Some women are from Mars

Somehow during lunch today, the conversation touched on the topic on how I often think/react like a guy. Working everyday with users on the floor, female users sometimes think I’m cold or insensitive to their problems. I guess I lack in the empathy department, at least according to their standards.

When it comes problem solving and debugging, the most important thing to me is always the end result: which is to understand why things happened the way they did. Rarely does it occur to me think about the methods I use to analyse the issues. An innocent but blunt question could come across as interrogative, or even accusitive.

Apparently, most women aren’t really interested so much in getting the problem solved than being reassurred that things are going to work out fine. In other words, they like to have someone who would tell them, “I see, don’t worry too much about it, it’s not your fault.” Most men fail miserably at that, allegedly. Perhaps they’ve come to accept the fact that men don’t usually mince their words, but have yet to realise that some women just don’t think/act like the rest of them.

This might also explain why I think I have more male friends than female friends. My closest friends are female, however, but these are friends that have known me for a long time, and either:

1. have been so used to me to know I’m mostly harmless, and have accepted me for who I am,
2. exhibit the same supposedly unfeminine traits, thus take no offence at all when I’m being blunt.

I guess empathy is a skill I have to pick up if I want to progress in the people-relationship department. My first step is to take a more conscious effort to try understand how the female brain works and treat people with more sensitivity and care.

Subjects: General

Mood: Discoveries & Relevations

Tags: empathy, gender