Group Work

I’ve been pondering those striking figures posted the day before yesterday, suggesting that kids segregated by sex learn faster. Another thought slowly but inexorably emerges: is it possible the same might be true for adults?

Might men working together, and women working together, do better than mixed groups?

It is at least possible. I doubt any studies been done; who would dare do a study so politically incorrect? Where would they ever get funding? Anecdotally, though, there is one committee here at my workplace that is famous for its spectacular accomplishments last year. By chance, it was all men; an extreme rarity in this institution. Was this purely coincidental?

Just as .little boys spontaneously play with other boys and little girls with other girls, the same spontaneous sexual segregation seems to continue at the adult level in most cultures—all but our own, and that in the last forty years. The women gather to do the laundry at the stream; the men to harvest or to put up a barn. They rarely mix in groups.

Speaking personally, I must admit, I find it frustrating to be on a committee with women; it seems more comfortable when it is all men. Women seem to have different priorities. We seem often to be working at cross-purposes. It feels sometimes like a three-legged race. Men generally want the talking over as soon as possible, and the work done most quickly and efficiently. Women seem to be happy talking forever, and must agree on every detail.

What happens? The men tend to tune out. They just shift into idle. Worktime is lost.

Indeed, they almost must. As soon as a woman is present, I, as a gentleman, feel I must defer to her. It is very different with other men. If another man’s ideas seem full of crap, I can just say so. With a woman, I dare not.

Is it the same for women? I asked my wife. Being Filipina, I expect she gave me a straight, honest answer. She is not too influenced by feminist ideology. She may be aware, but does not much care, what the politically correct answer is.

She said she would much rather work with other women. Why? Because men are interested in completely different things. They are a little crazy, she explains, not unsympathetically.

The implications are obvious and ominous. The feminists have been arguing for many years that, however we might feel about it, we cannot as an economy afford to leave half of our potential workforce idle. We cannot afford not to use all those good female minds.

This has never made sense. Those female minds were formerly employed fully and vitally in nurturing and educating the next generation of workers, surely vital to the long term health of any economy. Ask Japan; or, soon, Europe. At best, we have been simply mortgaging the future.

But it may be worse than that. Based on the figures from the schools, we may actually have been cutting even current efficiency in half; a fact that may have been masked by improvements in technology along the way.

This, if so, would certainly vindicate the ancient wisdom of sexual segregation; which all societies seem to have believed in, up to but excluding our own.

It is entirely possible, after all, that our ancestors were not total idiots. It is even possible they learned something over the millennia.