Two months ago, I posted a piece titled, “A Radical Relook at the Gender Gap.” (The link is below.) I pointed out that a half century after the start of the modern women’s movement, progress toward equity at or even near the top of the professional ladder remains slow. This especially applies to the number of women in positions of top leadership and management as compared to men.
My argument was “radical” in that it dared to go where others have not. I argued that one of the several reasons for this persistent gender difference is that women and men are different. First, “there are enormous physical and psychological differences between being a woman and being a man.” Second, these differences have consequences. Specifically, they have consequences for women and leadership. They are among the reasons why women continue to lag men when it comes to seeking, and to exercising, power and authority.
As I wrote in my previous post, “not every woman has menstrual cramps; or gets pregnant; or is exhausted or nauseous while pregnant; or chooses to breast-feed her baby; or feels more responsible for her child than her partner; or has symptoms of menopause. But many or even most women do.” Which is precisely why to presume that all these – separately and cumulatively – are irrelevant to women in the world of work seems to me absurd.
From time to time I will revisit this argument, notably when there is further evidence either to confirm or disconfirm it. (I obviously think the former is far more likely than the latter.) Today then I am pointing to a new book by Lisa Mosconi, titled The Menopause Brain. Mosconi is an Associate Professor of Neuroscience in Neurology and Radiology at the top-flight Weill Cornell Medical College. In this book she further develops the argument made in her earlier, The XX Brain, that women age differently from men. Physiologically differently, psychologically differently.
In The Menopause Brain she reports on how scans confirm that women’s brains change during menopause – and for that matter during puberty and pregnancy – in ways that can and often do affect how they function. Predictably, Mosconi is careful to be sensitive to the point of being politically correct. While her research seems to suggest that at least some of what women experience during menopause would cause their performance, including in the workplace, somewhat to deteriorate, she prefers to refer to the brain as undergoing “a renovation.” For most women menopausal symptoms are transitory – their brain is simply “adapting to its new biology.”
Clearly Mosconi has hit a nerve. Her new book is selling like the proverbial hotcakes, and her TED talk on how menopause affects women’s brains has been viewed over 4 million times. Even more curious then that the question of how being in the body of a woman impacts women and leadership remains generally unasked and, therefore, unexplored.
The average woman menstruates about once a month, for about five days, for about forty years. Moreover, about ninety percent of women report they have premenstrual symptoms such as headaches or bloating, and about half have menstrual cramps. Can it possibly be, then, that these facts of life are entirely irrelevant to the still relatively small number of women at the top of the greasy pole? Can it possibly be, then, that women’s experiences of menstruation, fertility, pregnancy, childbearing, breast-feeding, and menopause – none of which are experienced by men – have no bearing whatsoever on who in America holds power and exercises authority?