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Boys and Girls Play Differently

There is a brief window in childhood when girls and boys play similarly—up to about age 4, actually. Before then, their play is virtually indistinguishable. Granted, it’s not very elaborate: stacking, sorting, grabbing, pulling. Even classic toys like Fisher-Price’s Little People started out as generic pegs with faces. (Before adults got their thinking on them, but that’s another story.)

Then at age 4, children begin to gender differentiate, which is a fancy way of saying that they begin to understand that they are boys and girls, and the two are not alike. This is the age at which they start to play “doctor” and are able to understand what’s different about their bodies.

Though that’s a gross simplification, from that point on, behaviors, interactions, and approaches to the world are dictated in large part by these gender differences. This often comes as a shock to parents who have gotten used to a little girl and then get a little boy, but the difference is wired into us from the get-go, and there’s not much we can do about it.

Nor do we grow out of it. In her economical and insightful book, Sex, Lies & Creativity, author and life coach Julia Roberts describes the physical and chemical changes that influence behavior for kids and throughout life. She demonstrates how human behavior, perception, and interaction are driven by hormones as much as by sociological influences. Indeed, she demonstrates how the changing chemical makeups of our bodies at different times in our lives are likely to drive behaviors. Understanding this is helpful to the point that it explains how genders differ naturally—thanks to our friends estrogen and testosterone—and that there’s not much we can do about it. These gender differences were essential when humans filled more traditionally mammalian roles. In other words, the men went out and hunted, and the women took care of the cave and the kids. In our more enlightened age—with civilization, indoor plumbing, and the threat of being eaten reduced exponentially—it’s possible for people to take on roles or functions that might have traditionally been defined by gender. Social evolution is much faster than physical evolution, and no matter how intellectually enlightened we are, we still have that makeup more suited to the prehistoric hunter-gatherer than the contemporary office worker. In other words, modern social structures put some demands on both men and women that don’t come naturally to us as mammals. So, we have to work on it.

But bringing it back to play for a moment, when all the biology is taken away, boys and girls really fall into two distinct camps: Boys like power and conflict. Girls like nurturing and cooperation. In the late 1990s, we created a test where we put boys with traditional girls’ toys and girls with traditional boys’ toys. The kids were all of kindergarten age—5 or 6. We left them alone to see what they would do. Within a relatively short time, after the kids went through the stage of becoming comfortable with the other children in the room, we had boys whacking each other with dolls and using them as weapons and girls creating a family of vehicles that they had given characters and a social hierarchy to. This is how they interacted without adult supervision or guidance. Although we believe that this gender difference is the product of physical and biological patterning rather than social patterning (nature rather than nurture, in other words), it really doesn’t matter. The boys and girls played differently. When at the end of the play session, the boys and girls were brought together. Each group gravitated to the toys that were more consistent with their traditional gender roles and continued playing in the same way among their own gender. (At this age, co-play is shared space rather than interaction.)

You probably don’t need reams of research to convince you that boys and girls remain just as different as they get older. Boys love gross-out humor. Girls love pretty collectibles. Boys like The Three Stooges. Girls don’t. Men, as they move into their professional years, tend to be aggressive, looking for individual achievement and recognition. Women tend to like to create strong teams. Men are more likely to be dictatorial in their decision-making and management style, whereas women tend to want to build consensus. Before you get mad at me, remember we’re talking in general terms, and we’re not trying to call out any individuals. But think about times when you were in conflict with a member of the opposite sex, and ask yourself if gender chemistry had anything to do with it. It’s a worthwhile exercise because it opens you open to being more tolerant and understanding, and that’s a critical area for forming the interpersonal relationships that are critical to a successful working environment. If you can’t think of any of the top of your head, turn on the TV. From Dr. Phil to sitcoms to cartoons, differences in behavior or thinking that can be traced to gender are everywhere.

Real people exist along a spectrum of these gender differences. Age, socialization, education level, personality, and experience can all affect how the biological imperatives of gender are expressed in individuals, but they are always going to be there. Roberts shows how gay men and lesbians, for example, may share more of the brain chemistry of the opposite gender. She adds that as men age and their testosterone levels decrease, they are less likely to be aggressive and competitive, particularly in their 50s, what Roberts calls a “harvest mind.” At the same time, women at that age who are past childbearing are looking for new challenges and new ways to be relevant, what she calls “beginners’ mind.” The point Roberts is making is that these differences are part of who we are and we have to learn to live with them. That’s certainly part of relationships, but it’s also true in business.

Sadly, acknowledging these differences often becomes forbidden and helps drive conflict, whereas acceptance might facilitate understanding. Can you imagine in a contemporary office suggesting “She approached the problem that way because she’s a woman”? A man who said that would instantly be branded a sexist and vilified. But the fact of the matter is, given the situation, she might have approached a problem in a certain way because that’s how her brain is wired.

So, if you’re a man and you think that, you probably don’t want to say that out loud because you’re bound to be misunderstood. But as a manager or a co-worker, understanding how the people you work with are going to approach any given problem based on gender can be a real advantage.

Again, we’re going to generalize, but men tend to want to take action and move things along, and everyone else can follow or get out of the way. They also believe that they can wing it or power through a situation. We see this constantly when men and women have to work together on a proposal, for example. The women on the team want to rehearse and plan every aspect of it, whereas the men are content with a more general knowledge of where it’s going.

Women, on the other hand, are more likely to seek consensus of all involved and gather as much information as possible before making a decision. We’ve seen it too many times to doubt that this dynamic is very often at play in work situations. And you probably have as well, but you may not have thought about it as naturally occurring because of gender and biology. More likely, whichever side of the issue you were on, you were probably annoyed with the other person and didn’t understand why they wanted to do something in a way that surely wasn’t going to work. What this sometimes leads to are pitched battles, non-productive conflict, and politics.

A side note on politics: Men and women play that game differently as well. We’re going to go back to our prehistoric roots again. Men are likely to be aggressive and dominant, using power to get what they want. Women, on the other hand, are more likely to be quietly manipulative and work behind the scenes to get what they want. What always boggles my mind is that no one wants to talk about it, even when it happens right in front of them, and they refuse to acknowledge that gender differences might have anything to do with it. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, idiotic. In stressful situations, people are always going to revert to their inherent natures. Our current cultural environment, however, says we’re not supposed to talk about it in that way. We’ll get to why in a moment, but I often want to say to people, “You see those nature shows on TV? We’re exactly like that.” The challenge, of course, is that our natural instincts and inclinations developed when physical survival was a daily question, and those are still in us. Don’t kid yourself.

Recently, the marketing department of a major company we consulted to had a terrific shakeup, and the futures of all but a few of the employees and senior managers were in question. You might as well have said, “Let the games begin!” because that’s what happened. And it fell out along gender lines as well. The men were largely aggressive in promoting themselves and their achievements as being superior to the others in the department. The women, on the other hand, played a different game, trying to insinuate themselves with the senior managers—male or female—based on building or reinforcing relationships. When the axes finally fell, it was impossible to tell what the real reasons were for the firings, because all the announcements were made in completely neutral terms, as befits a publicly traded company that wants to avoid employment suits at all costs. That is, obviously, the only way to go with something like that. Still, human dynamics are always at play. By the way, more women were left than men.

Before we go on, I do want to throw in a brief aside about sexism. Sexism exists, and we’ve seen it hurt companies, departments, and individuals. It’s a terrible mind-set that can create a horrible and hostile working environment for all involved, and it’s something that needs to be addressed at the highest levels of a company. That extends to jokes, comments, and generally disrespectful comments or attitudes. These have no place in a work environment. But sexism is not the subject here. Rather, what we’re talking about is pretty much the opposite of sexism; it is an appreciation of the inevitable differences between the genders and an invitation to admit that these differences exist, embrace them, and see how they can be leveraged to make a better working environment and greater success for all involved.

The problem is that the topic of gender has become so loaded in today’s workplace, however, that any mention of it is presumed to be negative. I’ve had senior executives at publicly traded companies flat out refuse to discuss this with me as it relates to play and business, even privately. I get it, and I sympathize, but at the same time, we avoid these issues at our peril. So, perhaps we can all think about it quietly. I’m only half kidding.

But what can you do? Well, again we can take the hint from children. Kids don’t behave well to adult standards naturally. They have to be socialized. One of the things they have to be socialized into is respect. It has to be taught and modeled so they can practice it and make it part of their behavior in the world. Most parents try to teach children to appreciate differences in one another and accept those. The same goes for adults.

Michele Litzky, who for the past 20 years or so has run Litzky Public Relations (LPR), says that respect is the most important element of creating a positive working environment. The majority of the LPR employees are women, and when I raised the issue of gender with her, she said that it didn’t figure in her hiring decisions. Instead, she said, “We’re in a business that seems to naturally attract more women, but what we’re looking for are people who want to grow, learn, and succeed.” However, gender does figure in her understanding of the dynamics with clients.

She says, “We had one client who always liked to kiss all the women, and that made them somewhat uncomfortable. But then we realized, he’s an older guy, and this is the way he does something. You can’t really call it sexual harassment, though I suppose someone could. But you also can’t be running to a lawyer every five minutes, either, when you’ve got a business to run.” Still, Litzky had to set boundaries as gently as she could and ultimately resigned the client.

Litzky acknowledges that gender may determine how some of the people she works with act, or how they approach life and work, and she stresses that that is only one element of a working relationship. She says that she tries to understand, respect, and appreciate people as individuals and accept them as they are, but she is also neither a pushover or afraid of confrontation. Interestingly enough, however, she only confronts when pushed to it, and then almost exclusively to protect her business or her employees, which would often be considered a more female trait. She also has had the advantage of running her own show for more than two decades. Yet her emphasis on respect above all is clearly one contributor to her success. Most of her employees have been with her for the long term, as have her clients.

One of the reasons that public relations tends to attract more women is that very often the nature of the work is about teamwork, process, and getting consensus. In the case of crisis PR, it’s also about defusing aggression. If these are more female traits, so be it. There’s nothing sexist about appreciating people’s native or inherent skills and using them to advantage. That’s a kind of professional Darwinism. There are many men who are experts in PR as well, and the field was largely established in the early 1900s by Edward Louis Bernays and others, but still various estimates places the percentage of women to men in the field at anywhere from 63 to 85 percent.

In today’s world, the single-gender work environment is virtually non-existent. There are always exceptions, like the office portrayed in the movie The Wolf of Wall Street, which was more mythic than mainstream and pandered to a romantic (largely male) fantasy of the never-ending frat party with lots and lots of money. (They seldom make movies about your average publishing company, say.) So the genders inevitably have to mix, and that’s a good thing, as the assets of both can be leveraged more effectively. Mars and Venus, to use the nearly exhausted pop psychology phrase, can’t merely move in the same orbit; they need to align.

And that’s really where the opportunity lies. The complementary nature of these inherent gender differences is a remarkable asset, and one that’s relatively new in the history of work. For the savvy worker or manager, knowing how to use and balance these dynamics without bias is an essential skill.

We like to remind people of what it was like when they played “doctor” as kids—and we’ve yet to find a kid who didn’t. It was curiosity and exploration without judgment, discovering, appreciating, and being amazed by the similarities and the obvious differences and an introduction into the nature of being human.