After a decade of fear and loathing when is comes to assigning gender traits to how things are accomplished in the workplace, it seems the light is finally seeping through the cracks of the Great Wall of political correctness.  In other words, there is a murmur rippling, as I speak that dares to say that women and men are different.

In this morning's Wall Street Journal, Oct 7, 2007, there is an article by Erin White entitled "Deloitte Tries a Different Sales Pitch for Women".  Yes it's that Deloitte, of Deloitte & Touche USA, the renowned Accounting firm, has begun to teach it's male consultants to interact differently with women than with men. 

For example; Deloitte is training its male consultants to sit across the table from the women, instead of next to them and bringing in subordinates because women value knowing the people who do the work. I am still not sure whose subordinates the article is referring to, but the point is that consultants are being trained to feed into the way women want to do business. 

I have mixed feelings only because I don't want men to usurp women's natural proclivities and use them on her just to make a sale.  If there is a shared understanding and respect for her approach, it will be validated.  However, I think that one of the suggestions, such as returning her enthusiasm in an email with equal enthusiasm using exclamations points because she did, is a little shady.  It's called 'mirroring' in sales, but that is done in person with dress and comportment, not sitting at a keyboard plotting grammatical battle.

You know that I am a great believer in the differences of the genders, I just don't want men to come up with another pat generalization on how to sell to women using some extrapolated theory that smacks of stereotype.

Anyway, I still think that women's intuitive abilities will trump and lay bare a poser of female sensibility.