Fascinating analysis - the tension between vertical assignment and cross-functional collaboration isn’t just in the workplace, ha.
I also suspect that in some of the female-breadwinner couples in the study referenced, male partners’ lower incomes correlate with the behavioral reasons for divorce rather than are the primary cause. In other words, higher divorce rates driven not necessarily by well-paid professional wives whose salaries outstrip that of their also well-paid professional husbands, but rather -for an extreme example- by: women working a (often non-glamourous) full-time job while also responsible for housework and childcare, with an alcoholic husband frequently fired from jobs and who is checked out at home, a poor partner overall.
Would be very curious if a more detailed data breakdown of the divorce study bears this out.
This tracks pretty well with the most common complaints of men vs women. Women tend to ask "Why can't help see there's many things that need to be done" while men tend to stay "Why won't she just communicate what she needs me to do."
This theory also explains a lot male vs female student behaviour school group projects. I have found if I initiate the start of a project (eg making a group chat or asking when people are free to meetup), the men in the project will defer to me either implicitly or explicitly as the leader. They then generally won't take initiative to do almost anything until told to, whereas the women in the group will often take the next "leader" task on (eg assigning tasks). (Though I have also found men will do their work later than women will so perhaps men are just less consciousness/organized/motivated to do schoolwork)
I like this analysis a lot. Not least because of the way you ungendered the solution section. As someone who always winds up in the wrong gender category in these kinds of pieces, I appreciate you acknowledging the substantial minority of us in the counter-stereotype.
I agree with your model, both the pros and cons and the solutions. And the fact that you didn’t tie them down to specific situations. Knowing when and how much to lean into any of those three modes is a skill set in itself.
I like this, but I am also a massive sucker for explanations that show everyone has differing values / preferences without casting any group as simply lazy/entitled/rotten/.etc
Feels similar to the idea mansplaining is basically a result of women, who tend to want active questioning from a conversation partner, failing to grok that men are proactive sharers, who expect a conversation partner to proactively share things about themselves / related experiences.
Yes - I think women sometimes have an overly-expansive definition of "mansplaining." I've certainly experienced mansplaining - but it's different than the normal male conversational habit of sharing knowledge. But I think women who don't have a lot of male friends don't quite understand how guys talk amongst themselves; and perceive a lot of innocuous conversation as "he thinks I'm dumb because I'm a woman and that is why he is droning on about fuel injectors."
I've also noticed a lot of women get unnerved by the good-natured male banter that guys enjoy with their friends, because women generally don't interact like that with our friends. When a woman refers to another woman by an insulting nickname, or teases her about getting fat, it is an act of outright aggression and meanness - but guys talk like that to their buddies all the time and it's a sign of affection.
> I've certainly experienced mansplaining - but it's different than the normal male conversational habit of sharing knowledge.
To me the problem with this assertion is that it seems hard to falsify, and even you saying that it is different doesn't mean much due to the possibilities of false positives, and the fallibility of memory, and describing a social conversation online, causes issues dissecting these anecdotes. (e.g. perceptions of tone, things you may have done or said that came off a certain way without realizing it, .etc).
I've definitely seen women fail to understand banter, but I think most of the time it is a knowledge/feeling gap where they know guys do this but it feels aggressive to them to hear it.
One thing missing is that men with female breadwinners tend to cheat more so that is part of the reason they divorce too. If a man's entire identity is based on having more money or/and he was raised on "Whoever has the money makes the rules" even if the woman does nothing different, he will still feel emasculated and try to repair his ego. Is not always the woman leaving just because she makes more money men can get inside their heads and leave in their own way.
I feel like when women write about men it too often takes the formula of women being a gaseous cloud of vaguely pleasant notions and feelings, and men being some kind of extreme, even if women are trying to be unbiased. I don't know if this is intended to take men down a notch or it's just people taking the platitudes about men being extreme and women being unextreme too far and using it as a basis for further thinking. Bear in mind the most famous example of that heuristic was male versus female IQ which has since been deboonked. Also, it seems convenient that the opposite sex has to shoulder the burden of representing an "extreme" which is liable to be criticized whereas things in the middle typically aren't. We know characteristically speaking women tend to prefer this kind of passivity and avoidance, so I think this largely solipsism.
In another vein of solipsism you have women reading too much of their own sexual judgment into male relationships. There's an entire contungent of women into "yaoi" and I think that says a lot about this thing women can do where they export their sexuality onto male bodies that they are just observing. The interactions that form male groups are most remniscent of libertarianism and property. It's mostly a quick and unconcious effort amongst ourselves that determines where the various borders of ownership lie. Guys do not wantonly fuck with each other's shit, that can include physical property as well as more ephemeral things like personality traits or hobbies, which if you ask I feel a similar sense of ownership towards as physical property. Hierarchy still exists in anarchy.
I liked this, but found myself with a specific question about your collaboration model. Your last point there is to Accept Correction. The implication there is that there's a control model of how domestic tasks are supposed to be done. I'm not sure where that comes from, especially when the partners don't already agree. Is there a conventional answer I'm missing? Do we (maybe ideally) negotiate that at the beginning of partnerships, either explicitly or implicitly? Is there an authoritative source?
I'm particularly interested in this in connection with the the strategy of Needs Reduction. Maybe I'm being fussy or a dummy, but it seems like this is an obvious place for partners to disagree about whether they're collaborating ("I'm offering a gentle correction for how this needs to be done [in the abstract/objectively].") or leading/following ("I will do this the way I am told to") in the first place.
Cryptogal Kate had an interesting post refining this idea where she observes many happy straight couples in her life with a breadwinner wife, but that the man was almost always a blue-collar type, not just a less-financially-successful white-collar type. Being able to handle challenges calling for physical strength, mechanical know-how, and tolerance for disgust seem to be able to counterbalance the breadwinner question. Which is great, since increasingly there are more highly-paid white-collar women being created than men.
I notice that women in general do not want to feel like they are holding up the structural parts of the operation. We want to be the one who takes the operation from good to great. We want to make a house into a home, and not have to build or maintain the house. That’s why we don’t want to bring in the bulk of the income. If our income is only supplementary, then if we are sick, pregnant or otherwise incapacitated, the family’s finances aren’t ruined. While times are good, our income can by the small luxuries that make life feel dignified and abundant. In hard times, our income can be the much needed nest egg. But if we are the breadwinner, that’s not the case. Then our money goes into the “daily spending” pot. In such marriages, we don’t feel protected. We feel like the protector, the pillar. And it’s very unattractive if our husbands can’t protect us.
Fascinating analysis - the tension between vertical assignment and cross-functional collaboration isn’t just in the workplace, ha.
I also suspect that in some of the female-breadwinner couples in the study referenced, male partners’ lower incomes correlate with the behavioral reasons for divorce rather than are the primary cause. In other words, higher divorce rates driven not necessarily by well-paid professional wives whose salaries outstrip that of their also well-paid professional husbands, but rather -for an extreme example- by: women working a (often non-glamourous) full-time job while also responsible for housework and childcare, with an alcoholic husband frequently fired from jobs and who is checked out at home, a poor partner overall.
Would be very curious if a more detailed data breakdown of the divorce study bears this out.
This tracks pretty well with the most common complaints of men vs women. Women tend to ask "Why can't help see there's many things that need to be done" while men tend to stay "Why won't she just communicate what she needs me to do."
This theory also explains a lot male vs female student behaviour school group projects. I have found if I initiate the start of a project (eg making a group chat or asking when people are free to meetup), the men in the project will defer to me either implicitly or explicitly as the leader. They then generally won't take initiative to do almost anything until told to, whereas the women in the group will often take the next "leader" task on (eg assigning tasks). (Though I have also found men will do their work later than women will so perhaps men are just less consciousness/organized/motivated to do schoolwork)
I like this analysis a lot. Not least because of the way you ungendered the solution section. As someone who always winds up in the wrong gender category in these kinds of pieces, I appreciate you acknowledging the substantial minority of us in the counter-stereotype.
I agree with your model, both the pros and cons and the solutions. And the fact that you didn’t tie them down to specific situations. Knowing when and how much to lean into any of those three modes is a skill set in itself.
very cool post!
The part I’m confused about is *when* you should decide to adopt the collaborative vs hierarchical approach and how to pick
it had never once occurred to me that “following” was _not_ what you describe as collaboration. lots to chew on. thank you.
I like this, but I am also a massive sucker for explanations that show everyone has differing values / preferences without casting any group as simply lazy/entitled/rotten/.etc
Feels similar to the idea mansplaining is basically a result of women, who tend to want active questioning from a conversation partner, failing to grok that men are proactive sharers, who expect a conversation partner to proactively share things about themselves / related experiences.
Yes - I think women sometimes have an overly-expansive definition of "mansplaining." I've certainly experienced mansplaining - but it's different than the normal male conversational habit of sharing knowledge. But I think women who don't have a lot of male friends don't quite understand how guys talk amongst themselves; and perceive a lot of innocuous conversation as "he thinks I'm dumb because I'm a woman and that is why he is droning on about fuel injectors."
I've also noticed a lot of women get unnerved by the good-natured male banter that guys enjoy with their friends, because women generally don't interact like that with our friends. When a woman refers to another woman by an insulting nickname, or teases her about getting fat, it is an act of outright aggression and meanness - but guys talk like that to their buddies all the time and it's a sign of affection.
The answer is for women to do as men do and start teasing men for getting fat
> I've certainly experienced mansplaining - but it's different than the normal male conversational habit of sharing knowledge.
To me the problem with this assertion is that it seems hard to falsify, and even you saying that it is different doesn't mean much due to the possibilities of false positives, and the fallibility of memory, and describing a social conversation online, causes issues dissecting these anecdotes. (e.g. perceptions of tone, things you may have done or said that came off a certain way without realizing it, .etc).
I've definitely seen women fail to understand banter, but I think most of the time it is a knowledge/feeling gap where they know guys do this but it feels aggressive to them to hear it.
This is like an engineers version of marriage but spot on.
This tracks my own experience learning how to navigate task splitting in my own marriage, and adds useful context to your last post as well.
This explains a lot!
One thing missing is that men with female breadwinners tend to cheat more so that is part of the reason they divorce too. If a man's entire identity is based on having more money or/and he was raised on "Whoever has the money makes the rules" even if the woman does nothing different, he will still feel emasculated and try to repair his ego. Is not always the woman leaving just because she makes more money men can get inside their heads and leave in their own way.
I feel like when women write about men it too often takes the formula of women being a gaseous cloud of vaguely pleasant notions and feelings, and men being some kind of extreme, even if women are trying to be unbiased. I don't know if this is intended to take men down a notch or it's just people taking the platitudes about men being extreme and women being unextreme too far and using it as a basis for further thinking. Bear in mind the most famous example of that heuristic was male versus female IQ which has since been deboonked. Also, it seems convenient that the opposite sex has to shoulder the burden of representing an "extreme" which is liable to be criticized whereas things in the middle typically aren't. We know characteristically speaking women tend to prefer this kind of passivity and avoidance, so I think this largely solipsism.
In another vein of solipsism you have women reading too much of their own sexual judgment into male relationships. There's an entire contungent of women into "yaoi" and I think that says a lot about this thing women can do where they export their sexuality onto male bodies that they are just observing. The interactions that form male groups are most remniscent of libertarianism and property. It's mostly a quick and unconcious effort amongst ourselves that determines where the various borders of ownership lie. Guys do not wantonly fuck with each other's shit, that can include physical property as well as more ephemeral things like personality traits or hobbies, which if you ask I feel a similar sense of ownership towards as physical property. Hierarchy still exists in anarchy.
I liked this, but found myself with a specific question about your collaboration model. Your last point there is to Accept Correction. The implication there is that there's a control model of how domestic tasks are supposed to be done. I'm not sure where that comes from, especially when the partners don't already agree. Is there a conventional answer I'm missing? Do we (maybe ideally) negotiate that at the beginning of partnerships, either explicitly or implicitly? Is there an authoritative source?
I'm particularly interested in this in connection with the the strategy of Needs Reduction. Maybe I'm being fussy or a dummy, but it seems like this is an obvious place for partners to disagree about whether they're collaborating ("I'm offering a gentle correction for how this needs to be done [in the abstract/objectively].") or leading/following ("I will do this the way I am told to") in the first place.
Cryptogal Kate had an interesting post refining this idea where she observes many happy straight couples in her life with a breadwinner wife, but that the man was almost always a blue-collar type, not just a less-financially-successful white-collar type. Being able to handle challenges calling for physical strength, mechanical know-how, and tolerance for disgust seem to be able to counterbalance the breadwinner question. Which is great, since increasingly there are more highly-paid white-collar women being created than men.
I notice that women in general do not want to feel like they are holding up the structural parts of the operation. We want to be the one who takes the operation from good to great. We want to make a house into a home, and not have to build or maintain the house. That’s why we don’t want to bring in the bulk of the income. If our income is only supplementary, then if we are sick, pregnant or otherwise incapacitated, the family’s finances aren’t ruined. While times are good, our income can by the small luxuries that make life feel dignified and abundant. In hard times, our income can be the much needed nest egg. But if we are the breadwinner, that’s not the case. Then our money goes into the “daily spending” pot. In such marriages, we don’t feel protected. We feel like the protector, the pillar. And it’s very unattractive if our husbands can’t protect us.