This book is subtitled “How Women (And the Men Who Think Like Them) Will Rule the Future.”  I read this book because I wondered how two male authors, John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio, separated “thinking traits” into masculine and feminine.  They used a practical approach.  They created a list of 125 human traits and asked sixteen thousand people in thirteen countries to categorize them as masculine, feminine, or neutral.  Then they asked sixteen thousand different people to rate the traits’ importance to achieving a good life.  They also asked “big-picture” questions, which struck me as somewhat prosaic, about governments and the world economy.  Some pertinent information is left out.  The authors don’t discuss, for example, how they dealt with different languages.  The results of these surveys provide a frame for stories of people, both men and women, succeeding in business and government by applying winning “feminine” traits.

Here is a sampling of the traits:  Masculine traits include strong, hard working, self-reliant, selfish, aggressive, and proud.  Feminine traits include trustworthy, generous, good listener, dedicated, passive, upper class, and vulnerable.  The much smaller category of neutral traits includes fun, cunning, visionary, and authentic.  Readers may wonder how the people taking the survey defined these words: how is agile (neutral) different from nimble (feminine)?  But that quibbles with the bulk of the book, which presents stories of individuals ‘doing well by doing good.’

I am reminded of Pinker’s comment that “if narratives without statistics are blind, statistics without narratives are empty”.  The authors keep their statistics and stories more separated than I would like.  They present their stories as worldwide trends without any real proof.

You can easily skip around from urban bee keeping with poor youth in the UK, to Iceland’s crowd-sourced new constitution, to an Israeli business investing in Palestine, to Japanese citizens helping each other find housing after the 2011 tsunami, to Peruvians teaching sign language to deaf children and their mothers, to Bhutan’s happiness index.  I found some of the stories more interesting than others and skimmed if my interest waned.

This book offers an interesting attempt to describe international trends in familiar terms.  It is a good source of positive stories about people crafting a better world.