Why She Buys Read Online Free

identity is a crucial part of our personality development. Masculinity itself is often defined as that which is not feminine . 1 From the time they’re young, boys learn to reject or repress all things feminine to be accepted by their peers and society at large, which is just one reason you don’t see a lot of six-year-old boys wearing hot pink outfits to soccer practice. 2 Throughout their childhoods, boys are under pressure to prove their masculinity by shunning or even mocking feminine traits. The penalty for being viewed as even remotely feminine is to risk being humiliated for being a “sissy.”
    Then, after about twenty-two years of this societal pressure, many men find themselves graduating from college (and some from the über-masculine world of fraternity culture) and entering jobs in which their paycheck suddenly depends on understanding, identifying with, and selling things to women. Fresh out of business school and poof! they’re a junior brand manager on a diaper product. Once on the job, few executives of either sex get any kind of formal training on gender differences. They are just expected to informally“pick up” this knowledge through colleagues and vendors. For many people in these positions, achieving success has historically involved some trial and error, lots of smarts, and just enough consumer research to be dangerous. But in a era where businesses are struggling and every sale counts, that old formula isn’t enough anymore. Now, most consumer-driven companies must master female psychology to survive, because when it comes to consumer spending, women are the sex determining their fortunes. Just when executives have mastered becoming tech literate, they find there’s another skill they need to keep up: becoming female literate .
    It’s a subject that can seem overwhelming when you stop and think about it. How well can the sexes ever really understand each other? The fact that we don’t—and that we often want different things from life—is what drives sitcoms and drama plots the world over. It’s the foundation of everything from Shakespeare’s plays to my husband’s insistence on setting our alarm clock to his favorite Rush song (“Limelight”) every morning, just to playfully torture me. Ask any woman you know: Geddy Lee’s wailing falsetto is a guy thing. Mutual incomprehension between the sexes is one of the most maddening and delightful aspects of life. But there’s no room for it in business.
    We don’t check our biology at the door when we walk into work every morning, so the challenges we have in understanding the opposite sex in our personal lives can spill over to work without our realizing it. To plumb the depths of the gender gap for this book, I’ve talked to dozens of executives of both sexes, across industries. For better or worse, their stories are similar.
    “The things that interest women are so strange to me,” explains one male senior sales executive. “For instance, I gota new suit and wore it to the office the other day. When I got home, the first thing my wife asked me was, ‘Did anyone comment on your new suit?’ It was such a crazy question, because of course no one commented—I work with a bunch of guys, and nobody would ever care about my clothes, let alone say anything about them. I’m constantly mystified that my wife and her friends notice everything about everything—what other people wear and how they look, or whether they’ve gotten a new haircut or lost weight. Every time we go to someone’s house, my wife will notice a new piece of furniture or a new picture on the wall. And when she brings it up to me, I usually have no idea what she’s talking about, because I would never notice—or care.”
    It’s easy to see how this example of the gender gap could impact a business. Been to a Sears lately? The out-of-date decor, peeling paint, and drab fixtures are just a few of the things keeping female customers away from the once-mighty