Mars and Venus at Work
I’m reading a book about the former U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher (reigned 1987-90).
I’m reading a book about the former U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher (reigned 1987-90). It was written by Caroline Slocock a civil servant who worked closely with her in the last 18 months before she fell. Politicians, like sports stars, you know, usually end their careers badly, by losing or being pushed. Thatcher was pushed.
Slocock was a Labour-Party voter, a socialist, but came to admire the Conservative Thatcher, woman-to-woman. Her book reflects deeply on what it means to be a woman outside the home. The home, of course, has always been the “woman’s sphere,” right back to the caves. The men were out in the woods hunting animals and fighting with each other. But for the past century, women have been venturing into the public sphere. They’ve had to learn to hunt and fight.
It’s been difficult, opposed by most men and even many women, as I don’t need to tell the Brazilian women doing it. Slocock highlights the difficulties that Thatcher overcame, becoming the first female leader of the Conservative Party, then the first U.K. female premier. You Brazilians did it in Rousseff, Italy in Meloni, Germany in Merkel, Israel in Meir. We Americans just rejected for the second time a female candidate for president. I weep.
The book shows a crucial fact about female leaders, and, for that matter any woman in a workplace. Men and women don’t think of The Job the same way. A popular and somewhat silly book a long time ago declared that men are from Mars, named for the god of war, and women are from Venus, the goddess of love. Silly, but accurate. Men view The Job as a football game. Women view it as a home. Men view it as a courageous chance to tackle other men. Women view it as a loving chance to make connections, especially with other women. Men are willing to work in a team but always have their eye on overturning the leader and becoming him themselves.
Take the ball and score the goal. The big virtue for men is courage, about which they think almost as often as they think about sex. When Thatcher was dealing with her cabinet colleagues, such as the Chancellor of the Exchequer or the Foreign Secretary, always men, she found she had to tackle, taking the ball away from the men to score.
Thatcher was very intelligent, a graduate in chemistry from Oxford, and a barrister at law, and could play that game, sometimes brilliantly. When Boris Becker won the Wimbledon tennis tournament and she was prime minister, he joked to her in his thick German accent, “Vell, how does it feel for a German to beat you at your national game?!” To which Thatcher replied, in the upper-class accent she had learned—her father ran a little grocery store— “I seem to remember that we beat you at your national game, twice.” She never forgave the Germans for starting World Wars I and II.
But in the office with subordinates like Slocock, she wanted a loving home, and made one, treating her staff with nothing like the male lack of consideration she used in the cabinet room.
Ladies, am I right? Gentlemen, you didn’t know it?
I thought so.
Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.
I am a man. I don't see The Job as a game. Mostly I see it as an annoyance I would avoid, if only were able. I'm also a golfer; now there's a game, one that fascinates me, one that has no tackling. Like most generalizations about collective nouns, the whole Mars and Venus metaphor only kind of works. But I'm not complaining; as always, I learned some things from your essay.
Thank you. Your article didn’t convince me much because, as a man, I never viewed my job “as a football game”, viewed it “as a courageous chance to tackle other men”, having my “eye on overturning the leader and becoming him” myself.