Photo by Flickr user Broken Piggy Bank. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Echidne of the Snakes asks of John Tierney’s latest sociobiological/“ev psych” thesis

At the same time, I do not have the resources that someone who actually works in the field would have and, once again, I plead for the professionals to step in.

So here we go: Tierney’s thesis is that the more gender-equal a society is the more men look like they are from Mars and the more women look like they are from Venus. Men are competitive, aggressive, emotionally flat, and women are cooperative, timid and emotionally curved I guess. Yet the reason for these differences is not our different planetary roots but our different roots in prehistory!

And that prehistory must have had a division of labor between men and women though we don’t have any direct fossil evidence from it. And that division of labor must have meant that women gathered and men hunted though we don’t know if that’s actually the whole truth. And somehow gathering required cooperation and hunting did not though it’s fairly easy to imagine how finding a really good spot for juicy roots would be something you’d keep hidden from the other gatherers and though it’s also fairly easy to imagine how hunting for big game would actually require cooperation between the hunters.

In short, I fail to see how cooperation would have become the selected-for characteristic more often in women than in men, and I also fail to see how it wouldn’t have benefited both sexes to be able to be both cooperative and competitive, depending on the situation. In any case, only a guy who keeps his distance from women altogether could assume that women are not intensely competitive when needed.

Read the quote in context here.

Here’s a for-instance from Tierny’s article (as excerpted in Echidne’s post)

To test these hypotheses, a series of research teams have repeatedly analyzed personality tests taken by men and women in more than 60 countries around the world. For evolutionary psychologists, the bad news is that the size of the gender gap in personality varies among cultures. For social-role psychologists, the bad news is that the variation is going in the wrong direction. It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India’s or Zimbabwe’s than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge.

Yeah, boy, you’d have to have some pretty sophisticated gene sets, or as yet undetected but extraordinary selective pressure in humanity’s past, to get gender to express more distinctly during periods of gender equality and subside otherwise. So its nice that Tierny acknowledges the problem.

But couldn’t you just dip instead into almost any post-elementary-school feminist text for that bit about how beyond a certain, pretty-low-level baseline gender is socially constructed* based not on survival-driven genes but by observation and social interaction? And since the examples he uses (India vs. Zimbabwe vs. Netherlands vs. the U.S.) tend to also lie on a continuum of affluence and opportunities for leisure wouldn’t you think that residents of the Netherlands are going to have more leisure time** will also have more opportunity to construct more elaborate distinctions?

Oh, one more thing about how gender differences might be more exaggerated when gender equality is greater from a highly unusual source. In her epic The Origins of Totalitarianism, in her section on antisemitism, Hannah Arendt made a fascinating and relevant observation about England’s Victorian-era prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli. Disraeli was from a thoroughly assimilated family of Jewish ancestry. Baptised and raised much like any other affluent Anglican he nevertheless capitalized on his “exotic” origins. The tricky part? As Arendt dryly puts it

Disraeli, who never denied that “the fundamental fact about (him) was that he was a Jew,” had an admiration for all things Jewish that was matched only by his ignorance of them.”

Pg. 71

Arendt says Disraeli, having next to no actual experience of Jewishness, distinguished himself by having his tailors cut his suits, and his barber cut his hair, in ways that he imagined made him look “more Jewish.”

And when I think about Tierney’s finding that differences become more exaggerated as meaningful equality increases I’m left wondering if… maybe… y’know… you might have had the sort of social breakdowns that, oh, say, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English mention in the early chapters of For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women, or Shulamith Firestone brings up in The Dialectic of Sex. You know, where after the industrial revolution destroyed the ancient, necessity-driven sex roles people started having these identity crises about “what it means” to be a man (Hemmingway, Robert Service, Hammett, Kipling) or a woman (Godey’s Lady’s Book, Ellen Swallow Richards) with the result that they tended to, um, emulate what we imagine are the most distinctive characteristics.

Nah, all that’s a total coincidence. It’s waaaay easier to say evolution does it, right? :-)

[** Please note Thorsten Veblen’s observation that the construction of leisure does not imply effortlessness. In fact quite the opposite. —fl]