From “Land of Lincoln” by Andrew Ferguson

For our last module of the day we broke up into our teams for discussion. The room erupted in cross talk. Sometimes I think that workshops have proved popular because people get to talk a lot, much more than they get to talk at the office. Other times I'm not so sure. No workplace that included Motormouth could enforce a gag rule, for example. And there was the opposite example of the table next to ours. That team was cursed: it was all male. Evidently none of them had met before the workshop, and each man looked equally uneasy. They were silent.

My heart went out to them. I'd seen this before. Workshops are built on what even female sociologists agree are feminine styles of communication. Arguing and contention are frowned upon, and there's lots of sharing and unburdening and sympathetic give and take. For this and other reasons, men find workshops less congenial, as a rule. Lincoln himself, as one of his friends said, was the "most shutmouthed man I ever met." For a time the guys pretended to read several sheets of statistics that Everett had handed out. Then one reached into his satchel and brought out the sports section of USA Today. After five minutes or so, while the other teams bubbled with chatter, the guys had all stopped pretending to read their sheets and were staring into the middle distance, managing to avoid eye contact. They tried not to slump. Their legs jiggled up and down. They had that unquestionably male look of polite impatience, fists cocked at belt level, next to their hip phones, wondering how long it was till they could go get a beer.