“It is time that we all see gender as a spectrum instead of two sets of opposing ideals,” said actress Emma Watson in her now famous #HeForShe address to the United Nations. But all too often, perceptions of how men and women behave and succeed in the workplace are driven by out-dated gender stereotypes.
Time and time again, research shows that gender-diverse boards and businesses are the most profitable. But why is that the case? Could the success of men and women working together lie simply in the pooling of broader ideas? With researchers having discovered around 100 gender differences in the brain[i], we take a look at the neuroscience behind some of the ways in which gender difference, and gender collaboration, plays out in your workplace.
Endless data show that diverse teams make better decisions.
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO
Remember that the following are general behaviours based on scientists’ understandings of the differences in male/female brains. Neither way is right or wrong, and there are exceptions to every rule.
Focused taskmasters and masterful jugglers
Teamwork often calls for a combination of intense focus and a masterful juggling act of multiple tasks. And such a scenario can be massively aided by a gender-diverse team.
Lending some truth to the theory that men devote themselves to one thing at a time while women multitask in the extreme, scientists have found differences in the male/female biology which suggest that men and women are indeed programmed to veer towards these preferences.
There are two types of tissue in the brain: gray matter (information and action-processing centres found in specific locations of the brain) and the lesser-known white matter (the connective tissue which acts as a networking grid between gray matter and other areas of the brain). Men have 6.5 times as much gray matter as women; women have 10 times as much white matter as men.[ii]
Remembering that neither are indicative of lesser or greater intelligence, female readers might identify more with the tendency to quickly transition from one of many tasks to another, observing among their male peers a preference for giving their undivided attention to a single task to the exclusion of all else. Notice how the white/gray matter theory might be playing out within your network. Are your female bosses artfully keeping countless balls in the air while male leaders are setting clear one-at-a-time priorities?
Teamwork and competitive spirit
Testosterone, produced up to twenty times as much a day by men, can rise before a confrontation and governs our ability to co-operate: too much and you’re inclined to dominate discussion and become self-orientated; too little and you’re likely to co-operate to the point where you never get your own way. Male testosterone levels peak in the morning, meaning that a difficult negotiation requiring the cool heads of male participants is best postponed until later in the day.
Oxytocin, the hormone most closely associated with falling in love, is what encourages us to form workplace bonds. Too little is unlikely to foster a team mentality and too much can result in groupthink and skewed decision making. There’s also evidence to suggest that oxytocin in females leads women to form friendly relationships, while the same hormone in men allows them to better identify competitors and forge strategic partnerships.
The way our brains process the potent cocktail of testosterone and oxytocin comes into play during group work, and not just in difficult group sessions where tempers can flare; testosterone levels can also govern a meeting participant’s ability to simply sit still. While women’s testosterone/oxytocin combination makes them more likely to find a way through a long, arduous session, men’s chemical factory makes them more at ease in short, punchy sessions and likely to need a walk-around-the-black cool-off period if discussions get heated.[iii]
Seeing versus feeling the bigger picture
Ask a roomful of people to recall their memories of a shared event and you’re likely to get a range of responses, some evoking concise facts, others a general feeling, others still colourful details evoking every sense. Where we sit on the scale depends on the hippocampus, the seahorse-shaped memory centre in the brain and its surrounding pathways. Relative to brain size, females have a larger hippocampus than their male counterparts, and as a result are likely able to absorb more sensorial and emotive information. A man may recall the general sense of feeling connected to an event, while a woman may be able to remember in more vivid detail the sights, sounds, tastes, smells and feelings that went hand in hand with it. This might be behind the fact that women have better memories for recalling things like dates, while men are more matter of fact in their recall of emotive events.[iv]
Vivid language versus short, sharp and to the point messages are not just the calling cards of male/female memories. In organisations where teams must engage with one another and diverse clients and customer groups, it’s easy to see why drawing on a full range of recall styles is all the better for communication purposes.
A word of caution
Information like the above, recounted in numerous studies and replicated throughout the mainstream press, may have the result, according to one neuroscientist, that we look for evidence of typical male/female behaviour to reaffirm all those gender stereotypes that surround us from an early age.
“You can’t pick up a brain and say ‘that’s a girl’s brain, or that’s a boy’s brain’ in the same way you can with the skeleton. They look the same,” says Professor Gina Rippon of Aston University, Birmingham UK, who believes that the tiny differences apparent in our brains are the result of environmental factors rather than biology.[v]
Just like London’s taxi drivers who’ve gained ‘The Knowledge’ (a complex understanding of the city’s street system required in order to obtain a black cab licence) demonstrate enlarged memory centres,[vi] women may become wired for multi-tasking, social interaction and conciliation because they are constantly bombarded with messages that these are female traits they must embody. Likewise, men may embody higher degrees of competitiveness or impulsive decision-making because the cliché dictates that’s how they behave in the meeting room.
Regardless of whether you were born with the potential to multitask or became that way through gender expectations, the upshot is that the male and female brains work differently and when used together produce a rich portfolio of strengths, preferences and skills. “It’s quite striking how complementary the brains of women and men really are,” said neuroscientist Dr Ruben Gur. It seems two heads really are better than one.
[i] drgregoryjantz.com
[ii] The Neuroanatomy Of General Intelligence: Sex Matters by Haier, Jung, Yeo, Head and Alkired (NeuroImage: 2004)
[iii] Why Men Hate Going to Church by David Murrow (Thomas Nelson: 2010)
[iv] Deconstructing Brain Systems Involved In Memory & Spatial Skills by
Johnson and LaFee (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: 2015).
[v] telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/10684179/Men-and-women-do-not-have-different-brains-claims-neuroscientist.html
[vi] news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/677048.stm
