The vital statistics

The vital statistics
Evolution, not sexism, puts us at a disadvantage in the sciences
Helena CroninSaturday March 12, 2005
The Guardian
I often feel as if I'm in a Bateman cartoon: "The Feminist WhoSaid She Was a Darwinian". Gasps of horror and disbelief. Afterall, it's well known that Darwinism spells reductionism,essentialism and genetic determinism (whatever they mean) and isan agent of the male conspiracy to chain women to kitchen sinks.This caricature has been much on my mind since the president ofHarvard, Larry Summers, dared to get biological about women inthe natural sciences, engineering and maths. Talking at a closedconference about why so few women occupy top academic jobs inthese disciplines, he attempted to probe beyond such familiarissues as childcare, role models, confidence (lack of) andprejudice (lots of). Summers made the modest claim that evolvedsex differences, though not the sole reason for this malepredominance, are among the reasons that should be considered.Outrage ensued. Not least, would-be feminists got the vapours,exacted apologies, mooted no-confidence motions, demandedresignation, and told the world of their hurt and humiliation.But, as evolutionary science shows, Summers was right - forthree reasons.First, men, on average, have an advantage in certainquantitative and spatial abilities - particularly intuitivemechanics and "3-D thinking" (mental rotation ofthree-dimensional objects) - that are key for engineering andmaths.Second, there are, on average, sex differences in dispositions,interests, values. Men are far more competitive, ambitious,status-conscious and single-minded; and they'd rather work withabstract ideas or objects than with humans. Women are morefocused on family and other relationships; they have widerinterests and prefer not to work in people-free zones. Whenwomen leave high-powered jobs to "spend more time with thefamily", it's truth, not euphemism. In the US, even in the top1% of mathematical ability, only one woman to eight men makes acareer in maths, engineering or science; the other seven choosemedicine, biology, law or even the humanities - typically, towork with, and help, people.Third, sex differences exhibit greater male than femalevariance. Females are much of a muchness, clustering round themean. But among males, the difference between the most and theleast, the best and the worst, can be vast. So, when it comes toscience, more men than women will be dunces but more will begeniuses - although the means are close. The maths averages ofAmerican teenage boys and girls are not dramatically different;but among the most mathematically gifted there are 13 boys forevery girl. Sex differences are crucially about variance as wellas means.Now combine these three factors. Isn't it unlikely that thedistribution of men and women working in science will beidentical? And the higher the echelon, the greater will be thepreponderance of men - with obvious outcomes for eliteinstitutions such as Harvard.These differences are not recent or artificial or arbitrary.They have deep evolutionary reasons, which are well understood.Sexual reproduction as we know it began with one sexspecialising slightly more in competing for mates and the otherslightly more in caring for offspring. This divergence becameself-reinforcing, widening over evolutionary time, with naturalselection proliferating and amplifying variations on thedifferences, down the generations, in every sexually reproducingspecies that has ever existed. Thus, from this slight butfundamental initial asymmetry, flow all the characteristicdifferences between males and females throughout the livingworld. Now, 800 million years later, in our species as in allothers, these differences pervade what constitutes being male orfemale, from brains to bodies to behaviour.A wealth of evidence backs up this view of our evolutionaryendowment, ranging from newborns (even at one day old, girlsprefer a human face, boys a mechanical mobile) to pathology(females exposed to "male" hormones in the womb are typically"tomboyish" and surpass the female average in spatial skills -and vice versa for males) and children's play (boys' games arecompetitive, big on rules and establishing a winner, girls' aremore cooperative and end in consensus). These and otherpredictable sex differences are robust across cultures, andthroughout history.So much for Darwinism. What about feminism? Well, how could onebe a feminist and not a Darwinian? If feminists want to changethe world, they need first to understand it. And, when it comesto sex differences, Darwinian science provides the authoritativeunderstanding.Indeed, Darwinian insights open up promising avenues for policy.Consider the assumption that women academics areunder-represented in science and maths - and the conclusion thatprejudice must be to blame. Given what we know from evolutionarybiology, that can't be the whole story. Shouldn't that knowledgeinfluence feminist demands? If, for instance, fairness can nolonger be identified with 50:50 representation, why the missionto equalise numbers - and what sex ratios should we aim for? Andif the main evidence for discrimination was an imbalance, whatshould now be considered as evidence? Indeed, shoulddiscrimination occupy so much of the feminist agenda?Or consider the cognitive differences that disadvantage girls inmaths. Shouldn't we be drawing more - not less - attention tothem? How else will interventions be devised that don't treatgirls as default males? Bear in mind that mathematical abilityitself is not an evolved ability; maths is far too recent forthat. Rather, mathematical talent borrows eclectically fromabilities evolved for other purposes. Much of the mathematicaladvantage of boys lies in spatial abilities for navigation - anarea in which females are notoriously weaker; in particular,boys are better than girls at using these innate capacities toturn quantitative relations into diagrams. So why not help girlsimprove their skills? When males and females (both adults andchildren) are helped with translating word problems intodiagrams, the performance of females improves more than that ofmales - thus closing some of the gap between the sexes. Bycontrast, self-confidence in maths, which also favours boys,makes some impact; but it is relatively small. So forget classesin "self-esteem" or "empowerment". Go for evolutionarilyinformed teaching in maths classes. Admittedly, morefemale-friendly maths won't guarantee more female Nobelprize-winners. But it should enable more girls to realise theirpotential. And isn't that what fairness is about?So it is not Darwinian feminists but the anti-Darwinians thatshould feature in the Bateman cartoon. I nominate those Harvardprotesters. It is scandalous that educated women should be soprofoundly ignorant of scientific and statistical thinking; evenmore scandalous that, rather than learn, they slam the door andsneak to the media; and more scandalous still that they do thisin the name of feminism. It is not sex differences but sexismthat is iniquitous. And it is not science but injustice thatshould be opposed. For how can we forge a fairer world if welack a proper understanding of how the sexes differ?· Dr Helena Cronin runs the darwin@lse programme and is writinga book on Darwinian understanding of sex difference
darwin@lse.ac.u
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