Celia Walden
It’s no crime, but women love to yak, yak, yak
Our windbag ways exhaust others, but we find them oddly soothing
Iwant to know what Uber executive David Bonderman was thinking when he made a sexist comment at an Uber crisis meeting … about rampant sexism within Uber. I want to find out what he was thinking, bottle it and force male executives the world over to take a slug. They would all lose their jobs and their companies would go down, but it would be one last firework-display-like hurrah for non-pc-wired human beings – and it would give the rest of us a resounding belly laugh in the mirthless echo chamber that is now corporate life.
Then again, maybe I’m the only one laughing. There was certainly no sign of laughter at the $70 billion taxi-hailing company headquarters on Tuesday when fellow board member Arianna Huffington – who was presenting Uber employees with data showing that once a company had one woman on its board, it was more likely to have a second – was interrupted by Bonderman saying: “Actually, what it shows is that it’s much more likely to be more talking.”
The subsequent email he sent apologising to staff for his “disrespectful comment” not being enough (at this point self-flagellation on a purpose-built glass plinth in Uber’s state-of-the-art headquarters wouldn’t have been enough), Bonderman resigned – but not before having given himself a few more lashes. To have inferred that women are inveterate chatterboxes, he wept, wasn’t just “careless, inappropriate, and inexcusable” but “destructive”.
What Bonderman didn’t say – and this I find fascinating – is: “It was a joke. Get over it.” He didn’t say: “On this day and every day in America, 65 babies will die before their first birthday, 85 people will be shot dead and 500 to 600,000 people will sleep on the streets. Is it perhaps an idea – just an idea, mind – to devote our energies elsewhere? Because imagine what we could achieve if we channelled all that outrage into something genuinely righteous? Oh, and you can stick your resignation up your perfectly formed behinds.”
He didn’t say that because we are living in an era of microaggressions and a culture of fear. And after Uber’s recent investigation into allegations of sexual harassment, gender discrimination and generally boorish Silicon Valley behaviour within the company, and the resignation of its CEO, Travis Kalanick, earlier this week, that fear is terminal. But all this is beside the point, which is that, like so many jokes and generalisations, what Bonderman said was true: women never stop talking.
And as a woman I think I can say this without being forced to resign, but if I do have to fall on my sword, you can be sure I will yap, yap, yap away until the last breath leaves my body.
I have sat through meetings with men and meetings with women and, yes, I would say that the more women there are, the more likely that meeting is to turn into a coffee morning – which can be immensely profitable in this and many industries, but possibly not all.
Women are communicators. And that’s not a sexist comment, but a fact, corroborated by scientists who have found that our garrulousness is partly down to testosterone, which shrinks the area of the brain responsible for communication, leaving women with more cells.
Our windbag ways might be exhausting for others, but we find them oddly soothing. Research shows women enjoy the sound of their own voices more than men. In fact, where the average man uses 10,000 words a day, women rattle off an estimated 20,000. My husband’s response to this was: “That all? You were definitely a 30,000-worder last Sunday.”
To which I replied: “Well, it could have been halved if I hadn’t had to say everything twice. And quartered if you men spoke more.” Then again, given the trouble they get into every time they open their mouths, that’s not about to happen.