It’s a strong statement, but now that Google’s fired engineer, James Damore, has decided to double-down and speak out in public for the sake of espousing his cluelessness to a larger audience, his latest words confirm he’s a dunce.
The fact Damore played in the stereotype sandbox by composing an oversized, 10-page memo was already enough to indicate his limited depth of perception. (Dude, seriously?! You really thought that sharing that with the company wasn’t going to violate company policy? If you don’t have common sense, then make time to read the handbook. Doh!)
Since Damore decided to paint with a wide brush, I thought we would have some fun taking a similar prejudicial stance (this blog is called A Bias Opinion, people). We’re going to ratchet things up a bit more than poor Damore did and use research to back up our stance as we poke at the male inferiority complex.
Here’s a list of 10 ways that women are better than men at work… and in life.
1. Women have higher IQs than men: Alice Walton discusses in this Forbes article recent research which points out that, once women were allowed to work, go to school, and, you know, generally flex their brain muscle rather than being forced to stay in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant, women’s brains started accessing their full potential.
James Flynn, known for the Flynn effect writes “In the last 100 years the IQ scores of both men and women have risen but women’s have risen faster. This is a consequence of modernity. The complexity of the modern world is making our brains adapt and raising our IQ.” Flynn notes that the “improvement is more marked for women than for men because they were disadvantaged in the past.”
Fun bottom line? The disparity is only going to become greater, fellas. We can expect men to keep falling behind women on the IQ charts for the foreseeable future.
We’d argue the average woman is better able to organise her time and switch between tasks than the average man.”- Professor Keith Laws, University of Hertfordshire
2. Women are better at multitasking than men: This BBC news article echoes the Forbes article in which Dr. Rex Jung, PhD points out that, physically, women have more white matter in their brains than men. White matter is the connection between brain cells. This suggests the reason why women can analyze many different thoughts at once is because we rely on creating connections between information rather than creating room within a limited storage space.
This probably why our poor male counterparts get lost and wonder when women will stop talking. They cannot handle being bombarded with multiple thought processes at once. Men’s reliance on grey matter instead of white matter limits them to insisting women focus on going from point A to point B. Meanwhile, any woman worth her mettle is analyzing whether routes F, K, M, X and Z are better options than A. Hey, we women like to weigh our options and choose the best route.
3. Women are better under pressure than men: Science reporter James Morgan analyzed an article in BMC Psychology for BBC News which showed that women are more organized under pressure. “In the key search task in particular, women displayed a clear performance advantage over men,” says co-author Professor Keith Laws of the University of Hertfordshire. “[Results] suggest that – in a stressed and complex situation – women are more able to stop and think about what’s going on in front of them.”
Men were slower and less organised than women when switching rapidly between tasks in tests by UK psychologists.” – James Morgan, Science Reporter, BBC News
While women used methodical solutions to find an object in a search field, surprisingly, some men failed to search the entire field because they didn’t use a logical approach. Dr. Dongning Ren of the Chinese Academy of Sciences says her research found results similar to those reported by Prof. Laws and his colleagues.
Previous studies have found that females are more resilient to chronic stress.” – Dr. Zhen Yan, University of Buffalo
4. Women cope better with stress than men: Nick McDermott, science reporter for the Daily Mail talked with Dr. Zhen Yan who led a study to identify reasons why women manage stress better than men. The scientists put male and female rats through challenges that mimicked situations that cause humans stress, such as feeling pressure and frustration. Under stress, the male rats were unable to recognize familiar objects while female rats had no impairments.
Earlier research conducted by Dr. Yan found that repeated stress caused brain damage in male rats while this study showed females were unharmed. To find the underlying mechanism, Dr. Yan exposed the male rates to greater levels of estrogen and blocked signaling of estrogen in the female brains. Results indicated that an enzyme (aromatase) related to the production of estrogen in the brain provides gives females greater resilience from stress than men.
Now we understand why there is so much male envy out there.
5. Girls get better grades than boys: This has been going on for a century and includes every single subject – including math and science. The study reviewed research from 1914 from 2011 that included more than 30 different countries and, after reading above, the results should be unsurprising. In the American Psychological Association article, lead study author, Dr. Daniel Voyer of the University of New Brunswick, notes:
School marks reflect learning in the larger social context of the classroom and require effort and persistence over long periods of time.” – Dr. Daniel Voyer, Univ. of New Brunswick
Research shows that girls study in order to get understanding of a subject while boys focus on acing tests. (If this is going over your head, guys, it means the boys focus on one-time “performance” achievements while girls are attempting to master the entire sphere of knowledge.) “Mastery of the subject matter generally produces better marks than performance emphasis, so this could account in part for males’ lower marks than females,” the study authors write.
While Enrico Gnaulati tries to defend boys in The Atlantic by suggesting the problem is in the grading, he undermines his own argument by pointing out that, per Gwen Kenney Benson, psychology professor at Allegheny College, girls “are more apt to plan ahead, set academic goals, and put effort into achieving those goals.” He also ignores the point made by the study researchers: girls have been outperforming boys for generations.
Employers, what do you want, someone who can manage a one-time, standardized test or someone goal-oriented with mastery of the subject, who plans ahead and has enough persistence to perform long-term?
Girls write more complex programs and learn more about coding than boys when it comes to making computer games.” – Rhiannon Williams, The Telegraph
6. Girls are better than boys at making computer games: I can just hear all the men screaming, “Wait. No. That can’t be true!” Sorry guys, a University of Sussex study says that girls rock when it comes to coding. In the study, Dr. Kate Howland and Dr. Judith Good developed a programming language which helped students string scripts.
It turns out the same skills that make girls better in school make us better programmers as well. The boys principally focused on stringing their scripts around the first and most simple trigger the class learned. Meanwhile, the “girls used seven triggers within the games, almost twice as many as the boys of the group, and were much more successful at creating complex scripts with two or more parts and conditional clauses” writes Rhiannon Williams in The Telegraph.
Women CEOs in the Fortune 1000 drive three times the returns as S&P 500 enterprises run predominantly by men.” – Pat Wechsler, Forbes
7. Women make better bosses than men: If none of that was enough evidence for employers to prefer hiring women over men, there’s numerous research everywhere that says women make far better bosses than men. Boston-based trading platform, Quantopian, compared the performances from 2002 to 2014 of Fortune 1000 companies with women CEOs against S&P 500 companies that are principally run by men. Pat Wechsler writes in Forbes that the results showed “the 80 women CEOs during those 12 years produced equity returns 226% better than the S&P 500.”
Women seem to be predisposed to be more inquisitive and to see more possible solutions.” – Gregory McQueen, Sr. Exec. Assoc. Dean, School of Osteopathic Medicine, Still University
In another study from McMaster University, Chris Bart and Gregory McQueen proved women make better business decisions than men. “The study, which surveyed more than 600 board directors, revealed that male directors, who made up 75 percent of the survey sample, prefer to make decisions using rules, regulations and traditional ways of doing business and getting along. In comparison, female directors felt less constrained by these parameters and more prepared to rock the boat.”
Rick Naurt, PhD has an excellent 2-minute synopsis of the PsychCentral study.
Our findings show that having women on the board is no longer just the right thing, but also the smart thing to do.” – Chris Bart, Prof. Strategic Management at the DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University
On the American Express Open Forum, Barry Moltz uses multiple sources to provide a quick overview of why women are better in business. He cites a study by Zenger Folkman which “found that women rated higher than men on 12 out of 16 [leadership] attributes tested. After analyzing 7,280 of their clients’ performance evaluations, they found two traits where women outscored men significantly: taking initiative and driving results.” Moltz list 5 additional ways women are more effective as bosses than men:
Better communicators- Better community builders
- Stronger business ethics
- More patience
- Better at activating passion
Narcissism is associated with various interpersonal dysfunctions, including the general inability to maintain healthy long-term interpersonal relationships, low levels of commitment to romantic relationships, aggression in response to perceived threats to self-esteem and unethical and/or exploitative behaviors, such as academic dishonesty, white-collar crime and destructive workplace behavior” – Psychological Bulletin
8. Women are less narcissistic than men: To top it off, a study from the University at Buffalo School of Management in the Psychological Bulletin shows that men are more narcissistic than women. If the above excerpt reminds you of someone…
During the 2016 election, numerous professionals in the fields of counseling and psychology broke long-standing tradition of the “Goldwater rule” and spoke out against Donald J. Trump. In violation of the rule, 33 mental health professionals signed a letter to The New York Times to warning about Trump’s mental state. In an article from Vanity Fair, clinical psychologist George Simon said, “He’s so classic [a narcissist] that I’m archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example of those characteristics.”
If you’re an employer, do you really want to risk your company by hiring someone who is inappropriately aggressive, unethical, exploitative, destructive and prone to white-collar crime? Whatever good they might do, it’s not worth risking World War III at your company.
So, Google, if you need some help filling the void Damore left, I’m certain I’m not the only woman available to answer the call.
Women are well known to be able to respond more robustly to infections, and to recover more quickly than men.” – Dr. Leslie Knapp, University of Cambridge
9. Women have a better immune system than men: It turns out that the same estrogen mentioned in point 4 that protects women from the effects of stress also has “a beneficial effect on innate immunity.” A study by the Research Institute by McGill University conducted by Dr. Maya Saleh showed that women have a stronger inflammatory response than men, which helps them fight off disease.
Well, guys, at least it gives you an excuse for being wimpy during cold season.
If there are any men left who still believe that women are the weaker sex, it is long past time for them to think again. With respect to that most essential proof of robustness—the power to stay alive—women are tougher than men from birth through to extreme old age.” – Thomas Kirkwood, Director Institute for Aging and Health, Newcastle University
10. Women live longer than men: That’s right ladies. In addition, studies show that men need us to live longer, healthier lives but women fair better as single ladies. What do you think? Maybe it’s time to give the leeches the boot.
Okay, I’m just being sassy. We all love a good man but it is interesting that with all controversy over paying for women’s healthcare it turns out we happen to be a better investment than men. As our workforce ages, it seems that the healthy bet for companies is to invest more heavily in women.
In his Scientific American article, Thomas Kirkwood suggests there might be a solution that would allow men to live an average of 14 years longer – castration. But Kirkwood confesses, “I doubt that many men—myself included—would choose such a drastic remedy to buy a few extra years.” That’s okay, guys, we love ya and, although we will miss you when you die, we don’t want you knuckleheads to cut off any parts that make you happy.
Listen men. We concede there are definitely biological differences between the sexes. As women, we appreciate your upper body strength (Thank you for taking out the trash.) and that you’re often taller than us (Would you get that off the top shelf for me, please?) but we’re tired of mansplanations and malescuses.
Lumping anyone into a group is pretty naïve. We need to understand that the differences between genders, cultures, socio-economic statuses, life experiences, etc., etc. which makes us all alike and unalike become truly powerful when we blend them all together to make something new and beautiful.
While there’s no time in this post to be exhaustive and respond to all the accusations that Google’s ex-employee James Damore fired out, including his belief that women are less creative than men (Seriously, what planet are you living on?!), certainly we can acknowledge that it is the collision of disparate ideas that spark innovation. If we were all homogeneous, there would be a true crisis of imagination in the human race.
Therefore, we want to remind Damore he should value the input from those of different genders, ethnicities, etc. and that, if he were a truly creative individual, he would be actively pursuing and surrounding himself with diverse human beings rather than justifying antiquated beliefs.
In conclusion, we should all feel for Damore. We don’t know what his relationships are like with the women in his life, but they’re probably less than ideal. Perhaps he can learn from examples of strong men raised by single mothers who recognize the incredible fortitude in women. One excellent example is Kevin Durant honoring his single mother during his MVP speech.
You never know, maybe something is rotten in the Damore house and he is projecting those experiences onto the rest of the world. So let’s approach this situation with a little compassion. Perhaps this experience will help James Damore rethink his views and take another look at the state of his relationship.
Unfortunately, right now, he’s doubling down and spouting uninformed diatribes to whoever will listen. However, if he talked to Durant, he might realize women are less likely to be neurotic and more likely to be pillars of strength and support for the men in their lives.
Dear Mr. Damore,
I think most of us understand you might be in the midst of an identity crisis as you figure out your place as a man in modern society. Hey, women are still figuring out our place as well, so we are sympathetic. However, that doesn’t excuse boorish ignorance at your age. We’re all rooting for you. We’d like to recommend that, instead of burying your head in the sand, you let this experience broaden your perspective.
Much love,
Women
A Bias Opinion 