Differences of communication between genders: some fallacies exposed

Men are more likely to focus their attention on one thing at a time. They tend to compartmentalize relevant material, discard what they regard as extraneous data, and analyse information in a more linear, causal path. Dr Fisher calls this step thinking.

As they make decisions, women tend to weigh more variables, consider more options, and see a wider array of possible solutions to a problem. Women tend to generalize, to synthesize, to take a broader, more holistic, more contextual perspective of any issue. They tend to think in webs of factors, not straight lines, so Dr Fisher coined a term for this broad, contextual, feminine way of reasoning: web thinking.

With the growing complexity and sharpening pace of the global marketplace, more companies are likely to need employees who possess web thinking attributes. In this highly complex marketplace, a contextual view is a distinct asset. Women are built to employ this perspective.

What is important about gender differences is not whether they arise from social structure or from brain structure, a misleading distinction, but that they are not inevitable, and they can be changed.

Lise Eliot, of Chicago Medical School, concurs suggesting that ''we are being told there is nothing we can do to improve our potential because it is innate. That is wrong. Boys can develop powerful linguistic skills and girls can acquire deep spatial skills.

Eliot asserts that "children don't inherit intellectual differences. They learn them. They are a result of what we expect a boy or a girl to be.''

Thus our intellects are not prisoners of our genders or our genes, and those who claim otherwise are perpetuating old-fashioned stereotypes with a facade of scientific credibility.