Pangea Day was created from the vision of Jehane Noujaim who was awarded the prestigious TED prize in 2006. TED asked her to make a wish to change the world and hers was to bring the world together through the power of film. I had the pleasure of attending the live filming of Pangea Day at Sony Studios today. It was a great excuse to invite friends, including documentary film maker Cathee Weiss.
Jehane Joujaim (photo provided by event sponsor, Nokia)
I enjoyed sharing the day with women from around the world who are smart and beautiful and not afraid to look feminine. Among them, Queen Noor was a delight in both her demeanor and her shimmering turquoise gown. Meg Ryan, who is on the board of directors of the Pangea project, is eternally adorable.
Today is Pangea Day! I am on my way to Sony Studios in LA to join the event there. You can participate in this important global event through Current TV, the internet or other possible venues in your area. Please check it out.
Coors holds a very special place in my heart. I loved working there because the beer business is fun and they treated their people very well. However, I quickly learned that being an executive for a beer company meant being able to take humor like a man.
I’ve not been in a men’s locker room but traveling with an otherwise all male management team might be similar to what it’s like. Their idea of entertainment was a stream of jokes taken at someone else’s expense.
Good wit is attractive to women and important in male hierarchical play.
One reason I fell in love with my husband was that I loved his way with words. I admire Ray’s humor because he is able to be very funny without resorting to being gross, vulgar or hurtful. I consider that evidence of his intelligence.
Apparently, I am not alone in being attracted to a man’s wit.
Whenever you look at on-line dating sites, you will see many references regarding good sense of humor (GSOH). But that doesn’t mean that men and women are looking for the same thing.
Women want a man who is a humor “generator,” while men seek a humor “appreciator.” (Eric Bressler, a psychologist at McMaster University in Canada)*
Geoffrey Miller theorizes that men learned to use humor and wit to attract a mate and perhaps to outsmart other men.*
Men and Women use humor differently
Jonny Goldstein replied to my April 8th post saying, “‘the arch enemy’ statement was definitely written twit in cheek!” Jonny, I was using your words to make my point about male competitive spirit, not to express hurt feelings. I very much appreciated the reminder that I wanted to write this post about gender differences and humor. Many thanks also to Tim who left an inspirational comment here on April 30th about “verbal jousting”.
Anything said when comparing men and women usually includes sweeping generalizations and certainly there are individual, cultural and demographic differences. But looking at some expert opinions, it would be worth considering:
“Men taunt other men with clever nicknames and insults. That isn’t something that women do. They don’t tend to play practical jokes, or engage in humor that humiliates or puts somebody down.” (John Morreal, a professor of religion at William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia, who has studied humor for 25 years.)*
“For women the primary goal of conversation is intimacy and, for men, the goal is positive self-presentation. Women’s humor supports a goal of greater intimacy by being supportive and healing, while men’s humor reinforces performance goals of competition, the establishment of hierarchical relationships and self-aggrandizement.” (from Mary Crawford’s book, Talking Difference on Gender and Language)
Many men can feel threatened by a woman with a sharp wit. However, men who do appreciate their female partner’s humor are usually more secure, mature and educated than average. (Don Nilsen, a linguistics professor and expert on humor)* I would add the same holds true for male appreciation of intelligent, successful women.
*Thanks to William Lawson who sourced the *’d experts for an article in Psychology Today.
There are fewer successful female stand-up comics
I know a lot of very funny female writers of books, columns, blogs etc and there are some great comedians but in general the number of men investing their time in being humorous, particularly stand-up is simply larger.
I think it could be explained by the two common goals of being funny: to joust with other men and to attract women.
Christopher Hitchens explains why he thinks “women aren’t funny” in a Vanity Fair article. I am not saying I agree with all his points but I thought it was worth including.
Jokes about the difference between men and women
No discussion about the gender differences in humor would be complete without at least one humorous reference to stereotypical differences between men and women. There are so many, here is one cute list and a sample:
Nicknames:
If Laura, Suzanne, Debra and Rose go out for lunch, they will call each other Laura, Suzanne, Debra and Rose.
If Mike, Charlie, Bob and John go out, they will affectionately refer to each other as Fat Boy, Godzilla, Peanut-Head and Scrappy
Generational Differences in Humor
Do male teenagers use particularly aggressive humor? I should ask my friend, Vanessa Van Petten, author of Teens Today but I did pick up this amusing recent experiment.
As reported by the BBC, Sam Shuster observed hundreds of people while unicycling around Newcastle upon Tyne. He discovered that men made more jokes at him than women. He said the majority of male jokers were aggressive and mocking, while most women at most teased him with a smile. He found teenage boys to be particularly aggressive in their humor.
Is the Way Men and Women Use Humor Changing?
Political correctness and the evolution of the place in society of women and minorities may have affected how we use humor. As women become integrated into previously male domains, is the gender related use of humor changing? What have you noticed in your life?
The question has often been asked, are men more competitive than women? It seems reasonable to believe that generally we are competitive in different areas. Certainly living in different cultures affects our competitive nature. Competition can be defined as related to risk-taking, tendency to choke, versus collaboration etc. Attempts at scientific analysis of the topic are still controversial. There is an oft-quoted 2005 academic study by Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund, this recent attempt from Melissa Lafsky at The New York Times, one on Choking from Slate and a comment from Kate Minaker on the WorldWinner on-line gaming survey.
From my personal experience, I have seen more thrill of competition in men than women.
This does not mean that women cannot be successful. Women can be and are very effective and successful. Amongst women executives I know well, it is more about personal excellence and doing our best and less about the thrill of competition. Personally, I enjoy winning a tennis game, but mostly I enjoy playing well. Watching men play tennis, for most it appears to be crucially important to win, even in the most casual of settings.
This is also a generalization but it seems to me that women try harder than men. We are the Avis of the sexes. This was the shared opinion of my Women on Top Japan group. Certainly for me, mastering Japanese after the age of 30 took a lot of “trying hard.”
When I am trying to accomplish something I have an “it’s never over till it’s over” attitude but I am only competing with a situation not with another individual.
Why are we different? Could it be linked to our hunter/gatherer beginnings?
The Rohit Bhargava Crowdsourcing Blogger Interview Contest
As many of you know, I participated in a blogger interview contest run by Rohit Bhargava who is using various types of crowdsourcing to promote his new book, Personality Not Included (PNI). Shashi Bellamkonda, one of my first TwitterBuds and a great supporter, suggested that I participate. He assured me that Rohit was worthy of the effort. I was pleased to be one of the 12 finalist interviews that Rohit selected from the 55 submitted when he set up the voting process. He presented the winners here.
Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to come to my blog, read my interview and vote for me.
Rohit’s BrainStorming Breakfast
On April 5, following the Blogger Social launch night fest ending 3AM, Rohit gathered us at 9:30 AM to brainstorm follow-on promotional strategies for PNI. Women outweighed men in the gender ratio of those willing to drag themselves out of bed and keep their commitment to attend.
The Opportunity to Bring People to My Blog
I used this contest as an opportunity to introduce my new blog to friends I had not yet mentioned it to. I sent e-mails to some of my network in Japan, mostly those on LinkedIn and my Women on Top Japan group. I appealed to the group of Single Life Authors that I list in the “Authors We Love” on our Singelringen site. I also wrote to some of my Facebook friends. Finally I wrote to my Twitter Friends. As Blogger Social drew near I made new TwitterBuds with the participants. I included those that had followed me back. My message basically said: ‘Could you please read my interview and consider voting for me?’ As you might guess, jumping to a blog, scanning an interview and voting is something that TwitterBuds are most willing to do. For the average person, this is a big deal request, but on the other hand I was especially grateful for the comments from my non-Twitter friends who took the time to figure out how to leave a comment on my contest post.
The Voting Results
At the beginning, on Tuesday, April 1st, when I found myself getting a respectable number of votes, I was happy. I had told my friends, ‘I just want to make a decent showing amongst these respected and well-networked bloggers.’ I was not surprised that the highly networked Connie Bensen made an early surge to 24% of the votes. I was tied for second place when I got on the plane in LA to go to Blogger Social NYC Thursday morning, April 3rd (I never expected this). I felt so grateful to each person who had voted for me. When I arrived in NYC at 5PM I was shocked to find I was in first place with 21%. I stayed in first place through the night.
Competition is Like Crack?
In the morning of the final day of the contest, Friday, April 4th, I saw Jonny Goldstein’s “vote for me” avatar on Twitter and his Tweet saying, “@LindaSherman is a worthy competitor. It is going to be a long day” and I thought, “uh-oh.” Around noon Jonny suddenly surged from 19% to 34% and I thought, “that’s it, it’s over.” I hadn’t expected to win, so I was satisfied with a good showing. But after tasting a moment of special glory, I have to admit that falling to second place - with an unexpected voting gap like that - was rather a let-down. I had lunch with Shashi in NYC on the first day of the Blogger Social. Shashi happened to connect to Jonny Goldstein on the phone during lunch on another matter, and we thought it would be fun if I said “hello” to him. I said to Jonny, with honest intentions to save him some energy, ‘you can relax now, I am not spending any more time on this.’ I later saw him tweet, “I spoke on the phone to my ‘arch enemy’ Linda Sherman today.” Jonny wrote about “competition” several times including in his final summary of the process Jonny’s I won blog. He said, “As you can see, I poured quite a bit of energy into this contest. It reinforced for me the power of competition to drive engagement. It was like crack. I couldn’t stop.”
Competition can be looked at as a useful marketing tool for crowdsourcing exercises. Voting for user generated videos, such as Doritos’ Crash the SuperBowl contest; or for American Idol, are examples of the many opportunities to make use of crowds to generate both content and voting activity that create traffic to your brand.
What do you think about the thrill of competition, trying harder, and how it applies to men and women?
Update: Vanessa Van Petten kindly offered to guest blog this post on her popular Teens Today blog bringing me new readers including Tim “The Fool Man” who made a comment well worth reading below. Actually all of the comments for this post are great, so please take a look.
I first discovered Rohit Bhargava through one of the earliest blog posts written about Singelringen. He picked it up in August 2006, very shortly after my company began representing the Swedish product for North America. I was impressed both with Rohit’s blog and his trend spotting.
I am also very impressed with the way Rohit has put together his book launch for Personality Not Included, organizing bloggers to interview him for personal replies to each one. We had the opportunity to review his introduction before posing our questions. I was pleased to be part of what Geoff Livingston refers to as a noteworthy “crowdsourcing” process. I wanted to make my participation relevant to my blog so I created interview questions with an international perspective.
You can read all the great interviews that resulted from this very interesting process as well as Rohit’s introduction to Personality Not Included by clicking on the icon below. Please vote for the best interview (me! me! me!) here and here before Friday, April 4th, 9PM PST. Voting in both places has been blessed by Rohit. My apologies for the inconvenience.
Personality matters in your business. In preface to my questions, please let me share this excerpt from Rohit’s introduction:
The three hottest topics in business today are how to do more with social media (blogs, social networks, etc), using word-of-mouth marketing (the number one source of influence according to just about every international study), and interacting more authentically with customers. Personality is the theme that incorporates all of these topics.
Linda: In running subsidiaries of global companies, there is often discussion of tuning products for the local market. Certainly there are personalities that are strong enough to cross borders, but what did you learn about personality localization?
Rohit: You are right to point out that this is an important ingredient and it’s naive to believe that taking the same personality and rolling it out globally could work. Localizing personality comes down to finding the right individuals in every regional team and giving them to tools to craft the right personality and voice in their regions. The book offers a guide on how to do that which could be rolled out across different regions equally effectively.
Linda: Did you gather any stories for companies headquartered outside the USA?
Rohit: I did and I am really glad you asked this! Would you believe that in more than 50 interviews that I have done so far, you are the only one that asked about the international aspect of the book? I did spend quite a bit of time trying to get relevant examples from other countries because I see the global market for this book as a big opportunity. A few of the international brands I talk about in the book are Innocent Drinks (UK), Harry’s Cafe de Wheels (Australia), Moo.com (UK), Singapore Airlines (Singapore), and El Bulli (Spain). Many other brands I talk about are large global brands that are often struggling with exactly the issues you raised in your questions.
Linda: Customer service styles vary by country. In Japan B:B customer service is very personal and very expensive. Subsidiaries of foreign companies operating there have to play by the same rules. How do you see the ROI on this level of relationship based customer service and sales or the opposite end of the spectrum?
Rohit: Building a good relationship does take time. In my experience, I have found BtoB marketers to be the most accepting of this fact across the world. Japan may require more time and effort than many other cultures, but the idea of spending time to build an ongoing relationship is often a core concept that salespeople understand, but marketers have trouble with. The ROI of this type of effort can be huge because it is focused on a direct relationship and more broadly on word of mouth. Compare the “I” spent on this to the investment many brands make in useless television advertising destined to be ignored and you will understand how little this “I” really is. What if United airlines spent a fraction of their advertising budget for meaningless comic strip ads on building relationships with their key influencers?
Linda: Did you find any gender differences in your research? Obviously, there are personality differences between men and women. Can a corporate or brand personality be gender flavored? Should we match the gender of the personality to the bulk of the customer base?
Rohit: Another interesting question I haven’t heard before. I’m not sure that I saw a definite trend one way or the other when it came to gender and brands with personality. There was an obvious correlation with age (which will likely not be surprising), but gender was not an obvious factor in what I found. That said, there are certainly some brands and services that much more significantly target a certain gender because it is a core element of their personality. This is to be expected.
Linda: When will your book be available in other languages? Do you have a plan for which languages to introduce first?
Rohit: I have a large international publisher and so far that has paid off with publication rights already set in 8 countries and another 12-15 under negotiation. We have finalized translation rights for Chinese (Taiwan), Spanish, Russian and Thai. Another 8 or so languages are still under negotiation and all international versions should be out late this year.
Linda: I imagine that your employer Ogilvy is very happy about your book. Did they support you in any way to produce it? Will they be buying copies to give away to prospective and current clients?
Rohit: In terms of getting the book deal and contract, I did that on my own … but yes, the 360 Digital Influence team that I work in at Ogilvy was super supportive of my effort, letting me shift my working schedule to 4 days a week as I wrote the book. Now that I am moving into marketing and promotion, they have been brilliant, helping me to publicize the book, get media interested and coordinating events. I’m very lucky to work for an agency where I get to work on amazing projects, and get this kind of support for the book.
Come join 5 leading Single Life authors next Thursday night as sassy soloists fan the flames of living single at the SF Commonwealth Club. Meet and mingle with other singles during the unmarried blissfest! Please tell all your single and wish-they-were single friends!
THURSDAY APRIL 3 | 6:00 PM
The Commonwealth Club
595 Market St.
San Francisco, CA 94105
WOMEN WRITERS TELL ALL: SINGLE IN THE CITY Sasha Cagen, Author, Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics Jane Ganahl, Author, Naked on the Page: The Misaventures of My Unmarried Midlife Wendy Merrill, Author, Falling Into Manholes: The Memoir of a Bad/Good Girl Rachel Sarah, Author, Single Mom Seeking: Playdates, Blind Dates, and Other Dispatches from the Dating World Jerusha Stewart, Author, The Single Girl’s Manifesta
The joys and challenges of single life are topic A for this panel of talented women writers. Men, single parenthood, dates from hell, aging, career and the myth of “having it all” - nothing will be off-limits! What does it mean to be an unmarried female today? How is it different than it was for our mothers? Can a woman find happiness living la vida sola? Of course! Come and find out how!
In the presentation skills trainings Ray and I give in Tokyo, we talk about tapping into the right brain of the listener. In this inspiring, powerful presentation by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, she actually brings a human brain out on stage to make her point. Now that’s a prop!
If you haven’t yet seen this Ted 2008 video of Jill Bolte Taylor’s experience of her stroke and what she was able to learn from it, please find 19 minutes and watch it. You will be glad you did.
Following Jason Calacanis’s recent keynote address at Affiliate Summit West, I was motivated to check Maholo’s entry. Good job.
February 29 was declared a day when women could propose to men (made famous by cartoonist Al Capp in 1937 as Sadie Hawkins Day) back when that was a big deal. Such a concept is gratefully no longer relevant. But in that spirit, it is a nice idea to give ourselves permission to reach out with affection on Leap Day to someone who doesn’t expect it.
Or as suggested on a blog about female friendships, we can reach out to a female friend that we have been neglecting. Irene Levine Ph.D, Professor of Psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine, who is collecting stories for a worthy project that will culminate in a book about the “nature and course of female friendships”, particularly “fractured friendships,” suggests that we call February 29th “Make Time for Friends Day”.
As a cultural returnee to the USA, I found TV a very useful way to catch up. These days it’s hard to use that as an excuse but TV is still fresh enough to me to be interesting. I usually watch TV in background while getting computer-based work done. If I am fully watching TV, I want it to be pre-recorded or on commercial free cable. Commercials interest me but I want to control which ones I watch.
I went through a phase of not owning a TV for three years before moving to Japan in 1981.
In Japan I began watching TV to study Japanese. The dramas were pretty easy to follow even with minimal understanding of the language. I liked to use American movies broadcast in Japanese because I already knew the story so I could absorb the language almost subconsciously. I found TV a great right-brained way to study.
Broadcasting TV subtitles are not mandatory for television sets directed at Japanese consumers but I managed to find one. NHK was the leader but gradually the commercial stations produced more and more shows with closed caption sub-titles. This is a terrific way to study Japanese. Watching the story unfold, listening and reading is a great right brain left brain medley. I still have a collection of VHS tapes (I know, ancient technology) I made in Japan. Over the years, people would tell me my Japanese sounded “natural” as opposed to “textbook” which I attribute to the influence of TV.
I also watched Japanese TV to follow consumer taste. The style in Japan for commercial broadcast TV is to present a series of 12 shows that trap you in the story. While on the mission of checking out a hit show to better understand my customers, I would certainly get hooked from time to time. A show title that translated to “I Owe Her Money” was one of my favorites. It was about a man who falls in love with a professional money lender.
I found this method of studying language so useful that I used American movie DVD’s to study French and then Italian when I was working for Club Med and Barilla (supported by Berlitz lessons). The great thing about DVD’s is I can watch in French/Italian with English titles and then in French/Italian with French/Italian subtitles. The work days in Japan are very long but it is possible to squeeze in 30 minutes here and there. I set up an exer-cycle in front of the TV for morning exercise before dashing to the office.
These days I like watching TV in Spanish, which is very convenient in LA. I especially like HBO Latina because it broadcasts Spanish closed caption. Unfortunately it isn’t broadcast in Hawaii. I guess I am the only person spending time in Hawaii that wants to see it.
The 3MB WMV version of this YouTube link just arrived from my ex-JapanBud Guy Aelvoet (former COO Disney Japan) who now resides in sunny South of France. Guy fills my in-box regularly with quite excellent humor, photos and statements forwarded from various corners of Europe. I have a pile of gems reserved in a Mac.Mail folder that I haven’t had time to go through lately. But being an ad addict the subject “splendide pub” on this one caught my eye.
A quick search on YouTube showed it wasn’t new but it is definitely worth a watch. “Children See Children Do.” “Make your Influence Positive.” Thanks to Child Friendly Australia where you can find other PSA’s.
I found this ad to be very effective and moving. Did you?
Certainly a child’s behavior can be strongly impacted by someone close and powerful in their life. This type of influence of power may be found elsewhere. Can you recall a manager in your life that affected your own management style? I have definitely seen this domino effect in organizations.
