistent, energetic, shrewd work leader became irreverent, capricious, obstinate, indecisive, impatient, shiftless—and hopelessly unable to carry out any long-term plans. Moments after he devised a scheme for the future, he would abandon it. He displayed no forethought about or interest in tomorrow. He lost job after job, then joined the circus, then drifted to South America to work on a horse farm and drive a stagecoach. Finally his mother and sister in San Francisco took him in.

    From studying Phineas Gage and many other patients with injuries to the prefrontal cortex, neuroscientists now know that long-term planning takes place largely in this crossroads of the brain. As you may recall, women and men display differences in the structure of the prefrontal cortex. So it is possible that these brain differences contribute to women's tendency to plan long term.

    Long-term thinking would have been adaptive for women across the eons of deep history. Hunting required men to think about the habits of the animals and birds, the cycles of the moon, positions of the stars, patterns of the winds and rains, where creatures roamed last year, and where they would be heading next month or a year from now. Unquestionably, men had to think of events that would occur months, even years, ahead. But rearing and educating babies required women to prepare for exigencies that could occur decades down the road. As Dorothy Parker said of this feminine responsibility, "It takes eighteen years for a wise women to make a man of her son."

    From millennia of planning for crises that could occur in the distant future, women may have evolved intricacies of brain architecture that predispose them to take the long-term view more regularly than men.

The New Holism

Some men are certainly skilled at long-term planning. Financial officers and CEOs of almost all major companies are, overwhelmingly, men. These men must be adept at long-range and strategic planning. But women are good at "the vision thing," as former U.S. president George Bush once called it.

    Many business analysts and executives believe that the ability to cast issues within an even broader long-term perspective will become more and more relevant in the expanding global marketplace. "Breadth" of vision and "depth" of vision have become buzzwords in many executive offices and boardrooms. As this trend accelerates, women should make major contributions.

    All they have to do is be themselves.

The Power of Imagination

"The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were," said John F. Kennedy. JFK celebrated the imagination; he believed it was an essential ingredient for progress.

    What is imagination but the ability to reach into the depths of one's stored knowledge, assemble reams of information in new ways, and suppose how various combinations of things would play out? These abilities are aspects of web thinking. So it seems likely that the capacity to imagine arises from specific areas of the prefrontal cortex where patterns are assimilated, plans are made, and novel responses are generated.

    With their specially constructed prefrontal cortex and well-connected brain, women are likely to excel at envisioning future outcomes in innovative ways.

    "The possible's slow fuse is lit by the Imagination," wrote Emily Dickinson. With their natural talent for web thinking; their mental flexibility; their intuition; their broad, contextual long-term perspective; and their imagination, women have the innate talents to transform the business world.

    They will have the opportunity, too. Women are entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers.

The Rise of Working Women

"A woman's place in society marks the level of civilization," said the nineteenth-century feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. On the farm, women worked long and hard. American women also sold their surplus jam, soap, candles, quilts, and knitted sweaters in their parlors or at local farmers' markets. Some made commercial leather goods or clothes at home or cleverly ran a family business. But women rarely owned their own money or ran businesses by themselves.

    By the 1830s, American women began to leave the farm for domestic service and low-paying factory work. In 1870, however, only 14 percent of American women of working age were employed outside the home and most of these were unmarried. They made up only 16 percent of the labor force. Nevertheless, these female pioneers came home for holidays with stories, money, and store-bought clothes. They launched women's march into the modern world of paid labor.

    After the Civil War an era of swift economic development enticed more young women into the swelling urban centers to teach, shuffle paper, or do factory work, at least until they married. More and more clerical and sales jobs became available by 1900. Then, after World War I, droves of young unmarried women took to typing, filing, answering phones, and tidying up the office world. By 1930, some 20 percent of all clerical jobs were taken up by women. Many women even returned to work after their youngest child had completed high school.

    The Great Depression of the 1930s saw more American unmarried women working from nine to five, mostly in repetitive, boring, subordinate, dead-end jobs. But the number of working women doubled between 1870 and 1940. During World War II it doubled once again.

    Women's participation in the paid workforce took a temporary plunge when men returned home from military service to resume their "rightful" positions in the working world. With the postwar economic boom, however, the demand for secretaries, teachers, nurses, and salespeople soon expanded job opportunities for women. By 1950, even married women were being pulled into the American workforce. By 1970, roughly 43 percent of women over the age of sixteen in the United States held paying jobs. By 1996, almost 60 percent of these women worked.

    In 1998, 46 percent of the American workforce was made up of women. Less than 3.5 percent of Americans worked on a farm.

Fewer Babies

This historic trend toward women in the workplace is certain to persist, for several reasons. First, today women can work outside the home: they are bearing fewer babies.

    On the farm, women needed many children to pick the beans, milk the cows, collect the eggs, and help in making candles and mending socks. Children were a cheap, reliable, essential part of the farm labor force. But as ambitious young men and women packed their carpetbags and caught trains for Chicago and New York in the nineteenth century, they left this necessity behind. Urban families did not need children by the dozen. Throughout the 1800s, American birthrates steadily declined.

    This trend continues. Today American women bear an average of 2.2 children that live to adulthood. Across most of Europe, women bear even fewer young.

    New inventions have accelerated the decline in birthrates. Vastly improved medical technologies now save many more infants from untimely death. So a woman no longer has to conceive several infants in hopes that two or three will live. With modern methods of contraception, and the legalization of abortion in 1973, American women can also plan when they will bear young—and when they won't.

    Thus, married women generally have more years to work before getting pregnant. They also remain at work longer during pregnancy, return to work sooner after bearing babies, and have fewer pregnancies that interrupt their careers. In fact, today women, on average, spend less time being pregnant and caring for children than at any time in human evolution.

Housework Is Getting Easier

Women's home lives are also far less demanding than in the past. Today most women are surrounded by ingenious gadgets. They don't grow the peas or raise the chicken that they serve for dinner; instead they hunt and gather in the grocery store. They go through catalogs or department stores to buy clothes instead of shearing sheep, carding wool, and weaving cloth for skirts and coats and blankets.

    Hot running water, lightbulbs, washing machines, dishwashers, electric stoves, microwaves, refrigerators, baby bottles, Crock-Pots, Cuisinarts, canned foods, telephones, even Saturday morning television: an endless stream of inventions has made the tasks of cooking, washing, cleaning, shopping, and rearing babies easier for women. Women are finally liberated for work outside the home.

More Jobs for Women

And work is available. The decline of smokestack and assembly-line industries and the growth of higher-skilled and service-sector jobs favor women. For example, all of the paper-shuffling and computer-clicking clerical jobs; work in the medical and technical professions; and teaching, nursing, home care, child care, retail sales, and service industry employment continue to expand. These jobs, as a rule, do not require the physical strength of men. Many are part-time or have flexible hours as well—factors that appeal to women.

    The contemporary workforce does require some education. But women have used their extra time to educate themselves, as you will see in chapter 3. As women become better educated, they bear even fewer children, continuing the downward trend of childbirth and the steady entry of women into the labor force.

    Moreover, many women must work. Due to a constantly rising cost of living, women in most dual-income families say they cannot maintain a decent standard of living unless both spouses keep a job. Other women work because a husband has lost his job, returned to school, or prefers to raise the children as a house dad. Some women work because they have divorced. In fact, as women in industrial societies join the paid workforce, they gain the economic means to depart unhappy marriages more easily. Many do, thereby increasing the number of years they will be obliged to work.

Women Want to Work

Fewer children, more gadgets in the home, more jobs outside the home for women, more educated women, more divorce: all these factors encourage women to join the workforce. There are still other reasons. Women are marrying later. This means they have more premarital years to support themselves. Women are also living longer, extending the number of years they will work.

    Women also work because they want the things that money buys. Television sets, cars, fancy meals, aerobics classes, massages, designer blue jeans, concert outings, vacations to Key West, Kyoto, or Kathmandu: in America and other prosperous nations, many women have become accustomed to comforts and entertainment.

    As the necessity of bearing babies has declined, the attractions of working are mounting—drawing women into the world of paid employment.

    "Money is the most egalitarian force in society. It confers power on whoever holds it," according to New York social commentator Roger Starr. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 1993 American full-time working wives brought home, on average, 41 percent of the family's earnings. In the United States in 1998, some 20 percent of working wives earned more than their husbands did. Also, men are retiring earlier, and more of them are working part-time.

    As a result, the "pay gap" between the genders is gradually closing—albeit slowly and unevenly. American women are gradually gaining economic equality with men.

The Worldwide Rise of Women in the Workforce

What happens in the United States often happens elsewhere later on. This is particularly true with regard to women.

    Women in most of the world are having fewer children. Far fewer women are dying in childbirth? More are getting an education. And in many largely agrarian countries, insecticides, weed killers, tractors, and other technological innovations are freeing women from some farm labor, enabling them to enter more lucrative positions in the salaried world.

    As Ma Shuozhu, the patriarch of a large family in rural China, put it, "Farming is easy, there is time for business now."

    Overall, women currently make up 40 percent of the labor force in the countries of the European Union and the rest of the industrial world. In 1990, women made up 39.5 percent of the worldwide labor force as well. In fact, during the past two decades more women have begun to work outside the home almost everywhere in the world, while men's participation in the labor force has declined.

    Japan, for example, has lifted several restrictions on overtime and late-night jobs from which women were formerly barred. As a result, Japanese women currently account for 35 percent of all paid working hours. Women in Qatar, one of the strictest Muslim countries in the world, are beginning to work outside the home—without a veil. Even in the mountain jungles of Papua New Guinea, women are defying ancient customs to join the modern labor force.

    Miriam Wilngal is among them. In 1997, Miriam appeared in The New York Times soon after a prestigious clan leader was killed in a jungle struggle. To compensate for the murder, the offending clan was fined $15,000, twenty-five pigs, and one girl in marriage: Miriam. Miriam Wilngal refused to wed, defying centuries of tribal custom, toppling an elaborately balanced structure of social debts and credits, and infuriating her relatives.

    "I want to learn to be a typist," Miriam said to reporters in Port Moresby. "I want to have my own money; I don't want to have to depend on a man."

The Female Advantage

The world will see more women like Miriam.

    In 1995, the United Nations Development Programme devised an ingenious index to compare women's advancement relative to men, using multiple measures of men's and women's health, life expectancy, educational attainment, literacy, access to knowledge, relative income, and standard of living. The UNDP then used these figures to rank each of 130 countries according to its degree of equality between the sexes.

    Women fared best in Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark, in that order. The United States ranked fifth. Japan placed eighth. Women fared worst in Niger, Mali, Sierra Leone, and Afghanistan. No society treated its women as well as it did its men. But over the past two decades, women moved toward equality in every single one of these societies. According to this 1995 survey, "Not a single country has slipped back in the march towards greater gender equality."

    Afghanistan must have slipped back since these data were published; the fundamentalist Taliban government has stripped women of all vestiges of equality.

    Nevertheless, women are advancing in the paid job market in almost all contemporary societies. And many national and international organizations have launched projects that can only accelerate women's progress.

Web Thinking Will Be Valued

"'Tis true: there's magic in the web of it," Shakespeare wrote. A remarkable confluence of technological and economic forces is enabling women to join the paid labor force around the world.

    Moreover, with the growing complexity and sharpening pace of the global marketplace, more and more companies are likely to need employees who can collect, assimilate, and weigh a wide range of data; construct intricate relationships among constellations of ideas; imagine unexpected business developments; embrace ambiguity; intuit appropriate actions in puzzling business situations; strategize in multiple directions; devise complex long-term plans; envision a broad range of consequences; anticipate rapid, unexpected changes; prepare fallback options; set business objectives within their broader social context; think in systems; remain mentally flexible—and juggle a lot of office demands at once.

    All these abilities are aspects of web thinking; all are characteristic of the female mind. Many may come to agree with Amy Pascal, president of Columbia Pictures: she says, "My greatest power as an executive is that I'm a woman."

CONTENTS Acknowledgments.....................................................xi INTRODUCTION DEEP HISTORYAn Immodest Proposal.....................xv 1. WEB THINKINGWomen's Contextual View.............................3 2. THE ORGANIZATION WOMANFeminine Team Playing....................29 3. WOMEN'S WORDSEducators in the Information Age..................57 4. MIND READINGPeople Skills at Your Service......................84 5. HEIRS TO HIPPOCRATESWomen as Healers..........................112 6. HOW WOMEN LEADWomen in Civil Society and Government...........139 7. TOMORROW BELONGS TO WOMENHow Women Are Changing the Business World.....................................................167 8. SEXUAL CIVILITYThe Feminization of Lust.......................194 9. INFATUATIONRomantic Love in the Twenty-first Century..........224 10. PEER MARRIAGEThe Reformation of Matrimony....................254 11. THE COLLABORATIVE SOCIETYEquality Regained...................284 Notes..............................................................289 Bibliography.......................................................321 Index..............................................................361