"Although nobody denies that gender discrimination occurs, it can’t be the whole story. A large American study of gifted maths students, both boys and girls where talent was not an issue, showed that more of the boys went into engineering and more of the girls chose medicine or history or journalism. It was not that the girls couldn’t do the maths: they found other careers more interesting and challenging. "
The 1950s version:
Of course, although nobody denies that gender discrimination occurs, it can't be the whole story. A large American study of gifted maths students, both boys and girls where talent was not an issue, showed that more boys went into engineering and more of the girls chose housewifery and secretarial work. It was not that the girls couldn't do the maths: they found these careers more interesting and challenging.
But perhaps I'm being unfair...
Boys will always be boys The notion that the sexes are inherently different is anathema to PC people. But nature beats nurture, says Steven Pinker
One of my favourite movie scenes comes from The African Queen, the 1950s classic starring Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart. Hepburn plays a prim missionary forced to sail downriver in Africa with an unshaven, drunken tramp steam captain — played by Bogart — around the start of the first world war. At one point Bogart apologises for his drunkenness, explaining that his lack of control is just human nature. Hepburn replies: “Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” Historically, many institutions — especially democracies, with their checks and balances — have been designed to overcome the shortcomings of nature. It was accepted that human beings were born with personalities, talents and tastes. Among these talents was the ability to foresee the consequences of actions, and that could be put to use in devising social arrangements that counteracted the nastier parts of human nature.
Modern thinking has overturned that ancient belief in what it is to be human. During the first decades of the 20th century, psychology and the social sciences began to tell us that children are born as blank slates, or lumps of malleable putty, ready to be moulded into whatever society dictates. Much parenting advice, for example, is based on studies that find correlations between how parents behave and how their children turn out, not even testing the possibility that the correlations are caused by their shared genes rather than the effects of parenting.
Any difference between the sexes in their distributions of professions — such as the fact that fewer than 50% of mechanical engineers are female — is assumed to be a product of discrimination, without even raising the possibility that women and men might, on average, have different tastes and interests. Dozens of editorials on violence repeat the mantra that “violence is learnt behaviour”.
A belief in the blank slate can lead “experts” to make ridiculous claims: that boys fight because they are encouraged to do so or that children enjoy sweets because parents use them as a reward for eating vegetables. Nobody denies that we are affected by our cultures. But children must be innately equipped with complex abilities to learn and create culture — in human ways, as opposed to the ways of chimpanzees or parrots.
Over and over parents ask me, “How could anyone with more than one child believe that children are blank slates waiting to be written on? Children are born with distinct personalities.” Also, I suspect few people really believe men and women are identical — that women, on average, are as interested as men in how to build a carburettor or that men are as keen as women on the poetry of Sylvia Plath.
Even intellectuals often do not believe, deep down, some of the claims they make in public. Those who say that intelligence is a meaningless artefact of IQ tests will nonetheless gossip about other academics or the qualifications of George W Bush. Those who say women’s sexuality is fundamentally the same as men’s say very different things when giving advice to their teenage daughters.
The denial of human nature has distorted the pursuit of knowledge and the evaluation of ideas. Society is already beset by political correctness; this is “psychological correctness” — that some claims about how the mind works are a priori correct and it is immoral to test them. People who have dared to propose that differences in intelligence and personality have both genetic and environmental causes (as opposed to only environmental causes) have been assaulted and even threatened with death.
Many people who read claims that human beings have tendencies towards selfishness and violence believe it to be a reactionary position, because it dashes the hopes that a perfect society can be attained through changes in childrearing and the media. But in the 20th century utopian fantasies have led to human nightmares. It is no coincidence that Mao, who caused tens of millions of deaths, said, “It is on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written.”
The situation is slowly changing. I can see it in the average age of the main attackers of human nature, who entered their fields back in the 1960s and 1970s, the heyday of radical chic on college campuses.
After 15 years of staying far away from any politically touchy topic in my courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a student recently asked me if there was evidence for biologically based differences between men’s and women’s minds. I flushed and sweated, fearing a riot would break out if I answered truthfully, but screwed up my courage and went ahead. The students were intrigued and not in the least bit surprised or outraged.
When I explained that these topics were incendiary, they were flabbergasted — they took it for granted that men and women differ and did not see how this had any dire political implications. It was not because they endorsed traditional roles for women, such as housewife or air hostess. The women were in a competitive, elite institution for science and technology. They just did not see why anyone should make a big deal of the fact that women might not make up exactly 50% of the professions they chose.
Although nobody denies that gender discrimination occurs, it can’t be the whole story. A large American study of gifted maths students, both boys and girls where talent was not an issue, showed that more of the boys went into engineering and more of the girls chose medicine or history or journalism. It was not that the girls couldn’t do the maths: they found other careers more interesting and challenging.
Discoveries of possible sex differences do not threaten the core ideals of feminism, namely that women should not be discriminated against or treated unfairly. Whatever the difference in the average abilities of the sexes turns out to be, and regardless of whether they are caused by hormones or social expectations, a man or a woman should be judged as an individual. In fact, the insistence that professions end up with equal ratios of the sexes works against everyone’s interests as you will keep people out of jobs they like and force others into jobs they don’t like.
We should ask ourselves why empirical questions about how the mind works are so weighed down with political, moral and emotional baggage. Is it really such a good idea to hold beliefs that are not true but are emotionally uplifting?
Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature, was talking to Margarette Driscoll