One thing I really really hate about women is this:
Women are great but this one thing annoys the living bejesus out of me. I only want to be around women who are congenitally incapable of being in thrall to some imaginary critical voice that might not fully approve of their actions.
I have no idea how one develops this debilitating need to please some imaginary authority and the attending belief that if there’s one person on the planet who doesn’t fully approve of your actions you are going to drop dead immediately. But I do find it very annoying.
This is clearly why I have no friends.
At work, though, I prefer to collaborate with women. Women always have somewhere else they need to be. I love colleagues who want to be elsewhere because so do I. Lightning-fast meetings where everybody sprints towards the door the second there appears a small pause in the discussion are my thing. Women are great for that. I was on an all-female committee last week where we all arrived with very different proposals. In under 40 minutes, we discussed, agreed, and worded a joint proposal. Then we stomped towards the door like we had a newborn each far away, screaming for food. It was glorious.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’m like you, and I’m a man. Except that, where I teach, women seem to be the ones who would drag on and on, and good luck if you need to come up with a draft proposal in under two hours!
In my department (Foreign languages), 80% of my colleagues are women, and my solution to their seemingly infinite abundance of time to spend on a whole weekday afternoon musing about the best phrasing or something or whether that adjective is appropriate or wouldn’t it be better to ask so-and-so in the Department of Mathematics here let me email him it’ll be quick oh he hasn’t replied yet wasn’t he on sabbatical this year is to ask each of them to send me their suggestions separately which I then collate into a new document, which I later return to each of them well in advance of the meeting when we sit down to draft the final, agreed-upon text and I can send them all on their way while I quickly head home so that I can get back to my precious reading.
How I wish I had some of your colleagues as colleagues!
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The secret is children. The female colleagues here all have 3+ children, so they always need to be somewhere else to do things for the children. The happiest women are the most occupied ones, I find. The meanest are the ones who don’t have much to do.
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Yes:
Honeybee all-female hives vs wasp hives.
Also mixed-sex groups are always a challenge to getting the work done efficiently.
Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque revenit
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Yeah, in the end, Ol’ Mom Nature always has her way ;-D
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