A new study says women and men are different about something! (Think it's about time I programmed a series of command keys so I could type those eleven words with minimal effort? Yeah, only a dude would be that lazy. Or enterprising. Whatev.) Anyway, this study says that women work harder than men. Because they're perfectionists who set higher standards for themselves.
She recently asked both a male and a female colleague for help on a project. The female colleague said that to do a good job, she would need to do three days of research first. The male colleague said he could finish the work in an afternoon.
That's one of the conductors of the study, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia. And I think this gets to the crux of the issue, right? The colleague is being asked to help with a sociology project. She's not being asked to research, say, the evidence of nuclear proliferation in Iran. She's not mapping the human genome. She's helping a professor who supports her obvious assertion to a reporter by citing anecdotes. What the fuck does she need three days for? To be a better anecdote?
Maybe I just answered my own question. Anyhow, here is where I could go the extra mile and dig up all those other studies about how women think they are better at multitasking than men but are actually not, or how women work only slightly longer hours than men, or how men are more playful and women who play videogames have higher IQs, but in the spirit of gender equality I am going to exhibit some of that fundamental male arrogance and decree this post to be "good enough."
(And to that end, people, I illustrated this post with Tina Fey before I wrote the snarky headline or indeed, much of the post. It is not meant as a knock on Tina or the character she plays on 30 Rock, as her work is obviously very, very important to the future of humankind, so don't give me a hard time about that OR the fact that she doesn't get to play as "funny" a character on the TV show because she is trying to depict this harried, frazzled caricature of a female; haven't we been through that enough already?)
Do Women Work Harder? [US News]
Women Must Work Harder [UVA Today]