Vive La Difference!

Work released on December 20th 2010 by Sonya M. Kahlenberg and Richard W. Wrangham, described in the journal Current Biology provided "the first suggestive evidence of a wild nonhuman species playing with rudimentary dolls, as well as the first known sex difference in a wild animal’s choice of playthings." Many will have felt at greater ease with gender differences after having our hairy relatives prove us somewhat normal.

Men and women have different skills and attitudes in the workplace and we have to strive for better understanding of these not only to perform better as organisations, but also to be happier as individuals.

We can find an example of  gender difference in group behaviour (or one could apply - workplace attitude) in a recent research (quoted here) conducted by Jaime Confer of the University of Texas-Austin. Confer's research found that (as shown in the figure below) men try to impress the opposite sex more than their own sex, whereas the opposite pattern is true for women.


An example of gender difference in workplace skill was recently produced by researchers at MIT studying collective intelligence. The researchers conclude that collective intelligence is "not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group." The larger the number of females in the group the greater the collective intelligence (more here).

Equity is a slippery notion and one on which judgement shouldn't be rushed.