Eating with women vs. eating with men

"Women eating in groups of women tend to increase the calorie values of the food they choose," says Meredith E. Young, PhD, a psychologist and an assistant professor in the Centre for Medical Education at McGill University in Montreal, who led the study.

Women who eat in smaller groups of women friends, she found, eat somewhat less, and those who eat a meal with a man eat even less.

For the men, Young found a different story. Neither the number of dining companions nor the group's gender makeup seemed to make a difference in how much the men ate.

Ladies' Night Out: Diet Wrecker? , summarizing a study by McGill University in Montreal

I have seen this in the news in the past few days, and the angle of the story has been more along the lines of "Avoid girls' nights out if you want to lose weight!".

My reaction is WHY do women feel the need to eat less in front of men? I agree with this article that it probably has to deal with a woman's desire to look dainty in front of men.

Does this bother anybody else? That women's behavior is so easily influenced by the outside world while men seem to do their own thing no matter what? I can believe that there are evolutionary implications for changing behaviors based on the outside world. Centuries ago, I suppose it was necessary for women to notice more nuance in their surroundings. "Timmy is having less fun than usual. Maybe he is sick. I need to care for him." A society of socially dense women wouldn't last very long. As long as men were able to hunt, harvest, or whatever, society is fine.

But why do women behave this way around food? Why is it even something that is worth noticing? It seems that a society would survive longer if women were allowed to eat as much as they wanted so that they can bear healthy children. Maybe something changes in a society of abundance versus a society of scarcity. In a scarce society, being healthy is usually correlated with eating as much as possible. In the US today, being healthy is more about showing restraint around food. So, in a way, as much as it irritates me, I can see the evolutionary reason for women to eat less in front of men.

But why the difference in social cues when there are no men around? Women in large groups might feel that there are so many women around that their overindulgence will go unnoticed. But women in a group of 2 or 4 will notice what each of the others is eating and how much. I went out with 2 women for lunch on Friday. I scarfed my quesadillas while the other 2 took at least half of their meals in a box for leftovers. While I didn't change my behavior around the women, I certainly did NOTICE how the other 2 were eating.

My question is - even if the need to appear healthy in front of men for evolutionary reasons is legitimate - why on earth do we care what other women think of us? Are we so catty and jealous that we're afraid that another woman is going to call our husband at work and say "GUESS HOW MUCH YOUR WIFE ATE TODAY SHE IS SUCH AN UNHEALTHY FAT PIG WHO WILL BEAR UNSUITABLE CHILDREN?" It sounds stupid but it's really the only explanation I can think of.

I couldn't find anything in a Google search to see what other similar research has been done before, but it would be interesting to know what other behaviors in women change when men are around without us realizing it? Do we say less intelligent things? How is our sense of humor affected? How is our body language different?

Understanding these subtle behaviors and how they continue to give men control over us will allow us to being figuring out how to change the behavior so that women and men can interact more as equals, especially in the work place.