I've been struck recently by how fond men and women are of supporting the never-ending "battle of the sexes." If one gender wins, the other one must lose, or so it seems. If only we could move away from this battle and instead learn to understand and respect each other, we may find we have more in common than either gender thinks. (see Chapter 2 in my book "The Power of the Purse" for a description of how The Home Depot used this concept of similarities instead of difference to redefine its stores.)

Two readings have brought this ongoing battle to mind for me in the past few weeks. On Sunday, journalism professor Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Chalt Barnett, a senior scientist, at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University took on the "boy crisis" that seems to be gripping the nation--or at least gripping the front pages of magazines and newspapers. Rivers and Barnett are the authors of "Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs," a great read if you need some debunking of the myths surrounding men and women.

As Rivers and Barnett point out in their Washington Post article, boys were also in "crisis" more than 100 years ago. The reason: "spending too much time in school with female teachers," a relationship that was "robbing them of their manhood," write Rivers and Barnett. Fast forward to 2006 and once again women are being blamed for today's "boy crisis." Whether it's "hostile" female teachers or the fact that boys aren't "wired" to learn in the way today's education system has been constructed. Such an education system is apparently rigged to promote girls--who are supposedly outpacing boys in this "girl-centered" education system.

Rivers and Barnett go deeper to look at the statistics only to find, no surprise, that there really isn't a "boy crisis." When girls and boys of the same race and economic class are compared, there is hardly any gap in education advancement. There is a crisis in education and advancement, but it has nothing to do with gender, write Rivers and Barnett. It has everything to do with being poor and not-white. "Race and class completely swamp gender," they write. Instead of focusing on boys in crisis, we be addressing how our education system fails blacks and poor children, especially from rural areas.

This effort to go deeper beneath the surface of "facts" brings me to my other recent reading: "The Self-Made Man" by Norah Vincent, the journalist who went "undercover" as a man in hopes of better understanding them.

While by no means the perfect book, it's a worthwhile read if just for the first chapter. Vincent joins a men's-only bowling league and comes to understand these men in a way that few women would have ever been willing or able to understand men. Women (I am broadly generalizing, I know) instead like too more often harp that men don't understand us.

But women don't seem to understand men either. Moreover, it feels as if women are far less interested in understanding men and are happier being smugly superior about how well women express emotions. In giving us insight and trying to understand men is where Vincent's experiment is most useful. While by no means scientific, Vincent does get far deeper with these men as a man than she would as a woman. The bowling-league chapter shows how these men take care of each other, how they express their feelings in ways that are as individual as the men themselves, and how women miss all this because we are too busy asking why men don't understand us.

If you've read the book, I'd love to hear your thoughts--pro or con. I'll be finishing it next week and would like to have a conversation about whether Vincent's book does anything to stop the battle of the sexes.