Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Business

The New York Times:

Throughout her entrepreneurial career, Talia Mashiach has pursued another daunting activity besides starting companies: having children, four at last count. And she’s only 30. Enough’s enough, right?

Wrong. She’d like to have a few more. This is good news for people who worry about the dwindling Jewish birth rate, but really. How’s she going to do that and build her hotel-events company into a national powerhouse, as she seems confident she can do?

Because she’s a woman. I have a theory that women, especially mothers, have several advantages over men in the small-business world.

I searched the Internet for evidence for this thesis and found none. The book titles I came across, like “Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office” by Lois P. Frankel, seemed to contradict it. It’s a familiar tune: women leaders need to drop that nurturing nonsense and kick butt the way men do.

Perhaps it is the other way around. Perhaps men ought to imitate the opposite sex. The tide is turning in women’s favor, after all. They now account for 57 percent of college students. They are rising up the ranks in corporate America and invading formerly male sanctuaries like engineering and even construction. Most profoundly, they are changing the entrepreneurial landscape, with the number of businesses they own increasing at twice the overall rate for the last two decades, to 10.4 million today, or 40 percent of the total, according to the Center for Women’s Business Research.