Business Networking and Sex - Ivan Misner [59]
If I was going to a networking event, I had to make sure family was cared for in my absence. If it was an evening meeting, and I left the kids with Dad, I had to make sure he had something ready to feed them and leave notes reminding them to get their homework done. When I got home from the meeting tired, I still had to make sure their breakfast and lunch money were set out and ready to go for the next morning. Time permitting, I might even be lucky enough to throw in a load of laundry before bed. This chaos and over-demand can be overwhelming and probably is the reason so many women choose to network less than their male counterparts.
The biggest complaint I hear from women is their inability to attend networking events because of family issues such as getting kids to school or day care. In my own experience it made it difficult for me to network at times. There are more networking opportunities today than there were in the early 1990s, so women now may have a wider variety of choices to accommodate their family schedules.
The very fact that we are so busy being the ringmasters of our own personal circuses makes it vitally important to make the best use of our networking and business time allotments. Both genders can help themselves by developing good networking habits, meaning spending lots of quality time building deeper connections with the networks they are already part of rather than running around trying to meet more new people. This can be done in a very manageable fashion and will glean rich results from invested time.
WHO’S RUNNING THE HOUSE?
Networking events take place every day of the week, and in many different time frames from early mornings and lunch hours to evenings. Finding the right way to make it all fit together can be a bit of a challenge. An article titled “Battle of the Sexes” by MySalary.com shows how men and women divvy their time among life’s responsibilities. The statistical data is from the American Time Use Survey, courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
1. Full-time workers: Men averaged 8.2 hours daily, which was slightly longer than women, who averaged 7.8.
2. Chores: On an average day, 20 percent of men did housework such as cleaning or laundry, compared to 52 percent of women.
3. Meals: Thirty-seven percent of men did food prep or cleanup compared with 64 percent of women. If this indicates men were otherwise occupied during cleanup by the eating part of the equation, would anyone really be surprised?
4. Child care: During the average weekday, women spent 1.2 hours providing physical child care such as bathing or feeding, while men spent 23 minutes. On weekends, women provided about an hour of physical care to household children and men spent about half an hour.
A recent U.S. Census Bureau survey counts approximately 13.7 million single parents in the United States. Eighty-four percent of them are moms, and the remaining 16 percent, fathers. This group will no doubt require more scheduling flexibility and time management skills to allow them time for committed networking.
I can hear the ladies out there thinking, OK, now tell me something I didn’t already know!
The Survey Says ...
Safety
One area in which we might expect to find sex differences is in personal safety. Indeed, this question that unveiled one of the most dramatic differences between male and female views.
Participants were asked whether they felt unsafe attending networking events in the evening. Figure 4.2 shows how they responded.
FIGURE 4.2—Safety by Gender
This result seems to indicate a strong difference between the sexes at the “never” end of the scale, with considerably more men—more than 82 percent—saying they never felt unsafe attending evening events, and fewer than 64 percent of the women responding similarly. At the other extreme, although they numbered fewer than 7 percent, nearly twice as many women as men said they always or usually felt unsafe at evening events (the