Balance of power
Two Darwinian anthropologists on the changing roles of men and women
Archived article from Oct 1, 1999
Helen Fisher on women's ascendancy By Sandra Lanman
Helen Fisher had just presented a lecture on her new book, "The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World," when a businessman in the audience approached her.
"I finally understand why all of my plant managers are women," he told Fisher gratefully.
Such epiphanies amaze and delight Fisher, research associate in anthropology on the New Brunswick campus and member of Rutgers' Center for Human Evolutionary Studies. She knew she had touched a nerve with her previous books exploring the biological basis of human emotion -- "Anatomy of Love" and "The Sex Contract" -- but it was a private nerve. With "The First Sex," it's been different.
"I feel as though I've tapped into the Hudson River with this book," she says. "Everybody has an opinion; everybody says where they're coming from. It's part of the public dialogue. They're connected on the public level instead of the private level."
Published in May by Random House, "The First Sex" builds on Fisher's work on sex, romance and family life. But she also boldly launches a new discussion by offering an anthropological perspective on women's destiny in the job market. Fisher essentially posits that evolution has been kind to women, endowing them with certain traits and capabilities that make them ideally suited for success in fields like communications, medicine and corporate management in today's computerized, service-oriented economy.
"What I ended up discovering is that the job market is changing in many ways that need the female mind," she asserts. "Women have communication skills, and here we are in the information age. We're seeing an explosion in legal mediation and arbitration, and women are really skilled negotiators. We're moving into holistic medicine, which views the patient in this very broad perspective, just what women are so good at. And we've got this huge worldwide aging population, and women are natural nurturers."
The natural talents of men, on the other hand, made them ideal for farming and working in smokestack industries, both of which are fast disappearing. Men are also good at focusing on a particular problem and weeding out the superfluous, says Fisher. These are good qualities to have, but business is moving toward "systems thinking" that requires a more contextual, holistic approach -- and, on average, women do this better, she argues.
To help explain these sex differences, Fisher coined a new lexicon: "Web thinking" defines how women tend to see the big picture, or think contextually. "Step thinking" describes how males are apt to focus on one task at a time.
One of the hardest things for Fisher's audiences -- and the media -- to believe is that she did not start out with an agenda. A passionate Darwinist whose New York apartment has a wall of books by evolution's patriarch and his apostles, including Margaret Mead and Edward O. Wilson, Fisher says she began her research with just two notions.
"I knew that men and women were different, and I knew that women were pouring into the job market, not only in America but around the world," she says.
Fisher says she is not breaking new ground when she points out innate differences between the sexes. Darwin and many others did that. But she believes she's in new territory when she looks at contemporary research about women and sees the connection with evolution. "That's actually using Darwin," she says.
To examine that connection, Fisher turned to the New York think tank of which she is a member --Weiner, Edrich, Brown (WEB) --which tracks trends by analyzing 60 different mainstream and scholarly journals. She analyzed four years' worth of WEB's abstracts and identified trends that related to women, families and work. Then she compared her findings with what she knew about Darwinism and came to an astonishing conclusion: The very traits that distinguished women from men were also the qualities needed in today's world.
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