Brain Rules (Updated and Expanded)

part of the boys was hierarchical. The girls usually knew the answers, the
boys usually did not, and the males responded by doing what low-status
males tend to do: They withdrew. A performance gap quickly emerged.
In math and science, boys and girls were equally likely to answer a
question first. But the boys used their familiar “top each other”
conversational styles when they participated, attempting to establish a
hierarchy based on who knew more. This included drubbing anyone who
didn’t make the top, including the girls. Bewildered, the girls began
withdrawing from participating in the subjects. Once again, a performance
gap emerged.
The teacher called a meeting of the girls and verified her observations.
Then she asked for a consensus about what they should do. The girls
decided that they wanted to learn math and science separately from the
boys. Previously a strong advocate for mixed-sex classes, the teacher
wondered aloud if that made any sense. Yet if the girls started losing the
math-and-science battle in the third grade, the teacher reasoned, they were

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not likely to excel in the coming years. She obliged. It took only two weeks
to close the performance gap.
Can the teacher’s result be applied to classrooms all over the world?
One classroom in a single school year does not make for a valid
experiment. We need to test hundreds of classrooms and thousands of
students from all walks of life, over a period of years.
Pair men and women in workplace teams
One day, I spoke about gender with a group of executives-in-training at
the Boeing Leadership Center in St. Louis. After showing some of Larry
Cahill’s data about gist and detail, I said, “Sometimes women are accused
of being more emotional than men, from the home to the workplace. I think
that women might not be any more emotional than anyone else.” I
explained that because women perceive their emotional landscape with
more data points (that’s the detail) and see it in greater resolution, women
may simply have more information to which they are capable of reacting. If
men perceived the same number of data points, they might have the same
reactions. Two women in the back began crying softly. After the lecture, I
asked them about it, fearing I may have offended them. What they said
instead blew me away. “It was the first time in my professional life,” one of
them said, “that I didn’t feel like I had to apologize for who I was.”
And that got me to thinking. In our evolutionary history, having a team
that could understand both the gist and details of a given stressful situation
helped us conquer the world. Why would the world of business be
exempted from that advantage? Having an executive team or work group
capable of simultaneously understanding both the emotional forests and the
trees of a stressful project, such as a merger, might be a marriage made in
business heaven. It could even affect the bottom line.
Companies often train managers by setting up simulations of various
situations. They could take a mixed-sex team and a unisex team and have
each work on the same project. Give another two teams the same project,
but first teach them what we know about brain differences between the
sexes. Would the mixed teams do better than the unisex teams? Would the
groups prepped on how the brain works do better than the unprepped
groups? You might find that management teams with a gist/detail balance

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create the best chance for productivity. At the very least, it means both men
and women have an equal right to be at the decision-making table.
Imagine environments where gender differences are both noted and
celebrated, as opposed to ignored and marginalized. We might have more
women in science and engineering. We might shatter the archetypal glass
ceiling. We might create better businesses. We might even create better
marriages.