Posted on 04/28/2008 1:52:33 PM PDT by forkinsocket
Melanie McGrath reviews The Sexual Paradox: Troubled Boys, Gifted Girls and the Real Difference Between the Sexes by Susan Pinker
Why is it that some boys who fail at school or university - Albert Einstein and Bill Gates come to mind - go on to forge spectacular careers while many talented girls never reach the top of the career ladder? Here, in a nutshell, is the paradox explored in the developmental psychologist Susan Pinker's new book.
It is time, says Pinker, to stop thinking of men as the 'default' setting and women as variants of the norm, when advances in brain imaging and genetic mapping confirm fundamental genetic, neurological and psychological differences between the two sexes.
Women might be the fairer sex, but men are the frailer. Most premature babies are boys, fewer survive and those who do are more likely than girls to have disabilities. Men are more prone to chronic diseases, more likely to contract post-surgical infections and, as we know, they don't live as long.
Tests also show many more men than women grouped at one extreme or another of human intelligence. There are more male geniuses (as any man will tell you) and more male fools - a fact not lost on women.
MRI scans indicate that men's language functions are concentrated in the left brain, the hemisphere responsible for symbolic language and social comprehension, while women's are dispersed across both hemispheres, and connected by a higher density of receptor cells. Hence women's greater aptitude for language and social interaction.
In some male foetuses, a high level of testosterone slows the growth of the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere, responsible for visual memory and systematising, compensates. In extreme cases, this can lead to the almost exclusively male phenomenon of autistic savants, boys such as Daniel Tammet, who can recite 22,514 places of pi but can't multitask sufficiently to be able to drive.
Not surprisingly, these differences play out in the workplace. Conventional feminist wisdom lays the relative underperformance of talented women at the feet of hostile male culture, discrimination and a dearth of female mentors. But research described by Pinker paints a more complicated picture.
As women have been given more choice in the workplace, so their preferences become more significant. Only 20 per cent of women, Pinker claims, are driven by 'the same work values as men', viz money and status. These high-flying women do not, on the whole, complain of sex discrimination in the workplace.
A further 20 per cent of women are home-orientated. The remaining 60 per cent of us juggle work and family life, and this, inevitably, impacts on our priorities.
In large American corporations, 89 per cent of the professionals who opt to work reduced hours are women. Even when marriage and small children are not part of the equation, it seems that women are less willing on the whole to devote their lives to their careers. The glass ceiling may be, at least in part, a DIY job.
Women are also more likely to forsake money and status in favour of intrinsic career goals such as making a difference: 75 per cent of the non-profit workforce is female.
Despite the fact that women hold fewer top jobs than men (only two per cent of chief executive jobs in America) women across the Western world consistently rate themselves as more satisfied with their work lives, something economists call 'the gender paradox'.
'Instead of women being enslaved by patriarchal views of their proper domestic roles, they are now constricted by expectations of what kind of paid work is considered valuable,' says Pinker.
In other words, women are discriminated against only in so far as society rewards most highly that work which most fits with men's preferences, and stigmatised only in so far as definitions of success remain tied to the male-oriented goals of status and money.
Refusal to acknowledge fundamental sex differences, Pinker argues, fails fragile boys, who are let down by educators and policy-makers keen to ascribe their relatively lower educational achievement to cultural factors, such as absent fathers.
Ironically, those very 'inbuilt' traits - impulsiveness, risk-taking, aggression - which can scupper boys' education, may well help them excel in their careers. History is littered with examples of outstanding men who were school dunces.
Pinker's exhaustive (and at times slightly exhausting) survey of the research lends her book a rather dense and breathless character, but does she actually tell us anything that we didn't already - more or less - know? I'm not sure.
Her own presumptions seem out of date. 'We have come to expect that there should be no difference between the sexes,' she says. To 1970s feminists such as Pinker this may hold true, but younger feminists are more likely to subscribe to the 'different but equal' model.
There are other, more worrying, presumptions too, such as the notion that whereas women want different things from work, men are basically driven by the desire for money and status.
Pinker, sister of the acclaimed evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, does not appear to engage with the idea that both the 'hard' empirical sciences of brain chemistry and genetics and the 'soft' science of psychological and sociological surveys are themselves conducted within a cultural context that may blur the links between the two.
The observation, for example, that 75 per cent of all American and British men have dropped out of school by the age of 21 does not necessarily tell us anything about the hardwiring of men's brains. If boys are genetically prone to find school problematic then we would expect drop-out rates to have remained static over time, which they have not.
Attention deficit disorder is more often diagnosed in boys, but this does not necessarily tell us anything about male genetic or hormonal make-up, since ADD is a relatively new diagnosis and remains a highly contested one.
So though there is much food for thought here, Pinker's argument remains more journalistic than scientific.
Maybe food for thought among women but I don’t think many men really give a damn!
The ultimate question is which sex’s work ethic is more result oriented (in terms of making real world macro differences)? The answer to that seems to be that of the male sex.
They forgot to include a political observation: Which sex is more likely to trade freedom away for additional security?
Fascinating stuff, Susan, and as long as you’re up, would you mind getting me a beer?
Geez I was just about to post that the biggest difference was that wimmins give a hoot about this type of ‘study’ and men coudn’t care less... when I saw post 2 beat me to it
It’s a myth that Einstein was a failure in school. A myth meant to calm the addled minds of those who do fail.
Women have the skills to teach babies how to walk and talk. Men have the skills to feed and protect everybody while that happens.
Somebody stopped doing their job.
Must.Change.it!
98% of all women can’t be taught to leave the toilet seat up.
You mean there are 2% that Do?
More wrong conclusions by the feminists.
Men live shorter lives because we handle the dangerous jobs and get killed, such construciton and soldier. Take away the death on the job factors and we live much longer.
Albert Einstein and Bill Gates were both excellent students and not failures.
The rest of the story, all opinion, are pure garbage full of conslusions without all the facts, such as women make up the most of volunteer work. Well, they also make up most of the non-working so they have the time.
Men bashing is for women looking to stand tall only by standing on top of men. Again, they need a man to try to look good.
ADD in boys is largely a lack of exercise and a downgrading of the motivation of competition.
The “male” work ethic makes the female preferences possible. It takes a dynamic wealth-building society to be rich enough to support all the “non-profits.”
... and a certain percentage show an uncharacteristic lack of facility with language, including Ms. McGrath.
That’s a beautiful story now take you shirt off.
Yes, but unfortunately its because they stand to pee.
Name 10 inventions made by a women.
Name 3,987 inventions made by a man.
Hold the pics.
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