My wife asked me about the retweet in bed some time later, specifically whether I believed that it was true, and I said yes.
Her "hmnh" was non-committal at best, and I have found myself thinking a bit more on the subject.
Anecdotal evidence from my childhood and parenthood would seem to support the contention. Whether it's biology or environment I cannot be sure, but I have seen this behaviour in action in a worklife spanning 40 years, in the classroom, the shop floor, the boardroom, and at family gatherings.
Full disclosure: I am not a woman, and when I offer opinions on what it is like to be one, my wife and daughters are quick to call bullshit on me. But I am a man and I have some observations to make on how they operate. Whether my comments about men apply equally to women, I will have to let women decide.
When men work together to solve a problem, a number of things come into play.
First thing is pecking order. We know very quickly who to defer to, who to ignore, who the competition is. We may have already have alliances with other men, through blood or previous engagements, and we may already have been in combat against some of the men before. Sports and military metaphors figure highly in our conversations, and in our conversations about our conversations.
Rivalry, good-natured or not, informs many of our conversations, both personal and professional. One-upmanship can allow us to put down an idea for no other reason than that it wasn't ours.
Certainty and boldness and impatience (which may all be part of the same trait) also affect how we interact in teamwork and problem-solving. We like to win, we like to win first, and we like to win often. And we tend to see life as zero-sum most of the time.
So we tend not to collaborate if there is a way to succeed without it, and each side tends to describe the results of a collaboration in terms of how they came out ahead. Witness how union and contract negotiations get reported to the media -- both sides clearly won, no matter what the outcome.
It's not that we don't want an intelligent decision to come out of the group; it's just that we typically want to be recognised as the individual who deserves credit for the intelligent decision.
All of this is has to be seen in the context of growing up in North America, in a dominantly Protestant society, in the latter half of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st. I can't speak for other groups, other places, other times. I do see less harmful competition in younger colleagues.
I see more tolerance, generally, in my sons than I saw in my father and uncles. I see more open-mindedness and creativity at play. So maybe this difference will diminish over time. It would be nice if it did.
