Understanding Gender Differences in Task Management

Krishnan and I decided to take a shower at the same time today… before you start imagining a Bollywood adult movie scene, we have two bathrooms and decided to take bath separately, but at the same time.

Now read what happens next ….

Krishnan goes to take bath in Amma’s bathroom at 9.05 am. He is out at 9.10 am freshly showered.

I go to our bathroom at 9.05 am. As soon as I enter our bedroom, I remember that Bunty was supposed to collect the clothes for ironing today. So I collect the clothes that have to be ironed and look for the curtain cloth that he uses to bundle them up. I hadn’t put the ironed clothes back on the shelves/hangars. So next, I completed putting the ironed clothes on their respective shelves.

Bundled all the clothes that had to be ironed and kept it outside so that Amma can give it to Bunty.

As I was taking out the clothes to be ironed, I realised there were enough clothes for one round of laundry. So I sorted them out for Krishnan. Can’t he do it himself ? YES, he can and more often than not he does, but then the woman in me can’t let him do it all the time !! Krishnan is responsible for loading and running the washing machine and the dishwasher. I have learnt NOT to interfere.

I finally went in to take a bath only at 9.40 am and I was also out in 10 minutes but the half hour was lost to the “chores”.

This is not to do man-bashing. Krishnan helps and is always ready to help with household chores, but it’s how I react to a given situation and how he reacts, that differs. Despite being physiologically a man (post menopausal), the womanly traits are so ingrained in me that I would always react this way – the road to the bathroom is filled with diversions for me 🙂.

It’s the same when I enter the kitchen. I run my kitchen exactly the way I ran operations for my firm… batch repetitive jobs, backfill on time, have everything easily accessible. I do have to manage a one member team at home – my mother. So I arrange things in such a way that she can easily use the same kitchen. Despite all of this organising – my mother may sometimes use up some staple or condiment and forget to let me know.

I walked into the kitchen today thinking I will be done in 10 minutes, but it took 45 minutes because the refill run had been missed on Saturday and we had run out of certain spices :):).

Again, the road from the kitchen is filled with diversions for me :).

Gender at Work

The paragraphs above is just to illustrate how a man and woman approach a simple everyday task of taking bath differently. It’s this same difference that occurs at work ! So its not that a woman is taking more time to complete a given task, she is probably solving a few other tasks on the way …..

Importantly, this is not about man and woman in a physical sense only, because every human being is a “Ardha-Nareeshwar”, half woman, half man. Physically you identify with a particular gender or in these “modern” times, you can choose to be fluid. So every manager has to be trained to understand his team member’s way of thinking and his/her gender affinity.

All our appraisals are “one size fits all” type… so a good performer could end up in the bottom percentile just because the role doesn’t fit his/her personality type. Rather than asking the person to leave, try to find the role that fits him/her. It’s time consuming, but very rewarding.

The performance of an employee depends on how engaged he/she is, competence for the given job and their subjective approach. Competence is easy to identify, engagement is also easy to sense, but their unique approach requires time to understand.

All those years back, this was why I asked all my direct reportees to “know” their team members really well. Starting with memorising their names to knowing how they “think”.

In a way this is being inclusive of cognitive diversity. Do read my earlier blogpost on this – Cognitive Diversity.

How well is your workplace working for all genders ??