The value women place on relationships has increasing marketplace value. Changes in the nature of technology have made relationships — with customers, clients, suppliers, competitors, shareholders, and the community as well as within the organization itself — a far more vital resource for organizations than in years past. Twenty years ago, relationships were considered the soft stuff, dismissed as the province of “human resource weenies” by those who valued strategic toughness. Today, they are more likely to be seen as essential to innovation, teamwork, customer satisfaction, talent retention, and the transmission of embodied wisdom. Continue reading » »

Why do women place so much value on relationships?

Recent advances in neuroscience suggest some answers. A UCLA lab team using functional MRIs found that humans register the social pain of isolation and rejection in the same areas of the brain and with the same intensity as they register physical pain. Further investigation revealed that women experience social pain more acutely than men and in more parts of the brain simultaneously. Another study using similar methodology revealed that the hippocampus, which constitutes the major memory center in the brain, is more active in women when they are interacting with others. This makes women more likely to remember the details of emotional exchanges and personal conversations. Continue reading » »

What accounts for differences in how men and women notice? Why have we evolved in complementary ways? Are divergencesonly the result of socialization, or of something more fundamental? Recent evidence from the fields of cognitive and social psychology suggests that our different noticing styles have a biological as well as a cultural basis. For example, functional MRIs reveal that men (on average) have more “grey matter” in their brains than women, while women have more “white matter” than men. Continue reading » »