Dogs from Mars, Cats from Venus

My working hypothesis is this:

Men work to access their feelings. Women access their feelings in order to work.

I reached this conclusion after watching fellow workers for 20 years in a major university. In my experience, when a group of women met, they spent a lot of time at the beginning learning about each other, if they were not already familiar or friendly, or renewed their habits of personal inquiry with established friends. Then they got down to work. They sorted out their feelings in order to do good work.

On the other hand (in my experience) when men got together to do some task—or even just to play a team sport—they got down to work first and took the measure of each other, seeing how competent and reliable each person was. After the game or when the project was completed, the men had developed a gut sense of the others, had begun to lay the foundations of friendships. Men worked first in order to establish their feelings for each other.

In the end, both approaches (a) get the work done and (b) promote personal relationships. But they start on different feet, some with the left foot first, some with the right.