Darwinians such as David Buss point out that females can only have one child every nine months, whereas men can in principle impregnate a virtually infinite number of women. Here is another way in which I’ve always thought evolutionary psychology subtly denigrates females’ capacity to reason. She notes that just as science has justified racism by portraying certain races as inferior, so it has justified sexism. A broad review of the literature reveals “only the tiniest gaps, if any, between the sexes, including areas such as mathematical ability and verbal fluency,” Saini writes. Saini notes in The Guardian that Damore and others back up their views of male/female differences by cherry-picking studies that supposedly prove male intellectual superiority. The firing of Damore, according to Brooks, was an example of “ideology obliterating reason.” (See my post “ Google Engineer Fired for Sexist Memo Isn’t a Hero.”) So has David Brooks of The New York Times, a booster of evolutionary psychology. Some of my male students have expressed sympathy for Damore and his claims about innate male/female differences. Google fired Damore, but his views are widely shared. Last summer Google engineer James Damore nonetheless claimed in a widely circulated memo that females are under-represented at Google and other tech firms because they are on average less ambitious and more prone to “neuroticism” than males and “have a stronger interest in people rather than things.” Damore said these alleged male/female differences are “exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective.” Hence modern gender differences are more likely to stem from discrimination and other cultural factors than from females’ alleged biological inferiority. Actually, Saini points out, anthropological research has revealed that hunter-gatherer societies were remarkably egalitarian. Natural selection made males more aggressive in their pursuit of status than females. These behavioral differences reflect biological differences, Miller argues. Men dominate mixed-sex committee discussions.” In his 2000 book The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller writes: “Men write more books. Saini notes that evolutionary psychology, a modern instantiation of Darwinian theory, still provides justification for female inequality. Galton, Saini notes, produced “beauty maps” that graded women in Britain “from the ugliest to the most attractive.” At a time when women were seeking the vote, Saini writes, Galton, Darwin and other scientists “hardened sexism into something that couldn’t even be challenged.” In his 1871 book The Descent of Man Charles Darwin wrote: “The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain-whether requiring deep thought, reason or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands.” He added, “Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman.”įrancis Galton, Darwin’s cousin and the father of eugenics, was sexist too. In her important, timely new book Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story, British science journalist Angela Saini documents how science has long denigrated females. Then, when women fail to thrive, the men say, See? Women just aren’t our equals. That is, male scientists use science to justify their sexist attitudes toward and maltreatment of women. These two forms of sexism are mutually reinforcing. Second, male scientists portray females as males’ intellectual inferiors. First, women in science (including engineering, math, medicine) face discrimination, harassment and other forms of maltreatment from men. Is science sexist? Of course it is, in two ways. Below are points I made or wanted to make during my conversation with Wright. And I feel obliged to say something about this issue because I teach at an engineering school where females account for less than 30 percent of the professors and students. But I just talked about sexism in science with my friend Robert Wright on. This is a time, part of me thinks, for men to listen to women rather than pontificating about sexism.
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