"Women are more interested in getting the facts."

While men spend every day consulting the horoscope, women are concerning themselves with facts. Who ever heard of a woman reading the horoscope? We know how frivilous these men are - just look at the Mens' magazine industry: Mens' Weekly, Mens' Day, Cosmo Men... The list goes on. Instead of reading about facts these men can't get enough gossip. Let's not start on fashion or beauty. Men are just so frivilous. Thank God we have women always searching out 'facts' for us - I suspect this is why just about every major scientific discovery in the history of humanity was discovered by women.

"Much more prepared; ask many more questions. Men tend to shoot from the hip."

Right again. You know just last week I told my husband he had put on weight. You should have seen him. Not Happy Jan. Let's just say I'll be sleeping alone for some time.

"Women on boards are also more interested in how the organization will actually work."

Men on the other hand just read those mens' magazines and talk on the phone. It's so hard to get them to focus...

"Think of an acquisition or a re-org to take a company more global. When women are in the discussion, they ask questions like: 'don't just show me the Powerpoint. Who are these people? What are their responsibilities? Matrix type questions. Women tend to see the organization as more of a living thing."

After all, it was women who invented the modern organisation. Did you know the world's oldest continuing institution was founded by women - the Catholic church! The world's first incorporated company and the first multinational was founded by a woman! In fact, it was women who invented democracy, the modern nation state AND parliamentary democracy. Thank God for women. [Aside: what were MEN doing all these years?]

"If I had to generalize about the differences between men and women on boards?

I'd probably say it all comes down to FACTS. Women, like our distinguished contributor, are simple more concerned with FACTS.

Whether board members government ministers or teachers, such positions which have the most influence on shaping our society and economy should always be decided on merit not gender. When i was going for custody of my daughter the [MALE] princiapl at the school gave me no support even though she was missing weeks of school every term and getting no help at home.Small wonder she was put in a class for slow children. Yet after i got custody there was a female principal there and she bent over backwards to help me improve my daughters education.
It's funny though while i see large numbers of women demanding a greater female presence on company boards, government positions etc, i never see them demanding that more women be employed shovelling dross down the local smelter, or digging trenches or cleaning out septic tanks etc or any of the myriad of dirty and dangerous jobs that many men have to do to support their families. Anybody know the statistics on the ratio of male/female workers killed in industrial accidents. I would agree with balancing the genders but not when a certain gender picks and chooses which jobs it wants and is not interested in the dirty dangerous ones.

eyeinthesky

‘I would agree with balancing the genders but not when a certain gender picks and chooses which jobs it wants and is not interested in the dirty dangerous ones.’

Dirty and dangerous? … Like prostitution. Like shiftwork. Like changing bedpans. Like lifting, bathing and dressing adult patients. Like cleaning up vomit from floors and blood from operating theatres. Like caring for frail, disabled and terminally ill relatives. Like looking after sick children. Like changing 50 nappies a week. Like cleaning people’s homes and toilets. Like working in women's refuges and women's prisons. Like industrial garment making and laundering. Like women's factory work. Like giving birth.

And if women have it so clean and safe, why aren’t men moving into female dominated jobs in droves? Why don’t more men want to be clean, safe secretaries, librarians, kindergarten teachers, housewives, primary teachers, nurses, cleaners, strippers, babysitters, hairdressers? Chances are that, even if men wanted these jobs (given that many are so low on the social scale), most are so lowly paid that you couldn’t support a family on them.

And what percentage of men actually DO all this dirty, dangerous work anyway? I don’t see men lining up to do this kind of work unless they don't qualify for anything else or unless they carry some kind of macho mystique. And I don’t see men in these dirty, dangerous jobs promoting women into their ranks. Quite the opposite. The macho mystique ones are jealously guarded as bastions of male pride. If a woman comes within coo-ee of wanting one of their dirty, dangerous jobs, chances are she’ll be harassed and bullied with the full intention of getting her to go elsewhere.

SJF. It might interest you to know that i am currently studying for my cert 3 in aged care.It might interest you to know that when i lived with my daughters mother i changed most nappies myself because her mother was too lazy to. I also did most of the feeding and toilet trained her and taught her to eat. It might interest you to know that when i got custody of her i had to teach her to wash and shower herself, and paid $20.000 to the family court for the privelige of doing so while the neglecting ex got all the legal aid. It might interest you to know that shortly after i got custody, in addition to looking after my daughter, my father fell terminally ill and i was also looking after him for a considerable time showering,shaving,dressing, cooking, taking him to the toilet etc.Don't think for a minute that men are not capable of doing these jobs. More men work shiftwork than women, more men die and have serious accidents in the workplace than women, show me any official figures to the contrary. My fiancee told me that the best nurse she worked with was a MALE nurse.When she worked in an aged care facility her fellow female workers were the worst bullies out, to their own sisters too. The few men who were taken on were soon picked on, bullied and made to leave. She now works with handicapped people and despite there being a number of qualified men in our town to do the job the ratio where she works is 11 females to 1 male and guess who does all the heaviest jobs. Look at the ratio of male/female workers in such areas as social work and relationship counselling, all nicely worked out to advantage women. Ive been told that at kings cross there are almost as many male prostitutes as female, every month there seems to be a male strip act visiting my town. Equality, bring it on, i'll be glad when the male female suicide ratio is 1/1 instead of 5/1.

eyeinthesky

Your ex-wife from hell sob story is nothing new and is equally balanced by the next person's ex-husband from hell sob story.

What you are trying to do is use YOUR version of your marital woes (without your wife being able to tell her side of the story) to score gender-wars points about men's work being dirty and dangerous while women just sit around keeping warm, clean and safe at their expense. Also, none of your pseudo-statistical litany of men's work woes did nothing to lessen the fact that women do a lot of dirty, dangerous, menial and mind-numbingly boring work.

They also suffer depresssion at almost double the rate of men and they attempt suicide at about 4 times the rate (it's just that their preferred methods are less violent).

I'm afraid I have absolutely no patience left for the continual bleating and whingeing by the Poor Menz movement advocates like yourself who love to wallow in the belief that they are enslaved by a system designed to advantage women at every turn. Tell it to someone who cares.

SJF:"They also suffer depresssion at almost double the rate of men and they attempt suicide at about 4 times the rate (it's just that their preferred methods are less violent)."

What a lot of tosh. First we get "mum's harm their kids more because those horrible Menz won't take them, besides, Menz are really horrible, did I mention it's all Menz fault", then this latest rubbish. Straight from the "How to Milk Victims" handbook, well done you.

All of the evidence is that women not only harm their kids, they often self-harm as a means of getting attention. Self-harm is also more prevalent in girls than in boys. I suspect it's because girls tend to get a lot of fuss made of them when they get hurt, where a boy is likely to be told "be a man, suck it up". It's that constant conditioning to rely on the goodwill of others instead of standing on their own that has also lead to your own egregiously self-serving version of Feminism.

Men die from suicide at 4 times the rate of women. If women are trying at 4 times the rate of men, that means that for every male that dies, 16 women are pretending to try. By all means let's address that horrendous drain on our health services. What do you suggest should be done to reduce the waste?

SJF:"wallow in the belief that they are enslaved by a system designed to advantage women at every turn."

Welcome to the machine...
"Come in here dear girl, have a cigar, you're gonna go far"
"and did we tell you the name of the game, girl?
We call it riding the gravy train"