Are Men 32% more productive?
By Techgirl

Like most Indian women, I genuinely believe that most of us work better than most of the stronger (weaker?) sex.  We do better at school and at universities.  A woman heads our ruling political party.  The President of India as well as the Speaker of the Indian Parliament are women.  Arguably, India’s best English TV Channel CNN - IBN has more women journalists than men.

US-based RescueTime has developed software that lets you be more in control while working on your computer.  Using RescueTime software, you can voluntarily block distracting parts of the net for specific periods.  It also generates a report on how much fun time you spent checking out the new stilettos at Zappos and how much time was wasted preparing a report for your CEO.

According to RescueTime, it 'recovers' 3 hours and 54 minutes worth of productive time per week per person.  Its doing something right because it has been profiled in The New York Times, BBC, TechCrunch, PCWorld and BusinessWeek.

This month it released a report ‘Startling Data: Are Men 32% more productive than Women?’ which is so politically incorrect it was not picked up by most media.

The Rescue Time report makes the following points:

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1) Women spend more time socializing and shopping
The 4,000 women sampled managed to rack up an astounding 87,585 hours on social networking sites, which accounts for about 6.4% of their time.  Their male counterparts, on the other hand, spend 39% less time drinking from the fire hydrant of virtual friendship. 

2) Men multi task more than women
I was surprised to find that men switch their active focus about 18% more often than women.  On average men switch windows 53 times per hour, compared to women who clocked in at 45 per hour.

3) Men work more diligently than women
The average guy spends pretty close to 50% of his computer time doing things he considers distracting.  Women only manage to be productive with about 43% of their time.

4) Women spend fewer hours on their computers
Evidently, there’s a reason they are called “man” hours.  On average, male information workers spend 14% more time per day working on their computers than women do.

5) Do men simply care more about productivity?
RescueTime only has data from people who’ve decided they’d like to use our tools to get more out of life.  Everyone who uses our software has at least made it to step #1: “Admit you have a problem”.  If this is any indication, nearly 5 times more men than women install our tools to get more productive.

All this adds up to huge differences in the amount of knowledge work men get done compared to women. Our data shows women only work 76% of the time that men do.  Interestingly, the National Committee on Pay Equity found that women earn 77% of what their male counter parts do.
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By the time I finished reading the report, I was in a state of shock as it was against everything I had seen in my life.  Then I realized that most of the data was based on western men.  If they did such a survey in India, they will find that we are at least 100 percent more productive than most men in our lives. But we avoid saying this publicly as some Indian men have very fragile egos.

This survey was designed by men and so point 2) that men multi task more by switching screens may not be valid.  Just because you look at Barbara Mori from Kites in one screen and Deepika and Katrina Kaif in others, does not mean you are doing any real work!

Techgoss note:  Techgirl is a senior Tech journalist who reports on the IT, KPO and KPO Sectors for a leading media house.  In her spare time, she dabbles in satire in her blog http://techgirltalk.blogspot.com