The female needed an extra three days because she's busy reading and commenting on Jezebel.

Oh, wait. No, that'd be me.

I know that in grad school it was always the women tha worked the hardest. They spent the longest time doing research, they'd allocate whole weeks to actually writing the papers. It was a hugely stressful time while they earned their A+'s, and they'd flip their shit out if they got regular A's.

Then they'd get all pissed off at you for knocking the paper out in six hours and getting an A- or even (gasp!) a B+, which you never even bothered to check on when they handed it back because, really, who gives a fuck?

I heart Tina. That is all.

I think it could also be a personality issue instead of a male/female thing. Some people just want to feel prepared, while other think they are prepared enough.

Shit, I must be a dude.

@braak: I'm right there with you. An A+ on a seven page paper doesn't get me a better salary. Sleeping with the boss does.

@badmutha: That would be "others." Sorry.

@TruculentandUnreliable: It turns out then that I too, am a guy. Do I have to change my handle now?

@braak: You just cut me to the quick. I received a B+ for a class I struggled with throughout the entire semester. I kept telling myself I would be happy with a C (the minimum needed to continue on my Master's track). It was a difficult class for me and I spent hours researching other books on the subject that weren't even assigned in the class just so I could get the C.

When I saw the B+, I was pissed that I didn't get an A. Seriously. I wasn't exstatic. I was pissed.

I need therapy.

huh, according to this, i'm a dude.

Women definitely take their jobs more seriously than men. I just want to do the best job I can, but since I always seem to end up in these chaotic places with two or three persons' jobs to do, this hasn't always been easy. Hmmm...not many men I know have had to do multiple jobs, though.

Tina Fey's the only hilarious character on there. Sure Morgan and Baldwin are goofy and 'funny' but Fey is smart and witty, and thus the most funny of them all! And this is why there's a backlash against Juno, because 'witty' isn't funny, it's self-indulgent snarky woman-humor. And that's just bullshit.

href="#c3466453">lfw1031: "Ecstatic"...I wanted to type Xtatic.

Whatever! See! I need therapy!@

@lfw1031: I actually still don't know what my grades were for my last semester of graduate school--that was last spring.

It doesn't matter, anyway; I can't get my degree until I pay my library fines, and I'll be god-damned if I'm going to kowtow to those money-grubbing gangster that run Falvey Memorial Library.

Yeah tell this to my ex-manager at Starbucks, my ex-job. She thought she was running the freaking Pentagon. Me and four other people quit because she was making us physically sick.
She used to be a big lawyer but quite to "write a novel" and terrorize her underlings.

@badmutha: @badmutha: @lolkate: Yes, me too. Further evidence that I am a gay man trapped in a woman's body?? As if I needed more.

Moe, between this hed ("Dumb Jobs") and yesterday's "Why the Fuck Are you at Work," it seems as if you are assuming that an awful lot of us have dumb jobs at which we hate to be.

I love my job, it sure isn't dumb, and I couldn't wait to get the hell back here (I can only take so much Christmas spirit, ya know?).

But anyway, before contemplating anything to do with the male v. female sociologists here I'd want to know the nature of their project (I don't need three days, either. :p).

Just because something is qualitative research doesn't make it dumb or mean it should be rushed through. Maybe the woman in the anecdote is a slowpoke, but maybe the dude does sloppy work. Maybe they're both idiots -- many sociologists are (no offense, I say this as someone with an MA in Soc).

Boundaries, ladies. The men are perfectly happy to let us sit back and work 12 hour days and cancel our dinner plans because we're worried the job won't get done. Then they schedule Fridays off to play golf and weeks off to take their families to the lake.

@braak: I didn't think those were female traits, just Korean ones.

@brendastarlet: WORD. That is the truth. Have you ever scheduled a day out of work to take your female clients for mani/pedis? Hells no.

@TruculentandUnreliable: And science puts it all into perspective for us. I, apparently, am also a male.@

lfw1031: Have you seen Tina's American Express print ad recently? I wanted to make out with it and then hang it on my ceiling above my bed.

@braak: Yeah! Stick it to the man! Those grad school libraries are mafia run!

@brendastarlet: I will say that my brother gets into the office at 6:30am and doesn't leave until about 4:30 or 5, after the markets are closed and he's sure he's crossed all of his t's and dotted his i's. And he doesn't even leave for a 3-Martini lunch or play golf. Maybe he's actually a woman??

@braak: LOL. However, which focus, because I see this with education grad students. I taught a class with a ed. grad student and I gave her a B on her paper, which should have received a C, and I got this lengthly email reprimanding me for giving her, a teacher, a B, and blah, blah, blah. still bitter over her.
Anyhoo,us history grad female students, we will work for the A, but not as hard as we probably should.

Could it possibly be because men get ahead by doing things other than working hard?

(And if you wanna go that sleeze route, don't tell me sleeping with the boss ain't hard work!)

"Hmmm...not many men I know have had to do multiple jobs, though."

Well, in the stereotype world, men only do their one job in the job description and refuse to do the other work. Thus, the woman at the office gets stuck with the three other jobs the others aren't doing. And I said 'woman' because in the stereotype workplace, there's only one type of woman.

If there is some truth to this (there probably is), it's because women are taught to be a) insecure and b) people-pleasers. Add to this the fact that um, men out-earn us *STILL*, it's quite possible that some women have gotten it into their heads that, like, we have to work harder than men to be taken seriously. Or something.

Actually, my job is way cooler and more glamorous than most men, that's why I work hard. Haha!! And I gets PAID $$$$ Now, go balance the books and juggle some numbers menfolk!!

@LvV: hear hear! I like my job too, otherwise I wouldn't do it. But then, I'm not a sociologist.

I used to strive to be a perfectionist, I drove others crazy with my craziness, my visions of perfection and my execution of perfection. Then I had children. That pretty much threw a wrench in my neurosis. It no longer needs to be perfect, just get it done and move on, well, most of the time, I'm still working on some stuff...like the loading of the dishwasher.

And I'm just fucking lazy and smart enough to get by still excelling in comparison to how other people are doing.

@biscuitdoughjones: There were no Koreans in my graduate program. There was one girl that everyone insisted was Chinese (though I knew for a fact that her parents were from Myanmar, and she herself was from New Jersey). She worked very hard, but had already resigned herself to not getting good grades.

I don't know what this means re: the battle of the sexes, though. It was a theatre graduate program, so most of the people in it were women, and the few men that were in the program either wanted to be actors (and so didn't know how to spend eighteen hours on a research paper even if they wanted to) or arrogant lazy bastards that considered the assignments boring and pedestrian, and so couldn't be bothered to work very hard on them.

Two guesses as to which camp I fell in.

@TruculentandUnreliable: yeah, i can't imagine where we'd have gotten that impression!

@TruculentandUnreliable: Perfectly said. That is what I was thinking but couldn't express it very well.

@badmutha: Actually, my hair and massage appointments are "meetings" nowadays.

@lfw1031: That's actually a day I'd like to have. My doctor asked me how much I worked each week and I said, "I don't know, 60-70 hours." She just shook her head.

@lisas: Me either! I gave academia up years ago, the touchy-feely sociologists just don't know when to put a sock in it and then on the other side you have the quant jocks, ugh, no thanks.

I work in book-publishing production; perfectionism is a prerequisite for this job unless people want to see typofests with unusable tables of contents and entire indexes that are off by two pages. But I love my job and pretty much love being a workaholic. It's just my nature, I think.

@brendastarlet: I've come to the point where I refuse to work more than 50 hours a week, and I won't be in a career that requires it. If that means I make less money, so be it. Again, I'm lazy, though.

@braak: Oh, I get you. I just figured while we're in stereotype land....

I think a work ethic is often something picked up from a parent. Personally, I think a lot of women (including mothers) simply work harder than men/fathers (who historically have worked primarily and exclusively in professional life, where once again, they rely heavily on the support of female admins).

Not saying men don't work hard while at work. Just think a lot of traditionally corporate jobs are actually quite cushy and involve more meetings, politics and paper-pushing than anything else.

I think this is evolving though with recent generations, including a lot of both stay-at-home dads and fathers playing a greater role in domestic responsibilities - alongside women.

Then again, I might just be talking out of my ass.

@nyobserver: I wish I could get paid for talking out my ass cause I would do it fabulously.

Tina Fey went to UVA! Moe, you are so on the level.

@nyobserver: No, you're correct--a lot is learned from a parent. In my case, its my Dad, the perfectionist. Though he's more like the "absent-minded professor": really knows his stuff but is always like, "Where did I leave that piece of paper?"

@Miss Expatria: I second that. I never thought about reading Jezebel as "research".

Working at my job for a year now with fickle (all male) clients has certainly taught me to not work very hard at all.

@MsMerlin: interesting. I think I picked up much of my former perfectionist instincts from my mother (somehow managed to get her to let go too). but have nobody to blame for my absent-mindedness. except maybe your dad. if that's okay.

@MsMerlin: Can your dad operate a VCR/DVD combo? If he can he's ahead of the game. None of my professors seemed able to do that.

@truculentandunreliable: good for you! money isn't everything, even though with rents like they are, it seems that way.

@nyobserver: Nah, I think you've got something there. Both my parents worked full-time, but I saw my mom doing a lot of "extra" work--househ