Fools rush in where angels fear to tread...

Comments in an earlier blog suggested (among other things) that women might have different/poorer leadership priorities then men. Other commenters disputed that position.

Are women's leadership priorities different then men's?

This question is worth looking at because not everybody agrees. To some, it is glaringly obvious that there are differences. Some others will claim that any differences between men and woman are artificial or grossly exaggerated. Still others will cough-up-a-hairball when asked to define a difference between men and women.

The last group quickly runs into an internal contradiction. If there is no definable difference, then why is it important to have "women" in positions of leadership and control?

As a point of departure, I will be using the traditional, biological definition of men (XY) and women (XX). I will also be playing fast-and-loose with primary-causality, whether biological/hormonal, socialization or other so don't get hung-up on the details. I am focusing on observable/measurable and will make passing mention of POSSIBLE origins, but that is not the focus.

Also, this post is offered for entertainment purposes.

Men are more likely to engage in risk-seeking activities then women

Not just more likely, but to a higher degree of intensity.

"Gambling" is a classic example of risk-seeking. It is where you trade a for-sure-thing-dollar away for a chance to gain nothing or some amount greater than a dollar. 

"Insurance" is almost the exact opposite. You are trading away an exact, known amount every month but the "pay-off" is the avoidance of zero loss or some portion or all of the value of your car or home.

According to this peer-reviewed paper, "Findings also indicated that 2.9 % of women were problem gamblers compared to 4.2 % of men....Of these emerging (younger) adults who gambled, 14 % of men and 3 % of women gambled at problematic levels."

The ratio of 2 women (mature adult) gamblers for every 3 men (mature adult) gamblers is fairly stable across the researched literature.

Men have less empathy than women

Source

Not a huge difference, but it is considered statistically significant.

If you look at autism diagnosis rates, about four times more men are diagnosed with autism than women. Some of that may be due to differences in how men and women present. Men have very-focused interests and are "color-blind" to facial expressions. Women with autism tend to be obsess on "socially acceptable behaviors" which masks their neuro-divergence.

The higher degree of empathy in women as a population plays out as more altruistic behaviors and a greater vulnerability to "Groupthink", especially when combined with the next difference.
 

Men are more competitive and women are more collaborative

Anecdotally, men are more inclined to favor privatizing gains and socializing costs while women are more inclined to favor socializing gains and privatizing costs.

Viewed through the lens of reproductive economics, women have much higher sunk-costs in child-rearing while men's opportunities to share their pollen vastly increase after they win the lottery. That is, a man has to stand-out to have reproductive partners while a woman has to conform/fit-in to have access to the resources she needs to raise the children she is responsible for.

The implications are that women are somewhat more likely to favor collective bargaining (unions) and communism (equality of outcomes).

Men are more impulsive than women

Men currently represent just over 90% of the people incarcerated in the United States while they represent almost exactly 50% of the population. People who commit criminal acts are impulsive to commit the crime and are usually caught due to evidence that was produced via lack of impulse control.

Men are four times more likely than women to be diagnosed with ADHD. 

Men have more "dispersion" in the distribution of critical attributes

If the differences in the means (averages) are small (like the Thinking/Feeling variation from the Myers-Briggs results) and yet there are very large differences in the extremes (like incarceration rates or diagnosed ADHD and Autism rates), then that is evidence that the variation or distribution of attributes in the population of men is flatter and wider than that of women.

It makes sense from a biological-imperative standpoint. Only one man needs to survive to sexual maturity for every forty women (give or take a bit). The species requires that the women "bet" on the sure-thing while men can be squandered in large numbers on long-shots and wild-cards.

Compound interest

While there are not any single dimension that is a total slam-dunk one way or the other, the differences are large enough that if one group were to gain long-term ascendancy then there would be overwhelming "drift" over time.

Given women's competitive advantage in terms of being collaborative, in a society without a structural bias offering men advantage, women will always dominate. That will result in cultural drift toward toward a bias against risk taking (stagnation) and toward communism (de facto punishment of the most productive members of society). Such societies will, in time, be overwhelmed and absorbed by societies and cultures that have elements that embrace risks and believe in rewarding the successful.