Business Networking and Sex - Ivan Misner [6]
When networking with women I find myself trying not to offend.
On the other hand, most of the men and many of the women gave positive responses. Some women even expressed a preference for working with men:
I actually feel more comfortable networking with the opposite sex. I feel women working with women are more competitive.
I especially like working with men. It’s more direct with less “fluff.”
Similarly, quite a few of the men said they enjoyed working with women:
As a male it is easier for me to network with a female. With women there’s no ego issue.
I feel women are better networkers. Sometimes we men are more interested in handing out cards and talking business while women are more intuitive and like to listen. I always get more responses from women after I meet them at a social or business function.
However, almost all the respondents, even those who had positive comments, told us how differently they viewed men and women approaching the art of networking. Most seemed to agree that in networking situations, men were more focused on business and women on relationships.
As a sales trainer, I’ve noticed that men ask for the sale much more readily than do women, who need additional coaching in this area. I’ve witnessed this phenomenon for years.
It may sound sexist and completely contrary to all equal opportunity laws, but if I wasn’t able and willing to be flirtatious with people, I don’t think I’d be as successful as I am.
In their comments, men often cited the different networking styles of men and women but, on the whole, felt women did as good a job networking as men, or better. Their difficulties with women had mostly to do with not wanting to appear sexist.
Why did the opportunity to comment about the gender differences unleash such a strikingly different torrent of opinion?
In a phrase, we believe: The exception becomes the perception.
Most women don’t put up sexy photos on their websites. Most men don’t behave like frat boys. But it’s the few who do that stand out. They give us the impression that there’s a lot more of that sort of thing going on out there.
In our personal experience, if you ask individual men and women to think it over for a few minutes and then summarize in a single sentence how they feel about networking with the opposite sex, the vast majority of responses will sound something like this:
To me, people are people and gender doesn’t play a large role. A person’s attitude, competence, and interest in relationship building as opposed to selling are the attributes I look for when networking. In my business, valuable relationships with both men and women ave been formed by paying attention to those attributes.
Then why were such a high percentage of the comments about the other sex, on both sides of the aisle, so negative? Because bad news travels faster than good news. (Remember the old saying? “Good news can wait but bad news will hunt you down.”)
So although very few women report having any problems themselves, they have the perception that problems are very common because they’ve heard about them through the grapevine (or the internet). The same goes for men. They like networking with women and rarely encounter problems, but hear stories from somewhere else, often second- or third-hand, about women who are oversensitive to jokes or innocent comments or who imagine they’re being discriminated against. They also hear about women who dress provocatively and women who won’t network with men.
If this is the case, why did men and women give similar answers to many of the questions? Why are they in almost complete agreement on many of the issues about networking, including networking with the opposite sex?
Both the men and women in the survey are strongly committed to networking. They believe in it, practice it regularly, and look for ways to improve their networking-related skills. It works