Okay, I have enough responses to the previous post asking how many of you would enter the doorway in the fog.
Without crunching the numbers of my biased sample, it looks as if 95% of you would pass through the doorway, regardless of gender.
But that wasn’t all I was testing.
Recently I read a study about male-female salary differences. Males generally get higher starting salaries, at least partly because they are more likely to negotiate. Most people would assume this difference in behavior has to do with a difference in natural aggressiveness, or with upbringing. Perhaps men, filled with testosterone, are more likely to compete for additional resources. Or perhaps men play more competitive sports, so it is second nature to compete for higher salaries.
I have another hypothesis. I think women have a different sense of what constitutes an invitation.
To men, according to my hypothesis, anything short of a “Do Not Enter” sign is almost the same as an invitation. Women, according to my hypothesis, look for a more explicit invitation. So men negotiate for higher salaries because there’s an opportunity and no obstacle. To men, that’s as good as an invitation. Women might need a more explicit signal that negotiations are acceptable.
If you look at the male/female ratio of responses to any of my other posts, it’s about 90% male. The nature of this blog is that comments are easy to make, and a key feature. But that’s short of an explicit invitation.
My blog about the doorway was different. By asking your gender, I was explicitly inviting both men and women to comment. The ratio of women responding to that post was closer to 25%. That’s a huge increase, and probably indicates the ratio of female readers.
This is far too unscientific to have any meaning, of course. Frankly, I was just curious what would happen.