My hormones made me do it
THE SEXUAL PARADOX:
Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap
By Susan Pinker
352 pp. Scribner $26.00
Reviewed by Ruth Douillette
As battles go, the one between the sexes is epic. Sometimes a contentious, emotional fight for equal rights—the right to vote, own property, get equal pay for equal work—and sometimes the brunt of jokes: “After God made man, he fixed his mistake.” It’s an ongoing conflict each of us plays a role in, intentionally or not.
Gender equity spawns heated debates; multiple books have been written on the subject, as a scan of Amazon.com will show. Just enter the keywords gender or sex.
Research shows girls do better in the classroom, beat boys on high school achievement tests, and outstrip them in reading and writing. Recently they’ve achieved parity in math in European, Asia and the US.
So why the discrepancy in the work force between men and women and earning capacity?
In The Sexual Paradox (not to be confused with two other Sexual Paradox books by different authors), Susan Pinker, a psychologist and a social science columnist for Canada’s Globe and Mail, wades right in to explain. She makes no apologies for her purely biological rationale for men’s and women’s roles in the workplace: hormones direct the play, she argues.
Who would deny hormones a significant role in our behavior? Without hormones there would be no reproductive urge. It is a bath of testosterone that turns a female embryo to male early in human gestation. It is oxytocin that forms the unbreakable mother-child bond. Hormones control vital bodily functions. They clearly shape us in ways both physical and mental.
I’m not saying Pinker’s extensive research is not correct, or that the men and women she interviews don’t provide at least someone’s anecdotal truth, just that she clearly paints a one-dimensional picture that fails to address other factors that are also important in gender issues: societal expectations, religious mandates, and historical models, not to mention hidden biases that still linger.
Teaching was considered a profession for women 35 years ago when I chose it as my career. How much of my choice was biological and how much was social? While it’s true that all I ever wanted to do was teach (biological?), I knew that most other jobs went to men. After all, they had families to support; women just got pregnant and quit anyway. And my parents told me teaching was a job a woman could “always fall back on.” (Societal expectations?) In other words, biology no doubt shaped my choice, but so also did society’s expectations.
Pinker asks, “ . . .what would happen if all the ‘shoulds’—the policy and political agendas—were shifted to the side for a moment to examine the science. Would the female really look like an alternative version of the male?”
No. She would not. Women are not men in drag.
When Annie Oakley sang, “Anything you can do I can do better” she may have been correct, but she neglected to say that she didn’t necessarily want to do men things. And this is one of Pinker’s arguments. Women make career choices based on hormonal urgings, as do men, and they end up with what they really want, she says.
“What women want, and why they want it, is half of what this book is about,” writes Pinker. “The other half is about men, and whether it makes sense to see males as the base model when we think about women and work.”
Pinker lists intrinsic, identifiable biological differences that cause the assertive, single-minded, competitive, object-oriented man to climb hand over hand to the top of the tree, while an equally intelligent, tender-minded, empathic, people-oriented woman opts for a less competitive career that allows time for family, and intentionally stopping her climb halfway up. She admits these are generalizations that don’t apply to all men or women.
This is a biological view for sure, and one that conventional wisdom is wont to reinforce. Still the whiff of gender bias lingers in the forest. Who’s to say men don’t shake the branches? Who’s to say they don’t step on the fingers of the women beneath them? Or some other subtle force may be at work.
Interestingly though, Pinker says that the more society strives to equalize gender offerings, the more women and men hunker down in traditional gender roles and that this shows up world-wide.
Pinker’s intention is not to give men free rein—boys will be boys—nor women an excuse for remaining on the lower branches, although some may see it that way. Neither does she favor women over men.
She writes, “Ignoring sex differences . . . has the unintended effect of devaluing women’s cognitive strengths and preferences. As long as significant proportions of women have a different, or broader range of interests than most men, many women will be attracted to different occupations. As it happens, the people or language-oriented occupations that appeal to most women are not as well paid as the standard male career choices.”
It is in this area of pay, not the career choice itself, that gender bias may rear its head, although Pinker says, “It is not clear what comes first—lower rates of pay in people-oriented jobs, or stagnant pay scales in occupations dominated by women, who are less likely to negotiate.” Or as a male friend asks, “Why are they less likely to negotiate? She says it’s biology, but what woman wants to be called a nasty bitch?” True! And what man a sissy?
Pinker urges corporate policies be drafted that pay senior managers in roles likely to be filled by women as much as senior managers in likely male positions. She seems to acknowledge that even if hormones are at the helm they don’t create a perfect world, which seems a paradox of another sort.
The Sexual Paradox is an interesting book; I learned a lot. Pinker does what she sets out to do, and does it calmly, rationally, even-handedly. It got me thinking, and even spurred a little chat between the above-mentioned friend and me, where you would swear he was on the women’s side and I on the male’s. Go figure!
Anyway, I’m always looking for another excuse to add to my list, and on any given day, “My hormones made me do it,” will work just fine.
Ruth Douillette is retiring from her teaching career this month and looks forward to seeing where her hormones will lead her next. You can follow her journey at http://upstreamanddown.blogspot.com.
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