Men are From Google, Women are from Yahoo!
That’s the slightly odd headline to this piece. Looking at the results of a Pew Centre Survey the writer assigns the different behaviors of men and women on the net to Google or Yahoo. We can see what he means: Google is indeed a place for information searching, while Yahoo has many more opportunities for exchanges of views. As it appears, from first glance at the figures, that men use the web to hunt for information, and women to extend and nurture relationships, this appears fair.
However, I do think that, while it’s a fun piece of pop culture, as a serious piece of analysis is leaves something to be desired. There’s two things, one of them to do with our EQSQ personality tests.
The first is that the reported differences between men and women are very small. In fact, in a study of this size, they’re almost certainly smaller than the margins of error. Thus our numbers don’t really mean very much.
The second is, and this is where our personality tests come in, we know that there is no sharp dividing line between male and female behavior. There’s a spectrum and all we can really say is that women are more likely, with a very high spread in the distribution, to be at one end rather than the other. Thus, dividing this sort of behavior into male and female isn’t really all that interesting. It would be more interesting, and almost certainly more factual, to say that systemizers are from Google and empathizers are from Yahoo.
August 18th, 2007 at 1:50 am
Like you, Tim, I prefer the “systemizer/empathizer†division over “male/female.†Yet there has been a strong desire throughout humanity to divide behaviors according to sex. This once was linked to the needs of survival. [In the B.C. world, physical strength was highly necessary in survival, and we know, biologically, men are overall stronger than women. And thus, the strong male was revered, as is clearly seen in the ancient epic tale - Odysseus, both strong AND cunning!]
But in our modern world, in most places physical strength comes at a smaller premium; and while it may be necessary in warehouses and football lineups, it’s hardly a prerequisite for modern-day survival. And though it was once believed the female mind stood not a chance in the morass of high mathematics and science, and that the male brain couldn’t be wasted on such idle activities as child-rearing and vacuuming, wouldn’t most of us now, at the least, politely disagree?
So why the continued obsession with ‘maleness’ vs. ‘femaleness’? Perhaps some find safety in this – in the beer-guzzling, sports-watching, belching male and the gossiping, soap-watching, shopaholic female – in the same way they find safety in suburban developments with firey Homeowners’ Association meetings over homeowners who dared to install a mismatching mailbox or put their trash out a day early.
August 23rd, 2007 at 7:47 pm
Well, allow my masculine intelligence (or, if you prefer, lack of it) to come out here. I don’t think that “anyone’s” brain should be wasted on such idle activities as vacuuming. Dust doesn’t do you any harm: it’s only dead skin after all:-)
As to the strength issue this is something that I do wish more people would apply their intelligence to as well. Certainly, physical strength is largely unimportant in the modern world: but all too few remember how recent this change is. It’s pretty much something post WWII so I actually think we’ve done pretty well in closing (as far as we have) the gender pay gap in only what, two generations, after some ten millennia of its existence? There’s lots of research to show that the difference in physical strength, even in the times of our great grandparents, led to 40-50% differences in productivity: no surprise that wages varied by that much too.