(FORTUNE Magazine) – A shadow crossed the saturnine countenance of Keeping Up's senior editor for social policy. Groaning loudly, he flung the New York Times editorial page to the floor, stormed across the room to his Dell System 200 personal computer, logged on to Nexis, and soon was frenziedly plowing through 142 news stories and articles bearing on the work of psychologist Carol Gilligan. Dramatic lead, eh? And yet arguably appropriate to that clunky editorial feature in the Times, which addressed certain sensitive questions about gender differences. It seems that these questions are on the table because various ladies in politics have been going around stating that women in office are superior to men in office. Take Dianne Feinstein, now running for governor of California. Dianne and her opponent, Senator Pete Wilson, basically agree on the desirability of protecting abortion rights. But Dianne says that, precisely because she is a woman, she is a better bet to protect those rights. This position is most irksome to the Times, which posits that Dianne's posture is sexist, offensive, redolent of stereotyping, and ''precisely the kind of bias that women have fought against for years.'' High-minded punch line: ''Men are as capable of empathy as women, and women are as capable of insensitivity as men.'' Two contrapuntal themes have always been discernible in contemporary feminist thought. Theme No. 1, to which the Times is doggedly clinging, is that deep down inside, men and women are the same, and so differences in their life outcomes mainly reflect cultural conditioning and irrational bias. It is because of Theme No. 1 that our country now has girls on high school football teams and a Department of Labor agitatedly inquiring about the paucity of women in high executive positions. Theme No. 2, which former Mayor (of San Francisco) Feinstein seems to be reaching for, is that women are different enough from men so that it is reasonable to expect quite different -- and in some contexts superior -- contributions from them. Unlike Theme No. 1, this line of argument has a lot of research sustaining it. It should not be a secret that men and women think differently. It has long been established, for example, that women have superior verbal skills, men superior quantitative skills. The male edge in math is clearly biological in origin: It is nonexistent until puberty, and begins only after the boy's nervous system is flooded by testosterone. (Some data suggest that members of both sexes can improve their math scores by taking testosterone shots.) This hormone is also clearly linked to male aggression and leadership tendencies -- the main subject of sociologist Steven Goldberg's The Inevitability of Patriarchy, a highly readable classic that nevertheless got into the Guinness Book of Records for having been rejected 69 times before publication. One wonders why, does not one?

Carol Gilligan's findings have taken the subject several steps further. Professor Gilligan, based at Harvard's graduate school of education, has elaborated a model of male-female differences that describes utterly different ways of viewing the world. Men are far more likely to view issues in abstract, logical, principled terms, while women tend to relate them to the people involved. Carol told an interviewer last year that women see themselves ''as part of a web of relationships.'' Which is why, the Times to the contrary, the ladies excel at empathy. As you might imagine, these findings drive a lot of traditional feminists up the wall, but Carol herself is a feminist, and there is a sympathetic depiction of her work in the new, revived Ms. She believes that women need to play a larger role in business and that the feminine psychology she describes has a lot to offer the corporate world. For example, she has spoken affirmatively of crying in business. Asked about this touchy topic by a Newsday reporter, she responded: ''Does professional mean to not have feelings?'' Your servant's own hunch about crying is that there will continue to be limited demand for blubberers in high executive circles. Also that Carol Gilligan's research is likely to work against major elements of the feminist agenda in business. Once you jettison the notion that male and female executives are (except for irrelevant reproductive differences) the same, you no longer have a case for being automatically scandalized by the existence of a ''glass ceiling.'' Also, it seems possible that logic is more important than empathy at the CEO level.