Men vs. Women vs. Interviews

There's been a really interesting phenomenon that's come up since I started this blog and subsequently launched the magazine site. It centres around the odd behaviour of men and women when it comes to do agreeing to do interviews.

I confess I started the interviews for Women We Love and Men We Admire as a way of building content, and possibly getting a little extra traffic as a result. The results have been overwhelming, due largely to the encouragement of the fantastic people I've been interviewing. They're all quite happy to provide interesting commentary and insights into their motivations and successes, and I've had a lot of great feedback from readers as well.

But what's been unusual is the responses from interviewees in terms of who does or doesn't get things done. I wouldn't have expected some of these results, but check this out:

Women, in general, are quite happy to do the interviews. Most come from entertainment fields, so that's understandable. Actresses, singers, models, and filmmakers know the value in providing face time online.

Men, by contrast, take a lot of selling. In the main, it's actually far more difficult to get them to agree to do an interview in the first place. I believe it's because they see the value differently. Whereas women see contributing an interview as adding value to their online brand, men want to know what the interview will contribute to their online brand.

From men, I often get questions like, "how much traffic do you get?" or "how do these questions relate to my [product or service] so I can at least get some relevant backlinks?" Women see the value as intrinsic, whereas men question the value from a "what's in it for me" position.

And yet (and here's the funny part), men get the interview responses back to me very quickly, even if their initial response was "I'm pretty busy, so this may take a while." Women, always eager to take on the interview, take much longer to get it done and usually need one or two reminders. Why is this?

Actually, I have no idea. This is just a tendency that I've noticed in doing several of these interviews over the past year. Women are more likely to agree to do an interview, but take a long time to get around to it. Men are less likely to agree to it, but when they do the turnaround time is much faster.

I'm going to keep an eye on this, I think, because it's an interesting phenomenon. It's not a scientific study of course, just a curiosity. I'm wondering if there's some valuable lesson here in the differences between men and women in handling productivity. Either way the job gets done, but in different ways. Worth a look I'd say.