Book Review: The Male Factor

Knight Ridder/Tribune

It's not very politically correct of me (as if I care!) but I've always believed there is a gender gap in the workplace. Men and women think and act differently and react differently to the same things. Cut to the chase, obvious as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. Case closed.

This observation is based on almost fifty years of post-college employment, including decades on five daily newspapers, where women were well represented in the reportorial and editorial ranks long before other businesses. It's not sexism; it's realism.

Now comes Shaunti Feldhahn's The Male Factor: The Unwritten Rules, Misperceptions, and Secret Beliefs of Men in the Workplace (Broadway Books, a division of Random House, 320 pages, $22.99) which essentially confirms my long-held suspicions.

Based on a nationwide survey and interviews with more than three thousand men, Feldhahn, the bestselling author of For Women Only and For Men Only, has crafted a very readable and comprehensive exploration of how men in the workplace tend to think, which even the most astute women might otherwise miss. In The Male Factor, Feldhahn investigates and quantifies the private thoughts that men almost never publicly reveal or admit to, but that every woman will want to know.

Feldhahn would make a great investigative reporter; if I were an editor of a news operation of any kind, I'd hire her in a New York -- or Atlanta -- minute to head up the investigative staff. Both are applicable, since Feldhahn worked for the New York Federal Reserve Bank before moving to her present base in Atlanta, the New York of the South. She has a master's degree in public policy from Harvard University and is a syndicated columnist in addition to being a best-selling author.

This is the first book I've seen -- certainly the first by a woman -- to dig into the hearts and minds of thousands of men in the workplace -- from CEOs to managers, from lawyers to factory workers -- to get a comprehensive and confidential picture of what men commonly think about their female colleagues, how they view flextime and equal compensation, what their expected "rules" of the workplace are, what managing emotion means, and how that low cut top is perceived.

Feldhahn was supremely wise to guarantee the men in the surveys and interviews anonymity; because of this guarantee they talk in a candid and uncensored way about their daily interactions with women bosses, employees, and colleagues, as well as what they see as the most common forces of friction and misunderstanding between men and women at work.

Among the subjects The Male Factor tackles are:

--How men, with rare exception, view almost any emotional display as a sign that the person can no longer think clearly -- as well as what they perceive to be "emotion" in the first place (it's not just crying). Feldhahn even quotes the observation by the Tom Hanks baseball manager character in the movie A League of Their Own: "There's no crying in baseball."

--Why certain trendy clothes that women wear may create a career-sabotaging land mine in terms of how male colleagues perceive them. As a woman might say (silently, in most cases), "My eyes are up here, stop looking at my cleavage." A guy might retort (silently in most cases) "Why are you dressing so provocatively?"

--The unintentional signals that can change a man's perception of a woman from "assertive and competent" to "difficult." One very important insight men gave the author is that a woman who talks and acts rough and drops the F-Bomb at every chance she can -- in a mistaken belief that this is how men interact. The men she surveyed viewed women who act like this in the workplace as inauthentic.

As I read the book, the immortal line from George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, later translated to the musical stage as My Fair Lady (I like the 1939 Leslie Howard-Wendy Hiller movie version of Pygmalion very much and recommend it) wafted through my head: "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" Women -- and men, too, because guys should read this book -- are offered answers to that age-old question in The Male Factor. Feldhahn tells us that male and female brains are different -- as if we didn't know that! -- accounting for much of the differences in how men and women react in the workplace.

Women -- especially those who've been indoctrinated with the false view of some feminists that to proclaim differences between the sexes is to diminish women -- will likely be surprised, even shocked, by these revelations. Some may find them challenging. Yet what they will gain is an invaluable understanding of how their male bosses, colleagues, subordinates, and customers react to a host of situations -- as well as the ability to correct common misperceptions.

Shaunti Feldhahn is the best-selling author of For Women Only:What You Need to Know About the Inner Lives of Men and For Men Only: A Straightforward Guide to the Inner Lives of Women. Her books have sold two million copies and have been translated into fifteen different languages. You'll find the author online at www.TheMaleFactorBook.com.

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