Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
AAccording to psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams, almost everyone makes mistakes about sex. Traditionalists tend to exaggerate the natural differences between men and women. Progressives tend to downplay them, I think parenting and socializing are more important. She wants to encourage a more imaginative, scientific public discussion about why and how men and women differ in order to guide better policymaking.
Other sex differences are mentioned, he says, whether you are attracted to men or women, superior physical strength, height, the ability to kill someone and work. Many, like the ability to do math, or to do things with wisdom, it is very humble. Such differences are best seen as two overlapping curves. To understand this, let’s think about height: the shortest people are almost all women, the tallest are men, the average man is taller than the average woman, but there are many things we have in common. Knowing that someone is 5ft 8in won’t help you decide with confidence whether they are male or female, for example.
A professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham Malaysia, Stewart-Williams writes carefully, jumping into a character who, quite rightly, expects the reader to jump down his throat at every turn. A paper he wrote, which argued that the underrepresentation of women in Stem studies was due to innate differences in cognitive thinking, sparked a “mini-controversy on the Internet” and led to a report to his university’s diversity, equity and inclusion board (he found that the plaintiffs had misrepresented the paper). I tried, and it was an effort, to leave my thoughts and look at how to use the kneejerk and read his second book, which tries to explain the differences between physical, mental and emotional sex in terms of our evolutionary heritage.
At the beginning, Stewart-Williams provides a list of what happens in his field. Some of them are “gamma settings“The tendency to minimize differences that makes men look good while highlighting those who do different.” One of his recent papers found that, when presented with a fictitious study showing that men pull better, lie less or are more intelligent, people rated them as inferior, harmful and more worthy of investigation than a fictitious study showing that women have these qualities.delta bias”, hating the differences between the sexes and loving the changes.” Surprisingly, he does not mention the difference bias, even though the idea that women are inferior and that they belong to the family has formed a large part of the history of people and our inherited institutions.
To be clear, when Stewart-Williams says that there are natural differences between men and women, he is quick to add that this does not mean that one sex is better than the other, that we have the right culture to follow or promote the differences between the sexes, or that they are fixed. What they believe is that if you give people the freedom to choose their careers and lives, men and women tend to gravitate in different directions. Men like to work with things, women with people, for example. Men are more motivated by status, women by relationships. A variety of studies add weight to Stewart-Williams’ claims by finding that many sex differences – from career interests to personality – are. More information mentioned in many countries that are equal between men and women.
So what other evidence is there that nature, rather than nurture, plays a bigger role than some think? Stewart-Williams presents these arguments: Sex differences have persisted in history and culture, reflect differences in other species, appear from childhood or become more apparent at puberty, seem to be incompatible with interaction and seem to be affected by the exposure of pregnancy hormones. It can also be explained in evolutionary terms: because men and women form intimate relationships, and men are more involved in raising children than most other male animals, the difference between the sexes in humans is often much smaller than in the animal world. But if the driving force behind evolution is the ability to successfully transmit human nature, this creates different motivations for men and women.
This book is full of interesting, controversial, lessons that you might want to discuss with a friend. But evolutionary psychology is not always so useful. Stewart-Williams writes, for example, that domestic violence is better understood as a manifestation of male violence, not of childhood, as shown by the number of perpetrators with anti-parental beliefs. This, he says, means that methods of teaching people to exercise self-restraint are more effective than following people’s beliefs. This may be true in societies with equal rights between men and women, but domestic and sexual violence is much higher in patriarchal societies, where such behavior is tolerated or accepted. Obviously, understanding how social and cultural factors shape gender differences is very important.
Stewart-Williams believes that the person who is not accepted to represent more women in Stem, or in leadership positions in general, is a natural difference between the needs and interests of professionals. What I think is a simpler solution to the problem of unequal representation than trying to understand how offices, research institutions and leadership positions would be established if women had not been removed from most of human history. (For example I feel that men’s inability to speak has not held them back in literature.) It is important to understand the role that nature plays in making us who we are and shaping relationships between men and women – but it is a small part of a larger, complex story.
