About men and women
Have men dominated and exploited women? Isn’t it ridiculous that men occupy the majority of important positions, including academic chairs, and earn more than women? Was Larry Summers (former president of Harvard University, member of the Clinton cabinet) wrong to wonder whether the lack of women in the sciences is due to prejudices? I have always been inclined to say yes to all those questions. After reading a lecture by Roy Baumeister (delivered at the 2007 American Psychological Association conference) I have to reconsider my answer.
Baumeister points to the intriguing fact that 80 percent of women and only 40 percent of men have procreated. This means that a few men have lots of children (Genghis Khan apparently had 1000 or so) and lots of men have none. In the evolution of the species, so Baumeister suggests, men had to take risks in order to procreate. They had to stand out to stand a chance with women.
The real eye opener was his remark that if we look at the top men do visibly better—in terms of positions, rewards, achievements, and the like—but when we look at the bottom we also see many more men than women. Mostly men live in the gutters, occupy the prisons, and die in wars. Of the 3000 American war dead in Iraq only 62 are women. Baumeister concludes that men live more risky lives.
Baumeister attributes the differences between the sexes—the operation of gender—not to a difference in talent, or intelligence, but to a difference in motivation. Men are, more than women, motivated to take risks, to venture outside the home, to engage in many, often superficial, relations, to undertake risky expeditions and the like. Women are, more than men, motivated to work on intimate relationships, to take care of their homes and the like. According to him evolution makes sense of this difference in motivation. The caring behavior of women was essential for the survival of groups. That is why men were supposed to protect them. Men’s lives were dispensable and could be sacrificed in case of a real threat. (That is why 34 percent of the rich men versus 46 percent of the poor women survived the Titanic disaster).
This account helps me to understand the frictions I am experiencing with my wife. She used to complain about the amount of time and energy I spend on things and people outside the home, that I often do more for people I hardly know than for her and our children, that I have this ambition to prove myself in the outside world. We now understand (for it was she who drew my attention to the article of Baumeister) that is due to evolution. I as a man have to go out, be competitive, be ambitious at times, and engage in many more or less superficial relations, because it is my nature. Whereas it is in her nature to care for the home, to seek intimacy with me, and to be emotional about a time like Christmas (which is for me just hard work). Thanks to Baumeister, my wife and I have reached a mutual understanding. And I understand a little better why I am doing what I am doing.
Alice Verheij said,
May 19, 2008 @ 7:04 pm
Hello gentlemen,
The discussion is very interesting but also very incomplete. It’s a gender discussion that needs a broader view than the al so typical but rather underdevellopped gender dichotomy that our society is build on.
When we dive in the gender subject, we need to study Judith Butler’s publications like ‘Gender Trouble’. (Gender Trouble critically discusses the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Jacques Derrida, and, most significantly, Michel Foucault. The book has also enjoyed widespread popularity outside of traditional academic circles, even inspiring an intellectual fanzine, Judy!.)
If we study Butler’s views and findings we will start to understand that apart from the biological gender dichotomy current society is evolving into a gender continuum based society. In that society traditional male and female gender roles are for a large part of society no longer attached to the male or female born gender. They are roles, nothing more!
This abviously means that we can expect that the male bastion in many professions will deteriorate. Examples are there for anyone to observe. For instance in 2007 the number of women law students in the Netherlands was - for the first time in history - larger than the number of male students.
Another example is even more explicit. The way society handles queer people (or transgenders or transsexuals for that matter) is slowly changing. Much like it changed it’s attitude against homosexuals and lesbians over the last fourty years. We can expect that the general acceptance of people living in between genders or switching gender will increase over time. That said, we will also experience emancipated transgenders in public office and high standing positions all through society. This is already the case in parts of the US and in the US academic world. Frontrunners like Ann Lawrence, Deirdre McCloskey, Judith Butler, Kate Bornstein and many others show that gender diversity does not have to be a bloccking issue for social, political, scientific and commercial positions that people might reach.
My contribution to this discussion is that in my view, based on historic evoloution on emancipation and gender thinking over the last decades, we will in the coming century experience a slow but sure downfall of traditional gender role assigments. It will take time, but evolutions in thinking usually do.
For me as a human being I have come to realize (the hard way) that changing my gender did at this stage mean accepting social losses. But it also showed me that changing gender and thus experiencing living in the other gender than with what I was born has given me a lot of insight in how human we humans are. It certainly did no block me intellectually or professionally. On the contrary.
So, my dear gentlemen, changing views on gender is a matter of time and experience. Next generations will be much wiser on this than our generation is today.
Regards,
Alice
artgrrl said,
May 22, 2008 @ 10:55 am
[...]I as a man have to go out, be competitive, be ambitious at times, and engage in many more or less superficial relations, because it is my nature. Whereas it is in her nature to care for the home, to seek intimacy with me, and to be emotional about a time like Christmas (which is for me just hard work). [...]
I hope this is not to be taken seriously? Do men have a competitive nature by default? Isn’t it the culture that drives them, or is this all part of the nature/nurture debate all over again? It’s all about roles, like Alice points out. Lots of women don’t care for homes or children or don’t want to. The hairs in my neck are shivering by reading texts like this.