Subject: Should Women Rule the World? (Depends Which Decade) Hey there, this episode is dedicated to my SIL and brother who are "Stranded in Albuquerque," which sounds like a bad movie :) Love you much and good luck getting home tomorrow.... New episode of Midlife Mayhem is live, and this one got away from me a little — in the best way. I started with a silly question (should women run the world?) and ended up going down a genuine rabbit hole on hormones, age, and what actually makes a good leader. Whether you listen or just want the highlights, here's the full rundown — grab a coffee, this one's a long one. --- **THE QUESTION** If you had to hand the keys to civilization over to women, no debate, no committee, just hand them over — would we actually be better off? My honest answer isn't "women, full stop." It depends enormously on which decade of a woman's hormonal life you're talking about. A 28-year-old, a 45-year-old white-knuckling through perimenopause, and a 62-year-old on the other side of it are basically running on different fuel, different brain chemistry, different priorities. And fair's fair — the men get the exact same treatment later on. If we're going to talk hormones and leadership, testosterone doesn't get a free pass. One honest caveat before any of this: we're talking about averages here. There's enormous overlap between men and women on every trait below — plenty of men are more patient than the average woman, plenty of women are more reckless than the average man. Picture two bell curves stacked almost entirely on top of each other, with just the tails poking out on either side. That's what most of this research actually looks like. Averages tell us about tendencies at a population level. They don't tell you anything about the specific woman or man standing in front of you. **PATIENCE ISN'T ONE THING, IT'S TWO** Women tend to have a real, measurable edge on delayed gratification — waiting for the bigger payoff instead of grabbing the smaller one right now. That's a huge asset for long-horizon leadership: the difference between greenlighting a policy that won't pay off for ten years versus needing a visible win by next quarter to survive the news cycle. Some of this comes down to dopamine and reward sensitivity, both of which are influenced by testosterone — higher average testosterone tracks with more impulsive, immediate-reward-seeking behavior, in both sexes. But patience for other people's behavior — frustration tolerance — is a totally different animal, and women don't score especially high there. Shorter fuse, faster escalation to interpersonal slights, even while showing more patience with numbers and long-term payoffs. So "patience" as a leadership trait is really two separate skills, and women only clearly win on one of them. There's also a workplace wrinkle worth mentioning: wanting more time or more data before committing to a decision is a real form of patience, but it's culturally read as weak, while slamming your hand on the table and deciding right now gets read as strong. Which one is actually better leadership? Depends entirely on whether you're in a five-alarm fire or making a call that'll play out over a decade. **THE NEGOTIATION MYTH, BUSTED** The old research (Linda Babcock's "Women Don't Ask") found women negotiate less assertively for themselves — smaller salaries, smaller raises, faster concessions, across multiple industries and countries. But later work, especially by Hannah Riley Bowles, found that gap almost completely disappears — or reverses — the moment a woman is negotiating on behalf of someone else: a client, a team, a department, a cause. Women assigned to advocate for someone other than themselves perform just as assertively as men, sometimes more so. So it was never a competence gap or a confidence gap. It's a social penalty — women get judged more harshly by observers of both genders for self-advocacy specifically, sometimes called the "backlash effect," which creates a rational incentive to soften their own asks. And since leadership is almost always negotiating on someone else's behalf — a country, a shareholder base, a cause — this stereotype falls apart exactly where it matters most. There's a style difference worth a mention too: women tend to favor integrative, win-win approaches slightly more than purely winner-takes-all ones. In complex multi-party negotiations — trade deals, coalitions, multi-stakeholder mergers — that instinct finds trades a purely competitive negotiator would walk right past. **TEND-AND-BEFRIEND VS. FIGHT-OR-FLIGHT** The classic stress response — fight or flight — was studied almost entirely in men for decades, which is a genuinely embarrassing gap in the scientific record. When researchers (Shelley Taylor at UCLA) finally looked at women specifically, they found oxytocin and estrogen often produce a parallel stress response: de-escalate, calm the room, protect and support others, alongside or instead of pure fight-or-flight. Neither response is objectively better. Tend-and-befriend is brilliant for de-escalation and keeping a room, a company, or a country from fracturing under pressure. Fight-or-flight is brilliant for fast, unilateral action when there's genuinely no time to build consensus — a real ten-second decision. A world run entirely by one or the other would have a real blind spot. Good leadership needs both responses available, ideally at the same table. There's a cortisol wrinkle too: men tend to show a sharper cortisol spike under status-threat stress (think public failure, being outperformed in front of peers), while women tend to show a sharper spike under relational stress (conflict, social rejection). Different triggers, equally real stress — neither sex has a monopoly on "the calm one." **ARE WOMEN "TOO EMOTIONAL" TO LEAD?** Not by the data. Men and women experience emotion with similar intensity on average — the real difference is what researchers call emotional granularity: how precisely you can name what you're feeling and why. "I'm angry" versus "I'm frustrated because I feel unheard, not actually angry with you." Better labeling is a regulation skill, not a lack of control — you genuinely can't manage an emotion you can't accurately name — and women are consistently better at it, partly because we're socialized from a young age to identify and express emotion more than men are. So the "too emotional" stereotype has it exactly backwards: the ability to explain the emotion is evidence of more control, not less. **THE TWIST: WHICH WOMAN, AND WHAT AGE?** This is the part I had the most fun with, because I don't think every woman over eighteen is hormonally interchangeable, and pretending otherwise is a little insulting to all of us. - **30s — peak drive era.** Estrogen and progesterone at their most stable, dopamine-driven ambition running high. A lot of women describe this decade as their most confident, most externally-focused, "I will build the thing, get out of my way" period. Some of this is career stage and hard-won reps as much as hormones — but it lines up consistently with peak self-reported ambition. Founder energy. - **Perimenopause (mid-40s to early 50s) — the messy middle.** Estrogen doesn't decline smoothly here; it swings wildly before it drops, and estrogen directly regulates serotonin and GABA, the brain's calming chemicals. Real, well-documented irritability and mood volatility follow. Would I want her making a split-second, high-stakes call on a rough week? Probably not, and I say that with love, since I've got this decade ahead of me too. But that same hormonal chaos also produces a total collapse of patience for nonsense, injustice, and things she's quietly tolerated for years — a bad job, a bad dynamic, a friendship that only took. Redirected well, that's the leader who finally says "we are not doing this anymore" about the exact thing everyone else was too polite to fix. There's a reason "perimenopausal rage" has become such a widely shared, almost celebrated phrase — a lot of us recognize it as clarity wearing an irritable costume. - **Postmenopause (late 50s and beyond) — the era nobody markets correctly.** Anthropologist Margaret Mead called it "postmenopausal zest" back in the 1950s. Once the volatility settles, a lot of women report a genuine surge in confidence, directness, and lowered social anxiety — some of it tied to testosterone declining more slowly than estrogen, leaving proportionally more of it than at any earlier stage. Less concern about being liked, more willingness to say the useful, blunt thing everyone else is thinking. Historically, in a striking number of cultures, this is exactly the life stage when women became tribal elders and matriarchs — the person whose opinion actually ended the argument, because she had nothing left to prove. If I had to pick one age bracket to hand the keys to? Late 50s to late 60s. Established, hard-won judgment. A documented drop in people-pleasing. Decades of pattern recognition that a 32-year-old, no matter how brilliant, simply hasn't had time to accumulate yet. **NOW, FAIR'S FAIR — WHAT ABOUT THE MEN?** Andropause is real but far fuzzier than menopause — there's no hard biological cliff-edge like ovulation stopping, and huge individual variation between men. Some seventy-year-olds have the testosterone of a forty-year-old, and vice versa. What's more consistently documented with age is a decline in cognitive flexibility: the ability to update a belief cleanly when new information arrives, instead of defaulting to an entrenched, previously-stated position. There's real cognitive science behind why people (not just men) get more rigid with age — confidence in existing beliefs tends to outpace accuracy, and reversing a public position starts to feel less like updating an opinion and more like losing a piece of yourself, sometimes call
