Individual vs. The Group

David Brooks writes his opinion column today from China where notes a distinct difference between Asian and Western views on the indiviual versus the collective.  But Mr. Brooks didn't need to go all the way to China to see that.  All he needed to do was spend some time with kids...  or engineers.

Mr. Brooks writes,

If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim... The individualistic countries tend to put rights and privacy first. People in these societies tend to overvalue their own skills and overestimate their own importance to any group effort. People in collective societies tend to value harmony and duty. They tend to underestimate their own skills and are more self-effacing when describing their contributions to group efforts.

Instead of going to China (assuming you could get a visa in the first place), give a group of girls five dolls.  They'll set up a classroom or house, the dolls will be taking part in a class or become a make-believe family, and the girls will pretend to be parents.  Give the same dolls to a group of boys and they'll start a mixed martial arts match.

The trend continues in the classroom.  Imagine a 5^th grade math class, the teacher asks a question and ten hands shoot up.  Most of those hands will have a boy attached to it.  As my mother always said, boys act first and think later, literally in this case.  Girls wait until they understand the question and believe they know the answer before raising a hand.

The trend doesn't go away when those kids get older, it just gets harder to spot.  My wife calls it Male Engineer Syndrome.

Let's say we have an engineering problem and three proposed, imperfect solutions.  Take a group of women engineers (the fact that it may be hard to find enough women to make up a group is something for another day) you will notice a few things:

• Women engineers will use one of the proposed solution as a starting point and pull effective parts of the other proposals as needed.
• They tend to start a criticism with "perhaps I don't fully understand this," or, "I could be wrong about this but..."

Male engineers with Male Engineer Syndrome will look at the proposed solutions and point out the flaw first.  They tend to increase their perceived worth by finding flaws in other's work and they are more likely to throw out all three solutions in favor of their own.

Now, I know I'll get called for male bashing, which is not my intent.  Being a stay-at-home Dad hasn't completely removed my masculinity, though I had to look long and hard for a diaper bag that wasn't pink, purple or covered in flowers.  There are plenty of times when it's better to act first and think later.  Under deadline pressure, you want to know the flaws in a proposed solutions right away and if I'm ever on Jeopardy, I'll want to be able to figure out my answer after I've hit the buzzer.

What's important to realize is that everyone approaches a problem differently.  Their actions are a synthesis of not only their gender, but culture, genetics and their role models.  As a manager at Microsoft, I had to do performance reviews for everyone that reported to me.  The (one) female engineer was always underestimating her importance to the project.  If I did not factor that into her final score (basically, if I didn't do my job as a manager and just reviewed her on what she'd written in her review rather than her previous six month on the job) I would be under-rewarding an excellent performer.

The next time you're in a meeting with a bunch of engineers (or kids or Chinese) keep in mind that not everyone reacts the same when presented with a problem.  Anytime you talk about an entire culture or gender as a single entity you make sweeping generalizations, and I am doing that here, but if you use their gender or culture as one of many data points you use to evaluate them, then the generalizations we have made will not hurt.

"This article is dumb.  They way it really works is..."  -- Anonymous victim of Male Engineer Syndrome.