Yes, but jsgoddess’ question is more along the lines, IIUC, of “why do you associate some behavior with women and some with men, rather than with good people/high-maintenance people/assholes?” Which you keep doing in your response: “women act in many good ways” - why do you separate behavior expectations by groinal content?
Answering before reading other people’s responses, so as not to bias myself!
My first reaction was to go for option 2, a mixed workforce.
However on reflection, the best place I have ever worked was in a small company of seven women. We weren’t ‘friends’ but we were very close colleagues and I think that definitely helped.
My current workplace is probably fairly even overall, but there are gender biases in the various roles. I currently work in a team where I am the only female. My god, I am so bored with the football conversations. 
It’s not behaviour expectations, but personal observation on my part.
Probably because for them the behaviors are exhibited by one group way more than the other, so the good behavior from the other group is an exception.
Nava, with all due respect I think you might want to rethink how you look at this issue. I’d guess that as a person who has switched genders you are now trying so hard to be non-gender in your thoughts that you forget people ARE a single gender and often are quite happy fitting into that role. And furthermore, you have had the experience of being on both sides. Most people have not.
So maybe realize that when people speak of gender specific behavior, its coming from their specific reality. Not yours.
Ok, I have to ask. What did the women tend to talk about? I’d guess it wasnt sports or power tools.
Ooh good question! Let me think…
Obviously a lot of the conversations were work based. But from a non-work conversation perspective, I guess different people talked about different things with each other.
Current events were talked about. Not political conversations, but just talk along the lines of ‘did you see that interview last night with…’ or ‘did you hear about that poor child who…’
If we were all together, then family was a big topic of conversation. Some of the staff were mothers, and would chat about their kids and what they were up to. We all chatted about our spouses and shared information about what was going on in their lives. We also talked about our parents. Big life events, like moving house, would be talked about.
Popular culture was another topic. People who watched the same television programmes would chat about those. Me and a colleagues used to pop out to buy trashy magazines and discuss the celebrity outfits we liked best. If someone was going to a show or a gig, that would be discussed before and after. We’d discuss music and bring in CDs to share with the others (this was a time before digital music was king).
We were all food and drink lovers, so if someone went to a nice restaurant or was cooking something new, we’d definitely talk about that. If someone was planning a holiday, we’d all chip in with suggestions.
Sometimes we’d talk about sex, in fact come to think of it, we all had a pretty good knowledge of each other’s sex lives! It was never discussed in a detailed or dirty way, although it was sometimes discussed in a joking way. A smaller group of us bonded one night when we all discovered that we all had quite infrequent sex, but that we were all okay with that!
I guess that’s all fairly stereotypical ‘womens talk’, isn’t it?
Um, Urbanredneck, I think you’re confusing Nava with someone else entirely.
Also, her response was valid and being transgender or not has nothing to do with it. I’m quite happy as a woman, but I do try to look pass the stereotypes. Some of the reasons given in this thread as to why they prefer working with women over men is based of stereotyping. Other posters and I have been stating that the perceived stereotypes are not true. My view is that as the lone woman, I’m not exposed to the gossiping that goes on (and I’m not blind as to think it doesn’t happen) between men. But when I’m in a women’s only place, I can’t escape it.
And Nava’s point is valid in the discussion of the stereotype presented in this thread.
As a person WHAAAT?
I think you’re confusing me with Una. Honored and all that but I’ve had girly bits my whole life, promise.
I want to name a band “Groinal Content.”
Feel free, I don’t have a TM on the expression.
Or maybe it’s coming from a place of bias and stereotyping. We all do it, but it’s more obvious in a thread like this where people are saying that if a woman acts like they want, she’s acting like a man, where if she acts like they don’t want she’s acting like a woman.
As a woman, whenever I do anything, I am acting like a woman.
While we’ve all grown up with schools teaching, “Stereotyping is bad, mm’kay?”, stereotyping is pretty much ingrained into society as a fact of life. We all have bias. We all have prejudices.
This question directly asks our prejudices, “What would you choose?” We rather have to use a stereotype to come up with our answer. We have to start remembering all the men and women in our lives and start categorizing them in order to make a decision between whether we would rather work with men, women, or a mixed bag. In this situation, of course we will all end up with stereotypes of “those stupid traits women have” and “those stupid traits men have” because there’s too much information to process for a decision otherwise.
However, a more interesting question is, could the OP have gotten away with starting a thread that asks, “Would you rather work, 1. With mixed races, 2. With whites only, 3. With blacks only”? How much different is that than what he did ask? And if we decided to answer it, how could we answer it without resorting to stereotypes? I think it’s an interesting take.
Right. But if someone says (paraphrased) “Oh, women who act like men are okay” what are they actually saying?
Do you hear the problem when it’s reversed? “Oh, men who act like women are okay”?
As for the racial question you posited, I sincerely doubt people would be saying “All my black friends act like whites and I guess that’s why I like them.”
Pernicious stereotyping comes in when we can’t see the variation in the group we are stereotyping and, when an exception arises, we don’t reassess the group but make an exception or move the actor into another category:
“Women gossip. Leah is a woman. Leah doesn’t gossip. Women still gossip, it’s just that Leah acts like a man.”
Again, we can often see this more clearly in a racial example:
“Black people are lazy. Terry is black. Terry isn’t lazy. Blacks are lazy, but Terry acts white.”
Judge the group negatively, then make exceptions for some select people you know and suddenly you have the infamous “Some of my best friends are black.”
Oops. Sorry.
Yeah, pretty much.
Men never discuss what anybody is wearing. You never hear men say “those pants make your butt look great!”. Sex lives? Now THAT is something never discussed in mixed company for fear of sexual harassment. Come to think of it, you ladies could have gotten into trouble for talking about it to.
I would rather be in a mixed group. Diversity keeps things more interesting, I think.
Re: backstabbing and drama. Those traits seem to be a problem in organizations where management is too incompetent and lazy to distinguish between the effective workers and people who are just skilled at self-promotion. This creates competition for esteem and status, which brings out insecurity-driven behavior and in-fighting.
I don’t think this is a gendered problem per se, but it might be a problem associated with occupational settings that happen to correlate with one gender more than another. I’m thinking of places where management turnover is high, employee qualifications vary a lot from person to person, and there are pseudo-bosses (like non-supervisory team leads) whose roles are poorly defined.
To build on my response, if you had asked me this ten years ago, I would have said that I am a woman who prefers working with men, as they are more straightforward and more likely to share my interests.
Then I entered a female dominated workplace, and you know what? It wasn’t like being trapped in Mean Girls. The women I worked with were smart cookies and we got along well. It’s almost like they were…people! With individual characteristics, even. It took me so many years of being a feminist to finally realize that It didn’t make me tougher or cooler or smarter or geekier to be more like a man.
I missed the novelty/attention of being a woman in a me field. But that’s kind of a crappy reason to be discriminatory.
May I ask what is the female dominated workplace your talking about?
I agree we should treat people as individuals, but there are reasons some things become stereotypes.
Yes, there are men who talk of nothing but sports. They’re boring as crap and annoy other men as well as women. There are also plenty of men who can discuss other topics.
There are gossipy, back-biting women. They earn the ire of many women as well as men. That said, there are plenty of women who don’t engage in such things.
Unfortunately, some people seem compelled to adhere to stereotypes. The type of woman co-worker I find most annoying is the one whose sole topics of discourse are 1) religion and 2) offspring. Unfortunately, such people do exist. Around here, there seems to be an inordinate quantity of them, many more than when I worked in Chicago.