Manning Up or Wimping Out: Men Don’t Exist to Serve Women’s Desires
In 1993, I was getting my Executive MBA at the University of Texas. I took a class on Negotiations which was open to the EMBA folks as well as the ‘day-care kids’ (as we referred to the younger and non-Executive students).
The professor was discussing distributive negotiations (winners and losers) and I had a question (paraphrase): “In my experience, men are more aggressive than women. How do women fare in these type of hard-nosed negotiations?” Immediately, over half of the women in the class rose up and started to shout at me as sexist. I was quite surprised and looked at the Prof for guidance, but he just smirked. I defended my question as based on my personal observations and experiences, but that didn’t matter to them. After about 5 minutes, the Prof took control again and said he would address the issue in a later class. After the class ended, one of the women walked up to me and informed me that women are superior to men because they have an extra link between each side of the brain. When I said that seemed sexist to me, she cursed at me and walked away.
When we got to gender issues, guess what? It seems men do better with distributive negotiations and women do better in integrative negotiations. After this class, I asked the Prof why he never said anything about that the day I was pilloried. He laughed and said “You were doing find and we weren’t at that point yet”.
Ride on, ride fast, ride safe.
