Sex & sensibility - sex differences and the gender wars

Reason, March, 1999 by Cathy Young

The first victim of the gender wars is common sense.

In 1997, a study claiming to explain why boys will be boys and girls will be girls sparked a revealing outcry. British scientists had been studying girls with Turner's Syndrome; these girls have one X chromosome instead of two, and they tend to be insensitive and socially inept. As Time put it, "They act, in other words, a lot like boys."

Most daughters inherit an X chromosome from each parent. The study found that the Turner's Syndrome girls who got their single X from their mothers - as all boys do - were far more anti-social than girls with a paternal X. The researchers speculated that a social adjustment gene linked to the X chromosome is activated only if the X comes from Dad and thus is active only in girls.

"Experts Say Men Are Programmed to Behave Badly; 'Social Gene' Makes Lasses Nicer Than Lads," cried the headline in a London tabloid. "Preposterous," scoffed feminist writer Susie Orbach in the more highbrow, left-leaning British daily The Guardian. "Gender roles are culturally prescribed - they've nothing to do with genetics."

But were either of these sweeping statements grounded in reality? On a standardized index of anti-social behavior reported by parents, the average score for Turner's girls with a maternal X was nine out of 24. But if the "social gene" theory is right, Turner's girls who get their single X from their fathers should have been as socially skilled as normal girls. Yet boys and Turner's girls with a paternal X both averaged about 4 on the anti-social index. Normal girls had an average score of 2. There was also a good deal of overlap among the scores of normal children: Three out of 10 boys were as nice as five out of 10 girls. That's a difference, to be sure, and quite possibly a genetic one - but hardly one that indicates men are from Mars and women from Venus.

The Two Poles of Sex

The "social gene" brouhaha is all too typical of how we now talk about sex differences: Biology is either everything or nothing; men and women are identical or polar opposites. Many feminists absolutely refuse to allow that some of the gender-based inequalities they deplore may be due in part to innate differences. Many conservatives just as dogmatically invoke sex differences, often distorted or magnified beyond recognition, to condemn any departures from traditional roles. Neither side has much patience for the complexities of real life or for the variety of real people.

For example, in an August 1995 New York Times op-ed piece, conservative writer Danielle Crittenden argued that men's "genetic wiring" makes them immune to "the mental strain of walking out the door" that working mothers suffer. Irate readers dismissed this as absurd and asserted that any such feelings arise from "cultural conditioning."

It is hardly absurd to think that the parent who gives birth may have a biological predisposition to be more attached to the baby. On the other hand, a biological predisposition is not a universal imperative. Men thrust into a "Mr. Mom" role because they are out of work when the baby arrives often feel heartbroken when they have to walk out the door.

These extremes - polarity vs. sameness - are entrenched in mainstream culture. The notion that without sexist discrimination, half of all chief executive officers, engineers, and firefighters would be female is, paradoxically, matched by the equally pervasive notion that women and men are worlds apart. A May 1994 Newsweek story on gender in cyberspace says that women want computers to "meet people's needs," while men want to explore and conquer. In April 1998, The New Yorker ran two articles about how women will remake government and business in a collaborative, nurturing, consensus-oriented mold. A U.S. News & World Report story on women architects in October 1996 states

that, unlike men, they place human needs above the ego and "collaboration" above "individual brilliance."

The evidence for such claims is usually underwhelming. If 58 percent of women and 46 percent of men tend to favor an activist government, that mutates in the minds of analysts into "fundamental differences" on issues and values - even if, in the same poll, 44 percent of men and 49 percent of women agree that "government should do more to help needy Americans even if it means going deeper into debt."

It is sometimes suggested that to deny differences between the sexes is a willful blindness to reality. But all those grandiose pronouncements about men and women often seem no less at odds with how actual human beings behave.

When the women-only sailing crew of [America.sup.3] raced for the 1995 America's Cup, the media readily picked up team sponsor Bill Koch's favorite theme: Women (unlike men) don't have a problem subordinating their egos to the team. Yet an earlier all-female team, the U.S. Women's Challenge in the 1993 Whitbread race, was plagued by rivalries that prompted ousted skipper Nance Frank to lament, "Basically, there's no difference between men and women."