The New York Times is running a fascinating series of articles comparing the performance of men and women in the post-feminist-movement age. The one I read was about women pulling far ahead of men in school. The article itself is an interesting read, but what I was most interested in was one fact the article mentioned but then didn’t really follow up on:
Even though women beat men consistently in both college grades and number of years in college, men still beat women consistently in starting salaries for their first job out of college.
It’s tempting to simply say that must have to do with discrimination. But while I’m sure discrimination could play some role, I think that can’t be the entire story. What also it points to is the (often forgotten) importance of intangible qualities and networking in a successful career.
Because women were blatantly discriminated against for so long in the workplace, to get ahead and prove they deserved equal treatment they had to concentrate on excelling at objective measures like grades, degrees, sales figures, etc. Success in objective areas tends to be irrefutable and speak for itself so over time men had no choice but to accept women in general as equals.
The article went on at great length about how college men spend 4 hours a day playing video games or drinking beer while their female classmates are burning the midnight oil at the library studying for exams. The women in the article marvelled at how lazy the college men seemed to be.
And yet, male graduates start at higher salaries than female. What if those men weren’t just playing video games? What if without realizing it they’re also building business contacts, kicking around new ideas, or feeding on each other’s imaginations? What if they’re polishing negotiating skills? Or feeding their competitive spirit? They probably don’t even realize it themselves, but maybe all that hanging out is setting them up for better careers.
How much better off would anyone (man or woman) be if they could figure out what exactly about hanging out is useful and extract it, minus the Natural Lite and Grand Theft Auto?