Should Women Rule the World vs Men Over 70

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.

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**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.