Teach Girls they have a meaningful role in society and the bitchiness will go away

I remember watching like a 60 minutes special on 'bullying' approximately ten years ago where a girl in the audience pointed out 'if guys have a problem with eachother they just settle it with their fists. Girls use psychological attacks' or something, I'm paraphrasing.
On insight tonight, which was a repeat of an episode on 'Why girls are so mean?' which actually spent way more time on looking at 'how girls are so mean' vis-a-vis describing the behaviour rather than looking at the causes. But interestingly a 20-30 year old woman talking about the office politics amongst women made a comment 'It's - I think with men if they've got a problem, you know, you can just confront it or you punch it out. Whereas with girls, it's the whole kind of like ostracism and the sneaking around and the whispering and the emails to each other and you know –'

Which I couldn't help but notice was more or less the exact same observation that was made 10 or more years ago. It could very well have been the same girl.

But I think the Insight show did deliver some insight with the 'Queen Bees and Wannabes' author their to provide insight, but there was far more description of symptoms than exploration of causes. Particularly since if you are doing a show on why Girls are mean to eachother then the premise you have to assume is that when girls get mean it is a distinct phenomena from the male equivalent.

I think the office is a good place to start, because the gender divide is perhaps perplexing in every dimension except social-anthropological ones (these words are too big for me).

As in, in the modern era in a country even as backwards as Australia, it is generally acknowledged from the base stock of intelligence, social skills, street-smarts etc women and men don't differ in any significant way. Yet men are clearly more successful in corporate careers than women are. There still isn't pay parity, and although the proportion of women in executive roles has increased, it still isn't anywhere near 50-50 or even 60-40.

Yet it's not as simple as saying that most companies are controlled by a boys-club that looks after its own interests. I say that because Business is one of those things that is still on the evolutionary front-lines, and in many industries a single performer can actually still overcome a politically savvy group (in other words, people do things in business primarily because it makes money, so if you are a woman and make the company exceptional money, it will be hard for even the tightest conspiracy to do you serious damage. Alternatively if you are Michael Moore and you write an expose on Rupert Murdoch, Ruport Murdoch will himself publish it he believes it will make him money).

I put it to you that starving people fight more viciously for crumbs than well fed people fight for a rack of lamb.

Based on personal experience and observation, Men in corporate settings compete in objective business dimensions and metrics. Who has the most customers, who has the biggest revenue generating accounts, who has the best productivity, who has the most directs. Furthermore it is impersonal much of the time. Like a footrace, men charge in parralal lines at the same finish line trying to outmuscle eachother.

Furthermore, from what I've observed, if men aren't competing in the same event they will be cheering other men on.

That's probably the best metaphore I can/wish to offer. Women in the workplace, I noticed and overheard compete over shit that perplexes me in their insignificance. Many points of contention had nothing to do with work at all. The admin politics were far more cut-throat than the National Sales Managers ever were (predominately female and predominantly male respectively).

Whats funny is that before watching insight I was coming back from a run with my dog and whilst waiting to cross the road noticed a kitted out Japanese import car passby and caught the eye of the token asian girl in the passenger seat and thought quite instantaneously 'that girl is an accessory' or may have even initially thought 'she is fluffy dice'. The flip side of the equation is that while the girl may be a car accessory, the guy is as they say in Japan 'Mr Legs' or basically the girls chauffer service. It's better being single than being an idiot.

But I think much of the girls seemingly 'hard-wired' behaviour has a simple explanation:

They aren't important.

As always I can't be bothered doing any hard research to substantiate this observation, I just put to you that it makes sense because I think we can accept that:

1. There are still clearly definable differences between social conditioning for boys and social conditioning for girls.

2. Education and Corporate structures in many cases still have their ideological foundations in assumptions made prior to any feminist movements.

3. Historically speaking, women have generally been excluded from any social leadership roles.

The basic function of a woman in human society historically speaking was as a baby making factory for a male. Particularly keeping in mind that the atomic family unit erroneously known as the 'traditional family' is a relatively recent phenomena, historically speaking again the most traditional family structure was one man with a harem of many women.

In that context you have a bifurcation of society, or perhaps it is best put as saying that Men lived in their own society and thus their own world and women lived in a different society and thus their own world.

Rather than calling the two worlds 'male' and 'female' worlds, I prefer to call them 'important' and 'unimportant' because thats more offensive, and offensive ideas generally being wantonly rejected my argument is actually better served if you reading this want to reject it.

I would attempt to objectively qualify calling the men's sphere 'important' by pointing out that the political games and executive decisions men made would result in things like this:

The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.

- Genghis Khan

Who was a male and made the kind of decisions that could see whole communities wiped out of existence.

Thus in a harem style family, you had men competing against the whole world trying to dominate eachother and the resources at their disposal, establishing heirarchies with practical repurcussions fought out in objective terms - the actual strength and intelligence to dominate and command. In recent times the skillset of mobilising warriors to raid, pillage and conquer has shifted in favour of a skillset to mobilise public opinion.

Men have a tendancy to read books on strategy written by Sun Tzu, Machievelli and Musashi Miyamoto. What do women have? 'Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office'.

For women your traditional highest aspiration was to be 'first wife' or matriach of a household, your competition were only ever other women so effectively were you sidelined from the important decision making world. Physical violence against the other wives or concubines it would make sense to be prohibited on account of the dangers of being caught damaging the stable of wombs of any dominant male.

Thus you had I guess the ability to produce sons, attractiveness and physical allure and psychological attacks being the limit of your repertoir. This went on for thousands of years, poorly documented because apart from rare circumstances (Medea comes to mind) the two worlds probably didn't collide.
Memoirs of a Geisha was a hit afterall, a fictitious book devoured by modern day women about the political contests of women who had virtually no power over their own destinies.

Another divide I would point out is my general observation that women will factor the expected earning of their partner into their financial goals where I don't know any men that do. By that I mean, if a man dreams of having a million dollar home he dreams of having a million dollar income. When women dream of having a million dollar home at best they dream of having a million dollar income AND a million dollar earning husband.

Stay at home mums are still commonplace and socially acceptable, I still see little to no hope for the stay at home dad becoming commonplace.

Thus I say the solution (without any actually helpful or constructive suggestions) is to bring the two worlds together. Teach women when they are growing up that if they want to be important they can't marry importance and you'll slowly break the behaviours that make being mean and nasty useful.

Women have wombs as much as men have testes. Both are needed to make children. Men seem to find 'the choice' between career and children very easy. Furthermore it is admittedly also fairly easy for a successful man to have both. (a child often serving as incentive to be more devoted to a career), where women again are probably throwing back to anthropologically hard-wired, or childhood socially conditioned notions that they should live vicareously through their children. (you can't be important but your son can, sort of thing).

If women are let into the world of making decisions about commanding and dominating physical resources, they will come into the objective realities that make men's social heirarchies straightforward (and relatively pleasent) compared to womens infighting over who has in far too many cases the best access to someone actually important.

I think we are on the right track, I would also observe that in the country I think the problem is smaller, you come across more 'champion' women (whom I find generally more attractive) because I suppose in the older agrarian and hunter-gatherer lifestyles women play a far more active role in running the business, infact quite often the family is the business.