Men at work.

Tis a strange thing, but I have been observing men at work, or to be more accurate, the men where I work. They never talk. Now in contrast, when I worked at the Nature Park, all women, we talked a lot. We even had methods of talking to each other without speaking, for times when speaking was inappropriate. Feedback was instantaneous. Wow, sounds like I'm saying that one way of working is better than the other.

At the place, the office, there are three men and me. One man is the rainmaker and he is on the phone all the time, but I wouldn't say he talks. He doesn't even schmooze very much, but by thunder he gets the job done. There are two engineers who both work in labs, sometimes separate labs. Both really nice blokes. I know virtually nothing about them. They also get the job done, by thunder.

At the Nature Park, where we talked all the time, by thunder we got the job done there too. Sometimes we just delivered. So let's call that bottom line, bottom line was, we achieved what we set out to do. That was quite a rare occurrence.
Most of the time we did really well. We would tell each other,
'That was fantastic, this was a great way of presenting that...etc,' and we'd go back to the office and talk it through, share what went well, offer ways of improving anything that didn't. That was - well yes - most of the time.
Sometimes we stormed it, we were unstoppable as a team, we knew it was all working at celestial level. We all patted each other on the back. That was not as often as the middle one, but a great deal more often than the first one.

Now, ok, I am not really comparing like with like here. The Nature Park was basically teaching, the office is engineering, not for me of course, but that is their business, that's what they are doing. Teaching at primary school level is overwhelmingly female, engineering is overwhelmingly male. Secondary school teaching however is pretty balanced these days. I should add that my experience is of course of Britain, I'm not yet sure what the balance is in BC schools. Hopefully I'll get to find out one day.

And in the secondary schools where I worked in Britain, I would say that balance of genders gave the greatest strength to a team, leadership was vital, but that isn't what I am thinking about here. As ever, my science is flawed, based only on personal observation, but it's difficult not to look around you and notice what goes on. You could argue that it's a rather moot point, except that there are more women in the workplace than say 60 years ago, so it is not without significance.

Last night my friend was commiserating with me about the drudgery of office work. She told me that when she finally made it to 'Sales' after several years of secretarial work, she was the only woman in the department and by some strange coincidence, when she turned up for her first day's work, her desk was the only one with a typewriter on it. The typewriter took an immediate walk to the very end of the office.

On Sunday we were having a discussion about doctors. This started because I had met the doctor who delivered Kevin as a baby and I joked to him that in Britain we don't leave important things like delivering babies to doctors, we have midwives for that. This came up again later and I pointed out that one implication of having midwives deliver babies was that women in labour were being almost exclusively delivered by women. As it turned out, everyone around the table, male, female, gay and not so party-like, said that they preferred to have a woman doctor. Ok, we didn't get too messy about the question, or too specific, but it was an interesting discussion and outcome.

So where am I going with this? Nowhere particularly, just stuff going around in my head on the way home while I was stuck in another traffic jam in the suffocating heat.