Different minds working off the same brain

When my former coworker Colton wanted to find out how to do something, he would do keyword searches. Upon finding a promising-looking page, he would scroll rapidly down to the exact spot where his keywords appeared, read that, then look around for an example of the code in action. He was capable of making some amazing leaps of insight for which parts of which pages he needed to see and how to apply what he found there. Then he would write some quick test code - and keyword search all the inevitable error messages. In that way, he could quickly cobble together something that functioned.

When I want to figure out how to do something, my approach is to read everything I can possibly find that's even remotely related to the problem, before I even start. If there's a keyword search leading to a page, I'll read the entire page and any related pages. If there's a manual, I'll read the whole thing from beginning to end. It takes me forever to get started, and once I do I tend to be very slow and cautious with each and every step forward. In that way, I can make something extremely sound and solid that will last for a long time.

And when Colton and I worked together with our completely opposite approaches, we could do some astounding things. He was fast at making something that worked, and I was thorough about understanding why it worked. He was great when it came to creating something out of nothingness, and I'm great at taking the beginnings of something and optimizing it. He was much better than me at some aspects of a given project, and I was better than him at others. We could (and did) learn a lot from each other. Overall, however, one couldn't say that either of our approaches was superior or inferior to the other. They were just different.

So, too, is how I think of the different genders. Neither men or women are better than each other.

But there are differences. A masculine brain is better suited to doing certain tasks, and a feminine brain better suited to doing other ones. This doesn't, on the whole, make any particular part of the masculine-feminine gradient superior or inferior to the rest. It just makes them different. Different approaches to the same task are neither inferior nor superior, they are just different.

There are things I want to say here about gender differences. Some of them have a fair amount of personal importance to me. If for whatever reason you are unable to accept my basic underlying starting point - that there are differences - then you probably won't like anything else I have to say on the subject. Nevertheless, this is my blog and I'm going to say them. And after this post, I want to move on from the question of "Are there any differences at all?" My answer is that there are. If you want to continue disagreeing with my starting point after this post, you can certainly do it on your own blog.

And for those who can get past that first question: yes, I'll be delving into still more stereotypes. For that, Tania's 80/20 rule seems pertinent; 80% of women will probably fit the stereotypes about women, 80% of men will fit the stereotypes about men, and 20% of each will mix it up. I suspect most of my audience is in that 20% range about most things.


Here's an opposing-logarithms illustration of how I view the gender gradient. I slaved over it for many minutes, try not to nitpick the details too much.