[rokhayakebe]

I have worked with women who are clearly smarter than everyone else in the room, and take the entire group to a new level. However with every guy I have worked with we can argue the entire meeting (and maybe get emotional), but then at lunch time it's like it never happened. From my experience, if you argue with most (not all) women in the conference room, do not expect her to forget about it the next day.

[Benjo]

Anecdote alert:

A female coworker who was also a close friend of mine sent me an issue, asking me if it was related to an issue I had debugged. It was, and the issue was not assigned, so I took it and closed it as duplicate.

She was pissed. She wanted to know if it was a simple issue so she could assign it to herself, close it easily and get credit for it. (Not that our group really used that as a performance metric.) She actually said to me: "That was really unprofessional you ass!" I tried to gently suggest that she might be taking it too personally. If I had realized she wanted to close the issue herself, I probably would have let her. I just closed it myself because it was faster.

Later she told me that she had read in a book that women tend to become more emotionally invested in their work than men do. I told her I was glad she had read that in a book.

[mnutt]

Bug trackers are often pretty terrible at promoting passive aggressive behavior as well, if you don't have good communication with the person on the other end. Reasons to close often look like: INVALID, DUPLICATE, WONTFIX, WORKSFORME.

[alexgartrell]

This is a stereotype that has never panned out for me. Most of the time when you think the men have "let it go," they've just passive aggressively suppressed it.

I'd rather deal with someone who is obviously pissed at me than someone who is secretly pissed at me any day of the week.

(The passive aggressive thing has been much, much more prevalent amongst nerds, in my experience, compounding the problem)

[rokhayakebe]

You could be right. I have worked with 2 guys whom at some point clearly did not like me. However I respected the fact that it did not taint what I thought of their work, or their feedback on mine.

On the other hand I can remember a colleague of mine not talking to one of our teammates because of a personal reason. This, i think, affects business.

[danssig]

Men tend to compartmentalize more. I may get red-in-the-face mad at a colleague about some stupid design decision that he's trying to ram down my throat and get pretty emotional in our discussions but that doesn't leak over into lunch conversations. That's a different side of the person. It's true that sometimes a guy will have a hard time moving from the work compartment. That's why we have rules like "whoever talks about work takes a shot".

[rick888]

"The passive aggressive thing has been much, much more prevalent amongst nerds, in my experience, compounding the problem"

For me, it's been nerds and women.