I recently watched All The President’s Men for the first time. During a very particular scene where the executives at the Washington Post are sitting in a conference room trying to decide what headlines to put in the next issue.
I noticed, of course, that there are no women in this scene.
This led my brain on a series of sequential thoughts, which ultimately concluded that I may have cracked the code on why women are beginning to out-perform and out-earn men on many different levels:
Ability to multi-task.
Now – before you start bitching that multi-tasking shouldn’t be a skill, people should focus on one thing at a time, blah blah blah – remember that we live in a digitally connected world where we are being bombarded with information from every direction, and it takes a special kind of brain to gather, process, sort and connect all that information. A woman’s brain. If you’re a woman, you’ll know what I’m talking about. The same brain that keeps a household running like clockwork. The same brain that has the ability to set up all the dominoes while its attention is being demanded by children, men, her job and her friends – and somehow is able to do it all and then some.
My theory is that until the rapid rise of technology just a couple of decades ago, men dominated the business world because they’re better at focusing on one thing at a time. So back in the 70’s when “doing business” consisted of typing up an article on a typewriter, or having a meeting with no distractions, or proofreading pen-to-paper, it actually makes sense that men were able to sit down, focus and accomplish those things.
I’m not saying that if women were given the chance that they’d fail – quite the contrary – I just see a correlation between the rise in technology that requires multi-tasking ability with women taking on more business leadership roles.
Thoughts?
You're not important. 