A 1999 episode of In Our Time was ostensibly about "feminism," but in fact addressed a narrower and more pressing issue: Are men "by nature more competitive, ambitious, status-conscious, dedicated, single-minded and persevering than women"? And if so, doesn't that mean men are biologically better disposed than women to achieve material success? And if that's true, doesn't it follow that the comparatively disadvantaged status women hold in modern society results from "natural" psychological differences, rather than "cultural" patriarchy? What would that then mean for feminism's mission? Should society ensure equal opportunity, or privilege difference? I would have thought such claims would arouse more backlash than it has. But such theories are taken seriously, to some degree, because they are championed by Prof. Helena Cronin, an academic philosopher at the London School of Economics Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science. Lest you think I've mischaracterized Cronin's arguments, you can also read them here:
[C]onsider the cognitive differences that disadvantage girls in maths. Shouldn't we be drawing more - not less - attention to them? How else will interventions be devised that don't treat girls as default males? Bear in mind that mathematical ability itself is not an evolved ability; maths is far too recent for that. Rather, mathematical talent borrows eclectically from abilities evolved for other purposes. Much of the mathematical advantage of boys lies in spatial abilities for navigation - an area in which females are notoriously weaker; in particular, boys are better than girls at using these innate capacities to turn quantitative relations into diagrams. So why not help girls improve their skills? When males and females (both adults and children) are helped with translating word problems into diagrams, the performance of females improves more than that of males - thus closing some of the gap between the sexes. By contrast, self-confidence in maths, which also favours boys, makes some impact; but it is relatively small. So forget classes in "self-esteem" or "empowerment". Go for evolutionarily informed teaching in maths classes. Admittedly, more female-friendly maths won't guarantee more female Nobel prize-winners. But it should enable more girls to realise their potential. And isn't that what fairness is about?
I would have expected Germaine Greer, who was invited to represent the "patriarchy as cultural construct" school, to more forcefully object. But Greer seemed to largely agree with Prof. Cronin's essentialist premises. Aside from the premises, it's also hard for me understand exactly what Cronin has concluded. Is it that men are, on average, more likely to excel in those academic disciplines that better ensure material success and wealth? Or is it merely that men are statistically more likely to be intellectual outliers within homo sapiens, overrepresenting both the "genius" and "dolt" end of the IQ spectrum? Cronin announced a somewhat confusing change of heart in 2008:
I used to think that these patterns of sex differences resulted mainly from average differences between men and women in innate talents, tastes and temperaments. After all, in talents men are on average more mathematical, more technically minded, women more verbal; in tastes, men are more interested in things, women in people; in temperaments, men are more competitive, risk-taking, single-minded, status-conscious, women far less so. But I have now changed my mind. It is not a matter of averages, but of extremes. Females are much of a muchness, clustering round the mean. But, among males, the variance—the difference between the most and the least, the best and the worst—can be vast. So males are almost bound to be over-represented both at the bottom and at the top. I think of this as 'more dumbbells but more Nobels'.
So, yes, we have more male than female CEOs, but we also have more male than female prison convicts. And yet, how much of this "revised view" differs from what Cronin said in 1999? Even then, she argued that men were -- statistically speaking -- not only more likely to produce IQ outliers, but also generally more driven to succeed in life. If we are now to simply accept that men are "merely" more likely to possess the attributes necessary to reach the most elite ranks of society, wouldn't that state of affairs nevertheless perniciously influence who tends to get promoted/elected/appointed to positions on the next rung "down the ladder"? For example, is or isn't Cronin claiming whether her theory meaningfully accounts, for, say, the continuing wage/gender gap? (Cronin did argue that natural differences better explain the disparity between men and women in the sciences, a contention I think Patricia Churchland would have disputed, based on her comments in the PEL interview.) In any event, what exactly does Cronin propose? That perhaps we restructure all of modern society to accommodate these apparent gender shortcomings?
We live in many ways in a winner-take-all society....I think that if we don't recognize that in a winner-take-all society, it's going to tend always to be the men who are the winners because of their competitiveness, because of their single-mindedness, because of the kinds of different dispositions they have, that women aren't going to achieve, in ways that they might want to. Maybe what we have to do is to change the winner-take-all society, rather than try to put a few women at the top.
So, wait a minute. The primary mission for feminism is thus socialism? We should engineer a society that devalues individual excellence? Greer, an unreconstructed Marxist, was all too eager to support this theory. But to my ears, that sounded like essentialism gone wild.
But I'm having trouble finding a succinct and equally authoritative anti-essentialist counter-argument. I would have expected Germaine Greer to represent that wing on the interview, but she was plenty comfortable playing the "essentialist" game, as long as it involved re-characterizing "masculine traits" in a negative rather than positive light. (For example, rather than characterizing men as "single-minded" or "perservering", she'd say "obssessive." Rather than changing society, she'd rather "change men," etc.) So, was anti-essentialism too soon for 1999, when this recording took place, or did the BBC producers simply guess wrong when choosing their panel?
Of course, both commentators favored providing better opportunities for women. But both avoided dealing with the obvious response one might expect from troglodyte chauvinists: If the psychological traits Dr. Cronin characterizes as uniquely (or at least statistically) "masculine" better ensure material success in modern society, then isn't it right and just and proper that men are overrepresented in academic, public, and corporate institutions? Should society construct cultural "workarounds" against women's putative shortcomings? Am I the only one thinking we ought to first be really, really, really careful about what we're saying here? To his credit, Melvyn Bragg repeatedly attempted to tease out that very concern from the discussion, but everyone seemed too hyper-caffeinated and hyper-defensive to address it.
Regardless of how "sensitive" a male you are or aren't, if you have daughters, nieces, or granddaughters, then you should soon start to feel you have some skin in this game. These arguments all feel very Bell Curve to me, and I'd want to review more rebuttals to Cronin's thesis before I'm willing to accept it. The whole discussion encapsulates my skepticism of evolutionary psychology: it's one thing to hear these "just-so" stories looking backward to explain the present predicament. But once the prescriptions start to accept a kind of Social Darwinist paradigm, I have to ask: weren't these lines of argument discredited a while ago? Once we buy in to the notion that men and women have non-trivial natural differences in their aptitudes, then where does it stop? Wouldn't it be natural to extend these hypotheses to racial differences in aptitudes, etc.?
-Daniel Horne
Helena Cronin will never be the President of Harvard… I’ll be here all week!!
But seriously,
“Once we buy in to the notion that men and women have non-trivial natural differences in their aptitudes, then where does it stop? Wouldn’t it be natural to extend these hypotheses to racial differences in aptitudes, etc?”
it seems like as a society we’ve accepted the idea that truth is good no matter what, there’s nothing to fear in the truth, etc. This while also excluding, by rule, certain views from polite society.
I’m not here to advance one side or another (I have my doubts about whether we have nothing to fear from learning any and everything whatsoever, and I imagine polite society can’t include all ideas come what may). To try and stay true to an abstract philosophical spirit, it seems like something has to give on one or the other side of our social arrangement in this area. That is to say, either we inhumanly compartmentalize our self-conceptions in an area separate from scientific claims to the truth (which might get a tad uncomfortable with all that repression) or we decide that maybe we don’t need to know just everything about anything.
This also brings to mind issues of color-blind liberalism versus identity politics. On the issue of genes versus culture, Cronin is convinced on one side, and as far as I understand, Michel Foucault is convinced on the other. But for someone unconvinced/ambivalent like me, a color and gender blind state that emphasizes individual freedom and provides a generous welfare state (but not necessary the statist regulatory state) can go a long way to ameliorating the effects of discrimination while preserving the winner’s incentive that eventually has positive externalities (I’m veering off course here, sorry)..
What I’m getting at is that if we granted the classical liberal his formally equal and color blind society, perhaps he would have no reason to be interested in The Bell Curve (researchers will study what they will, but the results wouldn’t be as relevant to policy).
So first, I’ve veered off sex/gender and into race, but race was mentioned in Daniel Horne’s post and I think you could talk about the issues similarly. Second, I’m not super confident on which direction to go, I mean, maybe race and gender are socially constructed *and* we need proactive identity policy measures, but for now, suffice it to say, it does seem like there’s tension in our arrangement. To put it as succinctly as possible: having racial outcomes at the heart of policy issues like disparate impact and affirmative action *while at the same time* acting like it takes a suspicious obsession with race to wonder how large a factor possibly innate differences might make, is an unfair imposition on the conservative or classical liberal (or hell, maybe even socialist) who flirts with essentialism. The same principle applies to issues of sex and gender.
Hi Jay,
Good points, but there’s a big difference between (1) merely wondering “how large a factor possibly innate differences might make,” and (2) confidently announcing, as Cronin did, “The science is in! Women are generally worse than men at math and science, and lack what it takes to be leaders!” I’d like to first review that science, please.
Getting away from socially charged issues like race and gender equality, the issue is more about counterintuitive claims being presented as uncontroversial scientific fact, as Cronin did. I instinctively rebel against such claims. But yes, the fact that such claims can have socially pernicious consequences heightens the drama a bit.
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for the post and the reply. I suppose I agree (though I’m still a touch uncomfortable, but just a touch! about what counts as counterintuitive in conversations like this, what the default position should be, etc). Perhaps what one chooses to emphasize here is determined by the path dependence of one’s priors or what not. But for the record, I’ve never heard an argument that I thought settled the dispute between (for lack of a better term) “right-wing” evolutionary psychology and (for lack of a better term) “left-wing” sociological or Foucault inspired theses on the near omnipotence of culture. So one side or another might be able to block the crudest arguments from the other side, but it gets weird when one side claims to have finally defeated the other.
In other words, as a layperson, when I look at this issue I think what I’m seeing is something like underdetermination.
I should have added, in the course of introducing the possibility of the color and gender blind society dreamed of by Marx (and dreamed of by Scalia in the case of race), that the feeling of necessity surrounding the effort to resolve seemingly intractable issues like innate versus cultural differences fades away. Or at least that’s the idea.
I think that there was a (reasonably simple) confusion about Cronin’s position throughout the debate -admittedly because she didn’t do a very good job of putting it across- but in giving a generous reading I think this is the robust claim you would have to see her argument as making:
Take the example of mathematical aptitude. It is a statistical fact that men and women are different (she thinks genetically, which seems to me not unresaonable, but you might think due to cognitive differences that are down to the nurture recieved in childhood). The way the education system is set up exploits ways of teaching which are effective for males (spatial metaphors for “moving variables”, “balancing algebra”, even set theory) when there are in fact equally legitimate ways of getting females to learn what amounts to the same pragmatic/instrumental skill which would work really well for them (although not so much for the guys – but thats OK because they have their spatial metaphors). Her claim is not that the males are better in essence, but that they perform better under these conditions (so I think at least one very strong ‘essentialism’ is ruled out on this view; it in fact provides an error theory as to why men seem better essentially.)
If you scale that up to something like a corporate situation: Men are driven but lone wolves. Women might not be as driven but because of that very fact they are better suited to a collaborative environment, because they don’t have to worry about people stabbing them in the back to get ahead. But this complemetary skill isn’t rewarded (it isn’t firstly exploited for the profit of the business in a way that would warrant its being rewarded) in the way companies operate. For instance, whole departments aren’t promoted as a unit, which would preserve the value of the females as a collective (that benefit would be lost if only individuals were promoted and had to learn to work in a new social environment).
So to sum up, if you buy the stuff about male/female cognitive differences that doesn’t mean you have to think one or the other is better, sans any evironmental caveats. This is because some particular cognitive skill isn’t valuable in essence but only instrumentally, and it is the case that we can engineer situations which make the most of the different cognitive skillset that women have (and it would be to the benefit of all to maximise this potential) rather than the current institutions which have been developed to maximise productivity given the way males operate (because for most of history men have been the only ones involved in these institutions).
Hi KW,
You raise good points, and our differences may be more in kind than type. That said, I think the lede may have been buried in your second paragraph.
My point was that the statistical differences between boys and girls may result from a combination of both natural and nurtured factors, but any _meaningful_ statistical performance difference between boys and girls re: mathematical aptitude are more proximately caused by the nurture received in childhood, and perpetuated later by family and peer groups. That results in very different conclusions and policy prescriptions than Cronin’s.
Cronin treats mathematical ability as a kind of microprocessor chip in your brain, and kids are born with a either high-powered chip, or low-powered chip, or somewhere in between. You can adopt practices to work around a weaker microprocessor, of course, but you’ll always be limited by that handicap, unless you (or society) adopt workarounds. If we instead treat mathematical ability as a kind of muscle, which can be developed (or neglected) from an early age, then both the paradigm and the policy prescriptions change.
For the sake of argument, let’s just grant that innate physical differences* between boys’ and girls’ brains allow boys to more quickly absorb “spatial metaphors,” and therefore offer some advantage re: STEM** achievement. It’s nevertheless a huge jump to go from that assumption to “Therefore, we can now explain why boys have historically excelled in STEM achievement, and will continue to do so unless we re-engineer our entire educational system to account for girl’s innate handicaps.”
Why? Because we still wouldn’t know whether those innate cognitive differences resulted in trivial or non-trivial performance differences on STEM test scores. In other words, even if we grant that girls tend to be born with a “slower chip,” would such cognitive differences require young girls to cogitate 50% longer on math problems? Or 25%? Or 10%? Or 1%? If it’s closer to 1% than 50%, then perhaps the more _proximate_ cause of the male/female performance gap in STEM achievement result from _cultural_ factors?
For example, perhaps it’s true that:
(1) from a very young age, young boys are more often socially encouraged (and in many families, _pressured_) by their parents (and also peers) to engage whatever behavior is required to excel in STEM fields
and/or
(2) from a very young age, young girls are more often socially discouraged (and in many peer groups, _pressured_) by their peers (and also parents) from engaging in behavior which promotes academic achievement in STEM fields
Then it’s fair to conclude that these _cultural_ factors are responsible for, say, 50%, or 75%, or 99% of the performance differences between boys and girls in STEM fields. If so, then Cronin is being socially _counter-productive_ to focus on the 1%, or 5%, or 10% head start re: spatial metaphors which boys may or may not receive at birth.
It’s socially counter-productive because it allows us to ignore (if not rationalize and defend) the cultural factors that discourage young girls from engaging in the behavior which tends to develop excellence in STEM disciplines. And given the material rewards that society offers to people who excel in STEM fields, ignoring the cultural factors result in material penalties and historically self-perpetuating consequences for women over time.
I’m not saying my explanation is thoroughly correct, while Cronin’s is thoroughly incorrect. There’s no need to re-litigate nature/nurture. But Cronin’s failure to even acknowledge that there are more variables in the equation, and to simply scorn cultural factors as “postmodernist balderdash,” strikes me as worse than unpersuasive; it’s irresponsible.
__________________________
*But, cf., contrary scientific studies, such as the one cited by Geoff below.
**STEM = “Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics”
Just read this article @ theconversation.edu.au
Discusses the general nature v nurture debate but at the end discusses briefly a study on two Indian groups: One is patrilineal and the other matrilineal.
http://theconversation.edu.au/men-are-better-at-spatial-reasoning-erm-you-might-want-to-think-again-3216
Oh – and here is the abstract for the study discussed
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/08/19/1015182108