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Men, Women, Different

Matthew Daneman, writing the the Rochester, NY Democrat and Chronicle [1]:

More than 60 years after cultural icon Rosie the Riveter symbolized women’s emergence in the workplace, the state’s corporate boardrooms and corner offices remain largely a boys-only club.

A study released this month by Cornell University’s [2] Institute for Women and Work found that women hold less than 15 percent of board directorships and executive officer positions at the 100 largest publicly traded companies based in New York.

My initial reaction to both tripe like Daneman wrote and the Cornell study on which the article was based was — so.   It not that I don’t care.  Nobody a few in the media and on some college campuses care.    Women of certain age don’t care who is sitting on the board of Kodak or Xerox.   They would rather talk about their grandchildren. 

Was finishing off breakfast when a nice couple walking in.   Told Lou not to let Grace see the article, it was on the front page.   Grace she already read it and had things to worry about.  Don’t we all?

Which brings me to Kyle Smith who has column up about Susan Parker’s new book, “called “The Sexual Paradox.”   Smith, New York Post, “Equality Means Choosing the Job You Really Want [3]:”

Pinker no longer finds anything particularly worrisome about the facts. She derides what she calls the “vanilla gender assumption” – one sternly defended by today’s angry Salon.com-brand feminist – that females should emulate male behavior until every field is 50-50 and every income disparity eliminated. What if the average female’s desire to care for others, to choose a job in which human interaction comes before income or power, to feel that there’s more to life than work, were simply seen as the unexceptionable norm? Reading Pinker’s book, you start to think that the freaks are those who work 80 hours a week in jobs they hate in order to brag that they beat the next guy – just in time to drop dead of a heart attack

Becoming the CEO of Fortune 500 company is the end result of a long series of decisions a person makes.    In my observation, executives tend to be workaholics, which I am not.   Workaholism is disease which tend to strike men for often.   On the other shoe, women get inflicted with that disease called balance.  Men are simply more likely to obtain pleasure from doing one activity to excess.

Which path would women prefer to take, the one which leads to taking about their grandchildren or the one that has them talking about the boardroom?