Helen Fisher

Anthropologist spoke Feb. 20

"Women are about to change the world...current trends suggest that many sectors of the 21st-century economic community are going to need the natural talents of women." - Helen Fisher

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Helen Fisher says women are "web thinkers," integrating details and data more quickly than men, spotting nuance more easily, more comfortable with ambiguity and placing issues in context. Men, in contrast, segment a task into jobs, chores, machines - individual units connected in sequence. Give men their due credit for invention, creativity and will to build much of modern society, says Fisher, but our increasingly complicated society may be more suited to web thinkers.

Fisher has been a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, and is now a research professor and member of the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies in Rutgers University's department of anthropology. She received her Ph.D. in physical anthropology at the University of Colorado. Her current projects include writing a book on the primary mating emotions - lust, attraction and attachment - for Henry Holt & Co., NYC. She is also doing a research project on the brain physiology of romantic love with colleagues at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and SUNY Stony Brook.

Fisher has been on the national lecture circuit since 1983. Her topics have included the evolution of human sexuality, marriage and divorce, gender differences in the brain and behavior, and the future of men, women, business, sex and family life. She has spoken at the American Museum of Natrual History, the Smithsonian Institution, Planned Parenthood of NYC, the Women's Health Forum of NYC and the US Department of Agriculture, just to name a few. Her lecture stops have included academic and business conferences in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia. During 1994-95, she lectured on college campuses as a visiting scholar of the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Articles by Fisher have appeared in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, the New York Times Book Review, Psychology Today, Health and many other publications.

Her consultation contracts include those with NBC's Today Show, WNET TV, the BBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Reader's Digest and Time-Life books. For her work in communicating anthropology to the lay public, Fisher received the American Anthropological Association's "Distinguished Service Award" in 1985.

Fisher's book, Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery and Divorce, examined divorce in 62 societies, adultery in 42 cultures and patterns of monogamy and desertion in animals. This analysis offered a theory for the evolution of serial marriage and the future of human family life. Fisher was also the host in a four-part TV series entitled Anatomy of Love, which aired on Turner Broadcasting Systems in 1995.

Her latest work, The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World, discusses gender differences in behavior and the brain. It examines the impact of women on 21st-century business, sex and family life. The First Sex was selected as a "Notable Book of 1999" by the New York Times Book Review, and has ten foreign language editions.

Image and bio information courtesy of Program Corporation of America.

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Related Links:
Rutgers University

Read an excerpt of The First Sex

The First Sex at Amazon.com

Anatomy of Love at Amazon.com

The Sex Contract at Amazon.com