Sex on the Brain
This article first appeared in the New Statesman's 'Ideas Corner', 7 August 2006.
Mars and Venus may be neither here nor there, but in the debate over
whether male and female minds are different by nature, the two camps
certainly seem to be on different cognitive planets. To one side, it
appears obvious that men’s and women’s minds are as different as their
bodies, and that this is evident from a range of qualities, from
temperament to the ability to rotate objects in the mind’s eye. To the
other, any innate differences are marginal quirks whose power to
explain male dominance in boardrooms or laboratories is negligible.
The latter
view was passionately expounded in a recent article in the journal Nature by Ben Barres, a Stanford
University neurobiologist, continuing the controversy provoked last
year when Larry Summers, then president of Harvard University,
suggested that “intrinsic aptitude” might explain male predominance at
the upper levels of science. Barres dealt with the data in one
paragraph, finding little evidence of sex differences in maths
abilities, and devoted most of his essay to discrimination. But in a
sidebar, he affirmed that as a transgendered person (formerly Barbara
Barres) “no-one understands more deeply that I do that there are innate
differences between men and women”. He noted that he still gets lost,
but is no longer willing to ask for directions.
Undecided
parties may feel rather similarly. But instead of trying to resolve the
arguments over the evidence, we could usefully ask why male and female
minds should be different anyway.
The answer
(derived from the ideas of the evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers) is
that asymmetry is the basis of sex – eggs are large, sperms are small -
and the interests of males and females are asymmetrical. One sex is
likely to invest more resources and care in its offspring; that sex is
likely to be the more discriminating in its choice of mates. Among
certain pipefish (like straightened-out seahorses) males carry
fertilised eggs in pouches, and females compete with each other to
secure harems. Among mammals, however, it is always the females that
invest more.
This is a principle endorsed on both sides. In the words of the late
Stephen Jay Gould, it “makes Darwinian sense and probably does underlie
some different, and broadly general, emotional propensities of human
males and females”. Coming as it did in a polemic against evolutionary
psychology, that affirmation was rather like a comment in a
neoconservative tract to the effect that “the history of all hitherto
existing society is probably the history of class struggle”.
Nevertheless, the idea remains honoured in principle more than
application. Those who doubt innate sex differences overlook it, and
innatists fail to apply the logic of asymmetrical interests when they
regard unequal outcomes with equanimity. If positions of power are
filled by members of one sex, they will tend to use that power in their
own interests, which will differ systematically from those of the other
sex. Arguments from evolution can be used to expose discrimination as
well as to deny it.