On a normal day, Draegers is controlled chaos: several thousand people, a high proportion of whom are women, descend on Draegers and basically strip its shelves bare (or would, except for the hard-working Draegers staff).

On the male-predominant days (Mother's Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas a few other holidays) Draegers turns into utter, uncontrolled, disaster. When I arrived at 8:30 this Sunday morning, there were dozens of men in line on the pastry counter, piled high with pink cakes. Said men had the children, giving mom a break.

But unlike normal Draegers, men can't multi-task. Normal Draegers finds moms grabbing kids just before the food fights erupt: daddy-Draegers-day reveals children knocking over whole counters full of stacked boxes, racing carts in the aisles and otherwise trashing the place. Mom-mediated Draegers is relatively efficient: daddy-Draegers is hell.

The single difference seems to be the multi-tasking: men can be almost as aggressive fighting for the last pink-and-white-frosted angel cake, but they can't keep a lid on kids, get to checkout without forgetting something or find things the way moms can. So, I guess I'm buying into the notion that Steven Pinker and a few others have postulated that, while the races are equal, men and women have evolved with different feature sets...
Comments 10:27:51 PM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures