Men and Women
Sunday, July 24, 2011 at 1:36PM This is an interesting paper about the differences between men and women. You might set aside some time to read it.
It addresses the delicate point that there seem to be more men of ability in some areas (science, Chess, genre-creators in music, etc) with a much more plausible explanation than the conspiracy theory that throughout all cultures and times, men have kept women down. The author explains that the entire notion of "men vs. women" is a screwed up way to look at it, and that the actual evolutionary issue is "groups (that contain men and women) vs. other groups (that also contain men and women)."
The author suggests three main reasons we see such a disproportionate number of men at the top of so many fields. My summary is as follows:
1) Nature plays dice much more with men than women. Men are at the top of a lot of things, and they are also at the very bottom of a lot of things. Most people in prison are men. Even with height, it varies more with men in BOTH directions (meaning there are a lot of men way shorter than the male average, moreso than women way shorter than the female average). Though there appear to be more men at the top levels of IQ, there are more men at the BOTTOM levels as well. In the set of people who are mentally retarded, the more severe the case, the more likely the person is to be male, and below a certain point, it's basically all male. Though the average in IQ and many other things can be the same in both sexes, it's males nature takes chances on and ends up with more extremes in both directions. Also, I thought his notes about how deceptive the stats for minimum wage and grade point averages were interesting.
2) Evolutionarily, men need to stand out. The author presents a staggering statistic about how many of our ancestors are female as opposed to male. Twice as many are female! Although half the people who have ever lived were female, that's not the same stat. 80% of females who have lived passed on their genes (passing on genes means "ancestor" here), while only 40% of the men who have lived passed on theirs. Men are in a tough situation, and would do well to separate themselves from the pack, perhaps by accumulating wealth or power or skills, or something. The author says the number of times a group of 100 women have gotten together to build a ship to sail to far-off-lands is basically never, though men have done this many times throughout history. If you have an 80% chance of reproducing, it's just a better strategy to play it more safe and pick amongst the many men who are available to you. No need to build a ship or conquer some other land. And so evolution gave men a REASON to peruse all the crazy things they do, and to be passionate about them. To put it another way, the set of women geniuses who are just as able to be great at science as men contains fewer who WANT to devote themselves to such things.
3) Men's "relationship spheres" are different than women's. Women care about deep 1-on-1 relationships, and lucky for us, this has allowed our species to actually survive. Having families and raising young is pretty central to carrying on the species, so this preference of women's is not "worse." Quite the contrary, it's mission critical. Men's preference is to have a larger sphere of more shallow relationships. If you look at violence in the home, women actually commit it more. If you look at violence amongst "shallow relationships" such as going to the mall and getting into a knife fight, men commit it radically more. In each case, it's just the sphere that gender cares about more.
While the woman's sphere has allowed us to perpetuate the species, it has mostly stayed the same over the centuries. But the men's sphere is what enables science, trade, corporations, and so on. The men's sphere over time allows a culture to accumulate knowledge, wealth, and power. When your group of men+women is competing against other groups of men+women, your group is going to be in great shape if the women are great at their sphere (necessary for survival) and the men are great at theirs (not necessary for survival, but bring power to your group overall).
Given these three points, it's not hard to imagine that most CEOs (and even Chess players) would be men, even if the average intelligence of a man is exactly the same as for a woman (which is does appear to be). I know it's a delicate subject, but I think the author does a great job of not even mentioning any morals about what "should be," only looking at what is, and explaining how evolutionary forces created these specializations. To any particular man or woman who wants to excell at the other's stereotypical sphere: go ahead! Anyway, if you have comments, better to aim them at what the paper says, rather than my imperfect summary.
Reader Comments (37)
Look, I'm not going to be able to explain the fallacies inherent in evolutionary psychology better than the journals and articles I linked in my original comment, they're well researched, well sourced, well written, peer reviewed, published articles, and I'm an unverified source on the internet, so there's literally nothing I can say that would make anyone take my word for it. This is going to be my last comment on the subject, and then I'll try to gracefully exit the conversation.
My argument can be broken down into a couple of points that will be very brief and very poorly made compared to the research I linked in my previous comment. But for the sake of closure, here I go:
-Evolutionary Psychology is almost universally rejected by every relevant field: Biology, Psychology, and Anthropology each have articles in their respective field thoroughly debunking the claims.
-The "facts" presented in the article are not "facts." There are some statistics in there, yes, without any context to give light to those statistics (sample sizes, what factors were controlled for, demographics, etc), and then wild adaptionist conjecture presented as facts that I have to accept or be considered "shocking."
-Evolutionary Psychology is not new, it's as old as Darwin, was made popular by Psychoanalysts, and was used a lot in the 50s and 60s to keep housewives from leaving their husbands and getting a job. This is the exact same theory, just under a new title.
-Evolutionary Psychology is offensive not because it's controversial, but because of the very nature of its claims. Even a claim as seemingly innocuous as "men have more variance than women," is rife with implication: by virtue of the fact that men are "more extreme," (or to put it as I understood it: capable, innately, of reaching greater heights and lower depths) women are therefore, inherently, the more average sex. The greatest (writer, musician, poet, scientist, game designer) woman will never be as great as the greatest man because men, as a gender are capable of "more variance," and can therefore reach greater heights naturally, innately. The unsaid implications of Evolutionary Psychology are the most offensive and distasteful aspects of it.
-Evolutionary Psychologists ignores everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, that could possibly be an outside influence beyond their "just-so story" explanations (http://facts4u.com/OffSite_Stored_Pages/pdf/HowtheHumanGotItsSpots.pdf)
For example, I go back to the statistics the author uses:
Workaholics are mostly men. (There are some women, just not as many as men.) One study counted that over 80% of the people who work 50-hour weeks are men. That means that if we want to achieve our ideal of equal salaries for men and women, we may need to legislate the principle of equal pay for less work.
So, here are my questions about this statistic:
1. how many people were sampled
2. what location were they sampled in
3. what industry(ies) were they sampled in
4. how old were they (were the women of child bearing age)
5. how does this statistic compare to areas of the world that offer equal time off for paternity and maternity leave
6. how does this statistic compare to areas of the world that offer state subsidised child care
7. how does this statistic compare to companies that offer child care as part of the employee benefit package
8. what was the ratio of male / female entry level employees in the companies surveyed
9. what was the ratio of male / female management employees in the companies surveyed
10. what was the ratio of male / female senior level / board members of the companies surveyed
11. what is the average rate of pay in the company for male employees vs female employees
11. what other factors were controlled for
All of these factors and probably dozens more that I can't think of off the top of my head affect whether or not a person stays late or works overtime or comes in on a weekend. Not one of them are genetic. But because women work less, it's because men are just... wired that way?
Immediately afterwards he goes on to wonder why there weren't more great women concert pianists in the 19th century when today, in the 21st century, most orchestras have to have screens between musicians and the judges and women musicians are taught to wear soft soled shoes to auditions so that no one can tell they are a woman. The one orchestra in Europe that doesn't use screened auditions? Surprisingly has only hired 3 women out of 40 musicians hired in the last 13 years. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Philharmonic#Controversies).
I find it infuriating and frustrating and insulting that blatant facts like these are just brushed aside in favour of "men and women are just wired differently," because that makes a neater, tidier argument where no one has to change any behaviour or confront anything uncomfortable.
I could go on and on breaking down every sentence of the article, but frankly? I don't think it would make a difference. Evo-psych is easy to believe because it "makes sense" to people who want to believe it. Sexism is a hard pill to swallow for those who have never had to experience it, and even if I provided a perfectly academic and dispassionate argument here (I provided 5 in my last comment), I doubt I could convince anyone who found Evo-Psych appealing.
Hopefully this response is less "shocking" and clears up any confusion.
Unfortunately that comment doesn't clear up much of anything. Your example about women pianists is not relevant to the example given in the talk. It's entirely possible that discrimination against women has caused there to be fewer women in orchestras, and the auditions using screens vs ones that don't could shed light on that issue. The issue raised in the talk was an entirely different one, about who went beyond playing to create new genres of music. So I don't really see how the orchestra screen auditions are related to that.
You're also speaking over and over and over about how evolutionary psychology is wrong. I make no statement on that either way and don't really know what is bundled up inside that term. I asked in plain english if your point is whether evolution has had no bearing on the shaping of human psychology and you did not directly answer. It seems obviously the answer is yes. It couldn't really possibly be no. So that means I'm not sure what "evolution psychology" does or does not include. It would be a lot more clear to address the actual points of the author than to use this broad term that may or may not include various points of his, and to dismiss the whole thing.
You have also not explained why any of this is offensive. You touched on something that could get close to offensive, the claim the best woman at some field can't be as good as the best man. Ok, let's look at that. I never imagined such a thing to be true, really, but what does the author have to say about that? He would say that if the sample size is small enough, of course anyone could end up being the best. Next he might say that it depends what the thing is that the person is being good at. Maybe some skills are distributed the same across men and women, while others are the ones with the high variance. So suppose it's one of the skills that has high variance in men and low variance in women. Further suppose the sample size is very large. If this is the case, it seems a matter of logic that the conclusion must follow. And so what? Like...if it happens to be true, then you're offended? That would make no sense. So your claim must be that it is not true. And yet if a skill has high variance in one population, then how could you reach a conclusion that that population wouldn't end up having the top (and bottom!) people at that skill?
It would really only make any sense at all if you were saying the original claim that men have more variance at some skills or traits is incorrect. But again, why is that something to be offended at? I think you're bringing in baggage from other fields and other arguments that has no real place here.
Just want to clarify my issue with the paper because I didn't express myself clearly before. The subject matter is impossible to take a position on without offending somebody. I don't care very much about gender politics and my previous post turned out just like an argument from idealized equality.
Here's the crux of the issue from a scientific perspective: Plausible explanations that describe data are excellent and necessary. Sometimes they are (almost certainly) true! In the best case they work as wonderful models, tools for visualizing and understanding the world around us. But this author, and many thousands like him, are doing what no real evolutionary or cognitive scientist would accept: framing plausible speculation as evidence.
I concede that the author may be correct in all his assumptions about "why" we see this data. Perhaps his intent is to engage a debate that could lead to verification or falsification of an actual hypothesis. Is such a paper worth reading as speculation? Sure. So are any number of phlebotomy or eugenics papers from decades ago. Is it science? In no way. Should it be posted by you and implied to be worth reading? Sure, why not, that's your right and I'm glad you did. Should scientists point out and expose unscientific methods held up as (or implied to be) scientific research? Wherever possible, I hope!
I am compelled to call out speculation as speculation. Even if it turns out to be correct via falsifiable means, in which case it's no longer speculation, it's a hypothesis, and therefore worthy of serious consideration.
Like I said, I love your work and I don't think any less of you for posting this. I just wanted to point out that storytelling is not science.
Lauri: "Sexism is a hard pill to swallow for those who have never had to experience it"
...Who, sexless energy-beings? The way people treat men isn't "the normal way," it's biased and loaded with assumptions. Don't pretend you're in a privileged position because men are ignorant of what it's like to be judged.
"It's really frustrating to see such hostile gender politics being played out in what has been, up till now, a relative safe and neutral space for me to enjoy reading about games. It's a pity I won't be able to enjoy this space anymore."
Couldn't you just... disagree... and then enjoy reading about games here again?
The point about median income being higher for men than for women is a good one! I'm embarrassed that I didn't realise we should be using median income.
Sirlin,
I think Laurie refers to Evolutionary Psychology because that field as a whole is (in?)famous for 2 things:
a): taking a good hard look at a lot of (usually good) statistical data and finding interesting correllations, many of which are useful, fascinating and certainly worth exploring, and
b) crafting plausible but purely speculative scenarios in which various aspects of psychology and behavior could be (directly) selected for in the evolutionary process... and then propagating, as foundational evidence for further conjecture, the most plausible sounding explanations that fit the most data. Despite the similarity of this process to what most people think of as the scientific method, this is not science.
No evolutionary biologist or cognitive researcher dares to rest on this kind of speculation for a living. They start with the plausible conjecture, but real scientists advance objective knowledge by publishing papers containing testable, refutable hypotheses.
Case in point: I'm sure that you have heard the great example case of the moth species living near London that visibly evolved a change in color as its environment changed over a relatively small stretch of time, as the industrial revolution (and the accompanying soot and pollution) reached a fever pitch in that city.
The moth in question was naturally whitish in color, and blended in very well with the bark of the tree on which it spent most of its time. As the trees became permanently stained year-round with soot, the moth stood out like crazy against the bark, (presumably!) exposing it to predators more often. A previously rare phylogenetic trait in this species (dark coloring) began to become more and more prevalent, until the vast majority of moths were dark and sooty and blended in perfectly with the dirty tree bark. Later, as pollution began to recede, the change gradually reversed itself.
When I was younger, I was struck by the amazing simplicity and obviousness of the reason for the change. Predators suddenly became a major selective force on the species and then the dark colored trait, previously a liability, became an advantage. And just like the author of the paper you linked, I have used this true story and many other situations to vehemently argue against mysticism and to explain evolutionary mechanisms.
But you would be hard pressed today to find any biologist who would accept predation as the reason for the change, purely on the basis of its plausibility. And many other falsifiable hypotheses have been put forward, most of which very plausibly imply that the color change could have been a secondary effect of selection for another, more subtle trait. Even today it is not clear that predators of that moth have any difficulty distinguishing it from its surroundings, no matter what color it is!
The point of this disappointingly less-obvious-than-first-speculated example is to demonstrate how much more complex the process of evolution is than most people assume, even if people understand the basic principles behind selection.
The truth is that real evolutionary science in large part acknowledges and revolves around the extreme difficulty in saying for sure which traits are directly selected for and which are secondary effects.
Given that we're talking so cautiously about relatively simple, genetically identifiable traits like tail length, coloration, scale coverage etc, you can imagine that complex biochemical behaviors such as human brain activity, especially psychological traits and behavioral stuff like motivation and ambition, cannot be called simple by anybody that wishes to be taken seriously.
To analyze these cognitive traits in an evolutionary context is necessary and vital. To just explain the data with whatever seems like a plausible adaptational advantage and say "therefore evolution selected for this behavior" is a stance that no real scientist would ever take.
Evolutionary psych as a whole exhibits a total lack of respect or awareness for these nuances of evolution, and Laurie made the connection and the dismissal because the points put forward in the paper you linked follow the same lines of reasoning as the papers published by journals in that field. The phrase "adaptationist storytelling" means exactly this: taking data that have plenty of merit in their own right and are ripe for falsifiable hypothesizing and ruining them by just making shit up, and then hiding behind the false defense of "I'm not advancing any value systems, I'm just illuminating what the data tells us... by cherry-picking and speculatively interpreting data to tell a story that is not falsifiable!"
It's totally possible that men have "more variance" in a lot of traits than women. If that was what the author was setting out to demonstrate, he would have been better served by just giving us contextualized statistics that supported that hypothesis, so that readers would be able to explore the truth of his statement (men have more variance) for themselves. Laurie is correct to point out that the author breaks the scientific perspective by presenting "facts" ('a study says x') and then proceeding to conjecture, and then proceeding to imply that the "facts" are supported by the conjecture and/or vice versa.
The author is NOT just impartially presenting the evolutionary reality in light of clear and refutable data. The evolutionary reality is very murky even in its clearest points, due to the current limitations of our technology and evidence.
Selection occurs. It's just never clear how it works, and the more complex the trait, the more clear we must be in our hypotheses about exactly what we know and what we suppose. What we know is very little in this regard. What we suppose is worth supposing, but it should be clearly presented as such.
I don't think the article was a research paper as it has no references. It is a transcript of a talk.
If you are treating it as a research paper, you would make a huge list of objections and how it is already debunked and so on. That would miss the point.
Gabe Langton: _Awesome_ post. You write very lucidly, and I agree with just about everything you said. I even had just about exactly the same experience with the moth story :)
It is frustrating how easy it is for extremely intelligent, well-educated people (and I count myself in this set) to trust their intuitions about the truth of 'scientific' explanations like this and end up being.. well, wrong. It's something I've been painfully aware of in myself and trying combat for a few years now, and it still happens to me regularly.
Evo Psych is the art of making up plausible, appealing sounding stories based on no real evidence and developing theories that are not predicative and cannot be falsified.
There is a wealth of critiques on the web of Evo Psych available to anyone willing to do the reading. For the most part it's junk science and is most often used to provide a "scientific" basis for people's already-held beliefs and biases. Most often it's used to make excuses for "boys will be boys" behavior by claiming that such and such behavior held evolutionary advantages based on convenient conjecture.
It's very appealing to people who already agree with the message. garcia and WaterD are both misogynists, so of course they find this sort of stuff highly convincing and valid. Just as people with racial prejudice bought into the "science" of skull size measurement.
Whether or not you agree or disagree with the claims made evo psych is generally just not good science, any more so than homeopathy or a million other things that sound appealing to a certain audience but have no real scientific basis.
"If you are treating it as a research paper, you would make a huge list of objections and how it is already debunked and so on. That would miss the point."
Valid objections and points being debunked seem extremely relevant.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt but it sounds like what you are saying is that since you agree with the main thrust of the piece the facts are irrelevant.
Welp, I think Watered may have jumped the shark a bit in the other direction. Be careful when reacting to something you dont like that you dont respond with opposing claims which are equally as unjustifiable. Regardless, I do enjoy reading/speaking about this topic. The core of Sirlin's rebuttal here is essentially that the author is describing data, not using it to make a claim. Im not sure if its that black and white; what if presenting data without technically using it to make a direct political argument still makes one implicitly? Reading that, im sure the first counter-argument is that the implication lies in the mind of the reader, a projection which is the reader's responsibility, not the authors. Im not so sure about that. I think projecting can be a big part of it, but I dont think you could take it to the extreme and say that describing facts NEVER implies an argument and is therefore immune to rebuttal of said argument. I think you should acknowledge this grey area, Sirlin, and not rely so heavily on the "hes just describing data so you shouldnt react to what you think he thinks it means" defence.
Rule of thumb mate. If you aren't against a civil rights movement, don't publish something critical of them unless you are completely god damn sure the source is frankly unimpeachable, and above reproach. Or a member speaking to other internal members. Yeah, the whole, "that ain't fair" part sucks, but frankly, some topics are NEVER a neutral matter. It's not a matter of emotion or some silliness on their part, it's just the simple soul crushing reality that when the deck is stacked against you, simply playing as usual is not an option.
The paper is interesting, I'll give it that, but on the whole it says nothing of any great value. It's entire argument falls apart once you get to "motivation" as most evo-psych papers do. Yes the biological imperative is always present, it is not however always primus. Even more importantly, people do not base their decisions on how best to evolve, it is so far removed from us that it's actually a rather silly notion. It may be true that women were more likely to have children if they stayed at home, but that doesn't really provide any insight into motivation. And it especially doesn't provide us any insight into why it might have been produced by women and not something actively pursued for the gain of those 40% of all men who did manage to reproduce.
Sara, you completely lost me there. Against a civil rights movement??? Where did you read that I am for or against a civil rights movement? And movement about what? About how we need to respect the 4th amendment more, which I have actually directly written about? Or have you imagined an entire gender claim that I am making here? I have made NO CLAIM at all on what should be done or what should not be done, so I'm totally lost on your point. I think you are putting such claim in my mouth, perhaps.
Jesse, the point that he's just describing what is really is a valid thing to say. If you disagree with it, you can point to the original data being wrong, that perhaps there is no such extra variance in height, in IQ, in mental retardation, and so on. And in pointing that out, you could do it dispassionately. It really and truly is your responsibility as a reader not to inject your own issues into it. The Freakanomics guy is surrounded by the same kind of criticisms. He describe some correlation that appears to be true, and the mere DESCRIBING it causes some people to be upset. Again, not a very good response.
I find it fascinating that some of you don't find the claims interesting. Maybe if you stopped thinking of the moral questions, it would go better. Here's something that's interesting, and on VERY solid logical ground. Imagine that there are two groups of people, one with higher variance for a skill and one with lower variance. Imagine they both have the same average value. It is not about men or women. It's not about better or worse. Just take a step back out of your gender issues and think about that. The population with higher variance is going to be at the top (and bottom) end of skill. They just are, like it or not. What if you're in the low variance group? Are you offended? Better yet, what if you're in the high variance group but you personally happen to be at the bottom end of the skill. Are you offended now? Whatever the skill is, you don't get bonus points if other people in your "group" are super high in it, so you're pretty bad off there, being at the low end of the high variance group.
Those are concepts I never really thought about. It actually seems semi-intellectually bankrupt to ignore that entire concept because of some gender hangup you personally might have from other sources and other issues. I mean we could find the same sort of thing other places in nature maybe. Somewhere that evolution has favored chance taking in one group.
Whenever I see such harsh reactions to an article and review of an article that is clearly meaning to be educational and reasoning I think about how sad people are not to have the courage to break away from the pack.
At some point it became very popular for people to think that because they are not a blonde haired blue eyed white six three male romanesque visage with a 160 IQ and a few jags in the garage... that they shouldn't even try to compete against an "unfair advantage".
Well, here's Will Smith and he says try:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkrYX9EGUpM
Hold on, doesn't pretty much every sit-com ever made trade off the physiological differences between men and women? People laugh because there are differences between the sexes that are self-evident.
Do the eloquent rebut-ers deny these? Is it unfair to make judgement because it is not falsifiable - or just to do so in a scientific context?
It appears that some papers have been written on "Evolutionary Psychology" that have come under fire and lost some credibility to the phrase evolutionary psychology. I can't post on that thread for some reason or I'd tell her to think about what it would mean if evolution had no role the development of the brain. You'd have to think the brain exists as a separate entity from the universe altogether or that it's self contained and has no causal link to the forces of nature to find this acceptable. To say "evolutionary psychology is wrong" is to say this. It's simply rubbish. Evolution itself would have to be wrong if evolutionary psychology is wrong.
I haven't read the papers she's linked, but in skimming over them they seem to be criticizing specific problems within various theories within evolutionary psychology. Any critical thinker would immediately catch themselves before making the claim "evolutionary psychology is wrong." The fact that this has offended you to the point where you "won't be able to enjoy this space anymore," is just intellectually pathetic.
That all said, I think there were points in "Is there anything good about men?" where the author overstepped some lines. Overall he painted a picture of women being boring and interested only in survival. It makes them sound like some kind of scavenger. Even if I'm willing to accept everything he said as true, but the way he painted it is at least a little condemnable.
For example, "And by the same logic, I suspect most men could learn to change diapers and vacuum under the sofa perfectly well too, and if men don’t do those things, it’s because they don’t want to or don’t like to," is pretty offensive. It suggests that women are naturally mundane and enjoy tedium whereas men don't. I could go on about this paper but overall, like Sirlin, I found it a really enlightening read. I wish you would've seen the good in it. It contains some truly fascinating explanatory power. To respond with "evolutionary psychology is wrong" just tells me you aren't really interested intellectually. Which is kind of ironic :)