| Proceedings | Social Programme | List of Participants | Practical Information | Speakers | Exhibition |
Why
men don't listen and women can't read maps?
Allan Pease
Where do I do my research? I make television programmes for BBC Science in Britain. They send us everywhere researching human behaviour. I like to do research where we all spend our time. I did a little project today in the men’s toilet. My last book had a chapter on what happens in public toilets. In the toilet, you are with people you do not know, strangers. For men this is a scary situation.
Earlier, there was nobody in the toilet. One cubicle door at the end was closed, the furthest door away from the main door, so he was probably an Englishman. I was getting myself ready at the mirror. Women mistakenly believe that men in public toilets talk to each other about a wide range of interesting subjects. They believe this because this is what happens in women’s toilets. Women go to the toilet as complete strangers and leave as lifelong friends. What do men talk about: nothing. Death before eye contact is our motto. We get in and get out and we go alone. We do not need a support group. Never in history has a man said, ‘Peter, I am going to the toilet, would you like to join me?’
I was fixing my tie and a voice came from the cubicle. ‘How are you?’ the voice said. What would your reaction be? Fear? Panic? Terror? I froze and said nothing. The voice said, ‘I said: how are you?’ I said, ‘Good.’ He said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘If you don’t mind I am going to the toilet.’ There was silence. Then the voice said, ‘I’ll have to call you back, there is a guy yelling at me.’
I will be asking you some questions today. Some of them will have very simple answers. Do you believe that men and women are different? It is now politically correct in the world to pretend that men and women are the same. This gives us a 50% divorce rate. Marriage is still a very serious thing: ‘’Till death do us part.’ This vow was written 500 years ago when your life expectancy was only nine years more. Now you live 40 years with this person. After your kids leave, you realise you have nothing in common.
It is fair to say that there are no cultural differences in what we are going to discuss. In other words, men think like men, regardless of where they come from. Women think like women, regardless of where they come from. However, men and women do not think the same way. For example, if your doctor said that you can only have one glass of wine a day for health reasons, where would you picture yourself having this glass of wine? Would you be in a pub, club or bar? Would you be at home? Who would be with you? In a survey of 5,000 women, many pictured themselves sitting at a round table. This is significant because most men see themselves at a square or rectangular table, that is, a table at which you can have positions of power relative to other people, a table with sides. Women had at least one friend. Men saw themselves alone.
a. The Hunter
Men’s brains have not changed much in 50,000 years. This is not a shock to most women! What has changed is how we live. We now live in a society where men and women work together. In many countries it is fashionable to believe that men and women are the same. This gets you divorced and fired. It also loses you 50% of your market. There are two different languages in business: woman‑speak and man‑speak. You need an interpreter and translation book to figure them out.
Women look for certain things in their perfect man: he has to be strong and protective and stand up for her if necessary. She likes him to have a nice chest and arms, but not too big because this is egotistical. In other words, she wants him to look as though he can catch large animals. What is the purpose of a six pack? The second set of criteria has never been asked of men before. He now must be caring, sensitive and understanding. He should listen and anticipate her needs without being told. Women cannot have this man: he has a boyfriend!
In simple evolutionary terms, hunting is a man’s job. You are programmed to hit moving zebras at 30 metres and nothing more. There is not a great demand for this now, so it comes out in other ways. Football has the same elements as hitting a moving zebra.
b. Spatial reasoning
Brain patterns show that men have an enormous advantage in spatial tasks. Why are women not strong in spatial areas? The answer is simple: it is irrelevant to your evolutionary job. Woman, in evolutionary terms, is called a nest defender. Your job is to bear children and protect them. This has nothing to do with hitting a moving zebra at 30 metres. If ancient women saw a zebra, they would talk to it and give it a name.
About 15% of the people here today are women. Some of the things I will say will shock you. We analysed over 1 million brain scans over nine years. Male brains, we discovered, are a very simple mechanism. They are basic and uncomplicated compared to women’s brains. In simple terms, most of men’s brains in most circumstances are known as mono‑tracked. About one in five brains are cross‑sexed, that is, a woman’s brain that looks like a man but thinks more like a woman and vice versa.
c. Speech
Most men and boys have speech in four parts of the brain, about the size of a finger tip, usually in the left hemisphere. They are not strong centred. This means men and boys are not great conversationalists. Women do not need to be convinced of this. I have a 21-year old son that fits this mould. I live in England in autumn and spring. When I returned to Australia the last time, I had not seen my son for three months. I asked, ‘How is business?’ He replied, ‘Good.’ This is his three-month report. As a father, this is an acceptable report. I am happy with it. I decode ‘good’ to mean that he has had no problems that he has not tackled and solved. For his mother, this is not even the beginning of a conversation. She wants to know everything he thought, said and did for three months.
Women do not have just four spots in the brain: for women the ability to speak is a major brain function. Women talk much more than men.
How do you tackle these in your business life? How do you tackle them with your clients and customers? Importantly, how do you deal with it at home at the end of the day?
Where is the biggest area of stress in couple’s lives? It is when he arrives home at the end of the day. This is the tough part. He does not want to talk to anybody and she wants to talk about everything. As a result, many men get punished by their women. How do women punish men? She kicks him out of bed and puts him on the sofa. Women think this is a punishment. For men it is like camping.
d. Business life
How do you put the spatial skills of men’s brains into business? About one in five women have male‑orientated skills to a greater or lesser extent. Mental rotation means the brain’s ability to imagine things upside down. A man is more likely than a woman to read upside down across a desk or in a train or plane. He can imagine what things would look like from different angles. This explains why 94% of the world’s traffic air controllers are men, 92% of the world’s architects are men, 99.2% of the world’s airline pilots are men and 96% of the world’s engineers are men. If you have a spatial brain those occupations appeal to you. To apply for a job as an air traffic controller, you do not do a job interview but have to play six video games to assess if your brain can see width, height and depth. If you do not pass this test by 90%, you do not get an interview. If jobs were given based on the population base, half men and half women, we would all be dead. Of 100 people applying for the job, only six are women. Women do not want to be air traffic controllers.
Mental rotation means imagining things upside down. This is the reason why so many women have so much difficulty reading maps and street directories. Most men’s brains are compartmentalised. Each compartment works very well in isolation from the others. Women’s brains have functions using both sides and front and back. If a man is in an accident and suffers brain damage to the front, he may never speak again. A woman who gets hit in the same area can continue to talk.
a. Multi‑tasking
Women have a multi‑tracking brain. It functions on both sides. Typically, the chord that connects the left to the right carries up to 30% more connections. Women have multi‑tasking abilities. They can do between two and four simultaneous unrelated tasks. My wife, Barbara, runs our business. She is the CEO. I do not know how she does it. I cannot and do not want to do it. I can do a couple of things really well. She does all the juggling.
[End of tape]
Women can speak and listen at the same time on several unrelated topics. In public, if a man does not understand, he will not say so. At home, he will say things like: ‘Does this conversation have a point?’ ‘Where is all this leading?’ ‘Are you asking me to do something?’ ‘Am I a mind reader?’ ‘I do not know what you are talking about?’ This is disastrous for a business meeting. Men will mention it to other men. ‘What the hell was she talking about?’ He will not say it to the woman.
When a man is having his turn, women know to let him have it. Men believe that if they cannot get to the end of their turn they have been cheated. They accuse women of cutting them off or finishing their sentences. We trained 29 women in a British personnel company to, when interviewing men, let them have their turn, maintain an expressionless face and make grunting noises. The others were told to do their best. At the end of the test, the men in the company voted these 29 women as the most intelligent, capable, competent women they had ever known. All they did was to use male communication skills.
How do you listen to or talk to a woman if you are a man? Women all talk at the same time. When dealing with a woman or women, do not wait for your turn. There is no turn but participation. If you have something to say, open up and talk. For men, if one man is talking and another starts to talk over the top, it is aggressive.
How do you listen to a woman? Under pressure, women emote and men cover. In evolutionary terms, if men were to show their emotions on their faces in public, you could be attacked by such men. They can see you are weakened. We are the result of men that have masked their emotions. This is scary for a woman. She is trying to sell something to a man and she is getting no reaction. A woman thinks that we are judging her critically. When dealing with women, men should show they are alive. When dealing with a woman, if you want to be convincing, do not keep pushing for solutions. Support her emotions. This is why women love talking to gay men. Gay men feed back with their emotions without telling you what you should have done.
As we get older, do we get better at this? Do we pick up on the differences between the sexes and work with them? Men talk in direct terms. This means short sentences, facts and information. We say very much what we think. Other men appreciate this. To men it can sound very aggressive. Two men at a business meeting disagree with each other and then go to lunch together. Women are amazed by this. They say. ‘If a woman talked to me like that, I would never talk to her again.’ Direct talk will get you thrown out of a women’s group. Women talk in indirect terms. It is vital for men to understand what this means. When a woman talks, men are not quite sure what she means. She is inferring and hinting, hoping you will pick on it and get it. Men are bad mind readers. When talking with men, women have to be direct or else he will not get it.
Laurie has been married for 30 years. In these thirty years, he should have picked up the basics. He should know what to do to bring happiness and what he should avoid not to have grief in his life.
Peter is a single heterosexual man. Does Laurie, who has been doing for 30 years what Peter has been doing part time, know more about women?
Imagine you are driving your car. Men love to drive. 99.8% of the world’s professional racing car drivers in the last 100 years were men. For women, driving is not a spatial experience: rather, it is comfort, luxury and safety. When a woman goes to visit a friend, she knows it is not compulsory to break her best personal time.
Imagine you are driving in the country on a winding road down hill. The radio is off, of course. In the middle of nowhere, downhill on a winding road your wife or girlfriend says: ‘Darling, would you like a cup of coffee?’
Laurie says, ‘No’. Peter says, ‘I appreciate that but no thanks.’
Women know that when she asks if he wants a cup of coffee it has nothing to do with him. This is indirect talk. She is saying, ‘I would like a cup of coffee. I want to go to the toilet. I want to stop.’
Laurie said, ‘No’ and kept driving. 13 minutes of silence takes place. He is being punished. He says, ‘Is everything okay?’ Rather than saying, ‘No.’ She says, ‘It’s just fine.’ He knows he is in trouble, he does not know why and that night he goes camping.
You are taking her to the Gala dinner and your wife has bought a new dress. She is anxious about how the dress will look. She wants to make a good impact. She asks you to decide which shoes to wear with the dress, the blues ones or the gold? Does she really want you to choose her shoes? No. It has nothing to do with him. This is indirect speech. She has already chosen the shoes before she has asked the question. This is a trap. It means, ‘Tell me I am beautiful in whatever I am wearing.’ If he picks blue, she will say, ‘What is wrong with the gold?’
‘Do I look fat in this dress?’ A man will answer ‘no’ to this question but a woman will not believe him. She knows the answer. The answer is, ‘You look beautiful. I love you.’ My wife Barbara asked me last night, ‘Should I wear the drop earrings or the rings?’ I said, ‘Do you really want the answer?’ She said, ‘Yes, what do you think?’ I said, ‘You look beautiful in both.’ She said, ‘Cut the crap, give me the answer.’ I said, ‘Well, I do prefer the rings.’ She took them both off and wore pearls.
I did not choose this tie for this meeting. I chose a tie that would appeal to men: military stripe. She chose another tie for me to appeal to women. This is not how she said it. I put my striped tie on and rather than saying to me, ‘That tie is wrong,’ she said, ‘Are you wearing that?’
Men and women are different. One is not better than the other. We are not worse. We are different. Do not fight the differences, which is what men and women do. It is mostly women who fight with men about the differences. They want us as men to think like women, but we cannot. If we understand how it works, we can manage it. If we did think like women, they would not want us.
What do you do with the opposite sex? You manage them. It is like they are talking Chinese. Imagine they speak your language and they speak Chinese. You learn about their ways. You attempt to speak Chinese. You eat Chinese food. You attempt to communicate, if even you are poor at it. Is it not true that when someone attempts to communicate in your language, you really respect them for it, even if they are bad at it? The differences are why we love each other and also the cause of divorce if not managed properly. In business, they are disastrous.
To conclude, if you have empathised with what I have been saying, you are no different to anyone else. Every culture has these problems. Physiologically, we are different. Men’s eyes see directly in front better than women over long distances, to the side it is a blur. Women’s eyes are poor compared to men's but they see widely to the side. Men identify targets and hit them accurately using spatial skills. Women see short range in detail to monitor children’s activity and the body language of approaching people. 48 male weapons inspectors were sent to Iraq to try to find things. They found nothing. If you want to find weapons of mass destruction, send my mother and her friends, they will find them by next weekend.
Do not get upset about differences. Manage them. By doing so, you pick up the 50% of the market that you might be missing. They will love you for it.