Gender Studies in College

[Rick Denney]

Weeellllllll. Hmmmm. I can only give personal observations, and some will not be popular. Some not popular with you, Rick, I'm sure.

What you said about aggressiveness doesn't contradict my observations much, if any, about women. I would suggest one difference: You assume that men don't mind when other men are aggressively competitive. That may be true with some men (just as it is true with some women), but most men I know reserve the A-word for men who behave the same way as women of whom they use the B-word.

I think it's an even call.

When I played sports as a boy, there were those who were very aggressive and felt that the rules of the game were a burden to be overcome (or set aside if possible), while others enjoyed the game and saw the rules as the boundaries that shaped the game. Nobody in the latter group particularly liked playing with those in the former group. Sports provide fertile ground for bullies of either sex, and bullies were thought to be bullies by all others, including other bullies.

It's interesting to watch driver behavior as a test of general behavior at times when people think they are not accountable. I have not seen any trend that women are less aggressive--even dangerously aggressive--as drivers than men. In fact, I see the typical parent attitude ("you WILL NOT be allowed to move in front of me!") more commonly among women than men, while men are more often merely competitive ("you won't get in front of me because I'll get there first!").

In my work in the development of communications standards, reaching consensus is a critically important enterprise. We have both men and women involved in standards development, and I have not noticed that women are any more interested in consensus than men. They are no more or less able to transcend their own point of view. I wholly agree with Ray's assessment that good leadership sometimes requires consensus and sometimes requires the responsible person to just make a decision and move on. And I think that the decision works best when there is a clear winner who will take ownership of it and make it work. Too often, concensus means that nobody likes the result and therefore nobody will be committed to it. There is a balance there, and good leaders find it. Keeping score is usually harmful, but in my experience women keep score as much as men, though they may score by a different measure.

Rick "who has rarely been interested in keeping score" Denney

[iiipopes]

In my work in the development of communications standards...

Hell, no wonder I have misunderstood your posts in the past!

[MaryAnn]

On the driving behavior: when I moved to Tucson in 1988, the roads were still reasonably courteous. About five years later, a significant portion of Los Angeles had moved to Tucson and they had brought their driving habits with them. The roads here have been pretty rude ever since then. My trip last December to Virginia involved driving from the Baltimore airport south and around DC, where I ended up unfortunately at rush hour going west on whatever highway that was. I was astonished at the courtesy of the drivers in letting me into the far right lane to get on the off ramp, from the far left lane, in very heavy slow traffic. No such thing would occur here....when driving here you have to find a hole and put yourself in it, because no way is anyone going to move to let you in.

I have been honked at the very worst by women driving expensive cars, when I was silly enough to pull out into traffic in such a way (near my home) that they had to take their foot off the gas. Some women OWN the road much worse than any men I have encountered; but....the drivers who frighten me, in terms of being afraid to cross them because instead of honking at me they will blow my head off....have all been men.

It's interesting to me the different "levels of violence" that men and women will go to. Women seem to be the more obnoxious and men the more dangerous. Women will tongue-lash you until you wish you were dead, and men will make you dead. Not all of them, but a trend can be observed.

On the consensus/decree thing: I agree we need both. Some of what I do is write computer programs for the use of the rest of my department in doing transmission planning studies. For those, I will do what it takes to get consensus so we can all use the same basic program and not all have our own little idiosyncratic undocumented alien programs. The other part of my job is emergency support of the control center when things go haywire with the transmission system due to "unplanned" outages. When that happens....I get a bunch of control room operators asking me what to do NOW to alleviate the situation, and in that case I issue immediate decrees of do THIS. They don't want consensus, they want direction.

MA, who has been criticized at times other than emergencies for a lack of communication standards, by, always, women. Whoops...nope, a few months ago, it was Rick who didn't like my communication standards. I might have been decreeing, and I might have been tonguelashing. We female engineer-tuba players do both.