Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire–Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do
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The legal scholar Kingsley R. Browne has pioneered evolutionary psychological work on the sex differences in the workplace, such as earnings and occupational sex segregation.9 (We encounter his work on sexual harassment later in this chapter, “Why Is Sexual Harassment So Persistent?”) Browne points out that because of differential selective pressures that men and women faced throughout evolutionary history, men and women have evolved to possess different temperaments. Throughout evolutionary history, material resources and higher status were a man’s essential means to reproductive success, because women preferred to mate with resourceful men of high status who could protect and invest heavily in their children. In contrast, physically taking care of children was a woman’s means. As a result, women today, who inherited their psychological mechanisms from their female ancestors, are far less risk-taking (because if their ancestors engaged in risky behavior and got injured or killed as a result, their children most likely died),10 less status-seeking (because status did not enhance women’s reproductive success), and less aggressive and competitive (because throughout evolutionary history, men competed to gain access to women, not the other way around).
Browne suggests that men are much more single-mindedly devoted to earning money and achieving higher status than women are. In a study of an American sample, men are significantly more likely to rank income as an important criterion for selecting a job than women are. The absolute sex difference is greater among teenagers than among older workers, so it is not a realistic response to a lifetime’s experience of earning less than men, as feminists and other conventional social scientists might contend.11 In contrast, women place significantly greater emphasis on the criterion “the work is important and gives me a feeling of accomplishment” for selecting a job.12 As Anne Moir and David Jessel, authors of Brain Sex: The Real Difference Between Men and Women, state: “In the end, the secret of male achievement in the world of work probably lies in the relative male insensitivity to the world of everything—and everybody—else.”13
Browne reminds us that many jobs that pay higher wages require their occupants to work longer hours, relocate to new cities without regard to consequences for family and children (for white-collar or professional jobs), or work in dangerous and unpleasant conditions (for blue-collar workers). It is not that women do not want money or prefer less money to more; nobody in their right mind does. It is instead that women are unwilling to pay the price and make the necessary sacrifices (often in the welfare and well-being of their children) in order to advance in the corporate hierarchy and earn more money. Once again, Moir and Jessel put it best: “Men who fail will often offer the excuse that ‘Success isn’t worth the effort.’ To the female mind, this is not so much an excuse as a self-evident truth.”14 In other words, men make more money because they want to; women make less money because they have better things to do than make money.15
The sex gap in earnings and the so called glass ceiling are caused not by employer discrimination or any other external factors, but by the sex differences in internal preferences, values, desires, dispositions, and temperaments. Just as there are a few exceptional women who are more single-mindedly motivated to earn money and attain higher status than the average man, so too are there a few women who make more money and attain higher status than most men.
From the 1960s through the 1980s, feminists claimed that women earned only 59 cents for every dollar earned by men.16 The precise figure has since been revised upward to 64 cents in 1986,17 70 cents in 1987,18 and, according to President Clinton (if he counts as a feminist), 75 cents in 1999,19 but their claim is that women still earn substantially less than men do. However, all of these comparisons ignore the inherent sex differences in dispositions and temperaments. More careful statistical comparisons of men and women who are equally motivated to earn money show that women now earn 98 cents for every dollar men make,20 and sex has no statistically significant effect on workers’ earnings.21 Adjusted for occupation and motivation, men today do not earn significantly more than women do.
Just as most women are not as single-mindedly motivated to earn money and attain higher status than the average man, most women do not earn as much money and attain as high status as men do. Browne rhetorically asks the question, “Once one breaks the glass ceiling, does it still exist?”22 In liberal capitalist societies like the US and the UK, both men and women are free to pursue what they want. They just tend to want to achieve different things.
Q. Why Are Most Neurosurgeons Male and Most Kindergarten Teachers Female?
In a series of scientific articles and books, and in the popular science book The Essential Difference, the Cambridge psychologist and autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen advances the “extreme male brain” theory of autism.23 His theory can simultaneously account for many (though not all) clinical manifestations of autism (such as exhibiting severe deficits in interpersonal domains, while maintaining normal or even exceptional abilities in others) as well as the fact that an overwhelming majority of autistics are male.
Baron-Cohen’s theory begins with the two crucial concepts of the male brain and the female brain. The male brain is primarily designed for systemizing, and the female brain is primarily designed for empathizing. What are systemizing and empathizing?
“Systemizing” is the drive to analyze, explore, and construct a system. The systemizer intuitively figures out how things work, or extracts the underlying rules that govern the behavior of a system. The purpose of this is to understand and predict the system, or to invent a new one.24 Baron-Cohen enumerates six different types of systems: technical systems (artifacts, machines); natural systems (ecology, geography); abstract systems (logic, mathematics); social systems (law, economics); organizable systems (classifications, taxonomies); and motoric systems (physical movements, such as playing musical instruments or throwing darts). His definition of what constitutes a system is therefore very comprehensive, and seems to include everything that has to do with things rather than people. By a “system,” Baron-Cohen means anything that is governed by logical and systematic rules.25
In contrast, “empathizing” is the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to them with an appropriate emotion. Empathizing occurs when we feel an appropriate emotional reaction in response to the other person’s emotions. The purpose of this is to understand another person, to predict his or her behavior, and to connect or resonate with him or her emotionally.26 In other words, empathizing is about spontaneously and naturally tuning in to the other person’s thoughts and feelings. A good empathizer can immediately sense when an emotional change has occurred in someone, what the causes of this might be, and what might make this particular person feel better or worse. A good empathizer responds intuitively to a change in another person’s mood with concern, appreciation, understanding, comforting, or what ever the appropriate emotion might be. A natural empathizer not only notices others’ feelings but also continually thinks about what the other person might be feeling, thinking, or intending.27 Empathy is a defining feature of human relationships and also makes real communication possible.28
Having defined what systemizing and empathizing are, Baron-Cohen then describes the distribution of systemizing and empathizing skills among men and women. Both systemizing and empathizing skills are distributed normally among the general populations of men and women. Men have a higher mean of systemizing skills than women, while women have a higher mean of empathizing skills than men. However, the sex distributions of systemizing and empathizing skills substantially overlap. This means that while men on average are better at systemizing and women on average are better at empathizing, there are many men who are better empathizers than women and many women who are better systemizers than men.29
The distribution of height provides a perfect analogy. Height is distributed normally both among men and among women. Men have a higher mean height than women. However, the sex distributions of height overlap sufficiently so that, while most
men are taller than the average women, there are some men who are shorter than the average woman and some women who are taller than the average man. In Baron-Cohen’s theory, the systemizing and empathizing skills have similar distributions and sex differences.
Two Types of Brains
Baron-Cohen defines the brain of someone who is better at systemizing than empathizing as the “type S” brain, or the male brain (even though not everyone who possesses the male brain is male), and the brain of someone who is better at empathizing than systemizing as the “type E” brain, or the female brain (even though not everyone who possesses the female brain is female). Baron-Cohen then suggests that the type S brain was particularly adaptive for ancestral men, because systemizing ability was necessary for inventing and making tools and weapons, and because low empathizing ability was helpful for tolerating solitude during long hunting and tracking trips, and for committing acts of interpersonal violence and aggression necessary for male competition.
Similarly, Baron-Cohen argues that the type E brain was adaptive for ancestral women, because empathizing ability facilitates various aspects of mothering, such as anticipating and understanding the needs of infants who could not yet talk, or making friends and allies in new environments, in which ancestral women found themselves upon marriage. (In the ancestral environment, women left their group and married into a neighboring group upon puberty, a practice necessary to avoid inbreeding.) Natural and sexual selection would therefore have favored ancestral men having the type S brain and ancestral women having the type E brain.
Baron-Cohen then explains autism (and other autism spectrum disorders such as Asperger’s syndrome) as a result of possessing the “extreme male brain,” which is exceedingly good at systemizing but correspondingly poor at empathizing. Not only does Baron-Cohen’s conceptualization of autism as a manifestation of the extreme male brain explain many of the clinical features of autism, but it also explains why it is so much more prevalent among men than among women.
One of the discoveries by Baron-Cohen and his team of researchers is the high prevalence of physicists, engineers, and mathematicians among the families of autistics and those afflicted with Asperger’s syndrome.30 This is because brain types (type S vs. type E) are largely genetically heritable and therefore “run in the family,” and because these professions require high systemizing skills. This seems to be why most scientists and engineers are men. Contrary to what the Standard Social Science Model’s social scientists claim, it has very little to do with “gender socialization” and much more to do with sex-typical brain types. (Once again, “gender socialization”—to the extent that it is widely practiced—simply reinforces and solidifies the innate genetic differences between the male and female brains.) By the same token, any occupation that requires a large amount of empathizing skills, such as kindergarten, preschool, and elementary school teachers; nurses and other caretakers; and social workers, are more likely to be female, because the typical female (type E) brain is highly useful in such occupations.
In liberal capitalist societies like the US or the UK, both men and women try to pursue occupations and professions that best suit them. Because some men have type E brains and some women have type S brains, there are some male nurses and kindergarten teachers, and some female neuroscientists and engineers. However, a majority of those in “systemizing” occupations are men, and a majority of those in “empathizing” occupations are women, and Baron-Cohen’s theory can explain why.
Q. Why Is Sexual Harassment So Per sis tent?
One of the unfortunate consequences of the ever-growing number of women joining the labor force and working side by side with men is the increasing number of sexual harassment cases, particularly in the United States. Why is this? Is sexual harassment a necessary consequence of the sexual integration of the workplace? What is sexual harassment, anyway, and how can evolutionary psychology explain it?
As with the study of sex differences in earnings and the “glass ceiling” (see “Why Do Men Earn More Money and Attain Higher Status Than Women?” above), the evolutionary psychologist who pioneered the study of sexual harassment is Kingsley R. Browne.31 Browne identifies two types of sexual harassment cases: the quid pro quo cases (“You must sleep with me if you want to keep your job or be promoted”) and the “hostile environment” cases (where the workplace is deemed too sexualized for workers to feel safe and comfortable). While feminists and other Standard Social Science Model scholars tend to explain sexual harassment in terms of patriarchy and other nefarious ideologies,32 Browne locates the ultimate cause of both types of sexual harassment in the sex differences in evolved psychological mechanisms and mating strategies, thereby “seeking roots in biology rather than ideology.”33
Studies unequivocally demonstrate that men are far more interested in short-term casual sex than women. For example, in a classic study,34 75 percent of undergraduate men approached by an attractive female stranger agree to have sex with her; none of the women approached by an attractive male stranger do. Many men who would not go on a date with the stranger nonetheless agree to have sex with her. In another study,35 men on average desire nearly twenty sex partners in their lifetimes; women desire less than five. Men on average seriously consider having sex with someone after only one week of acquaintance; women’s average is six months.
The quid pro quo and similar types of harassment are manifestations of men’s greater desire for short-term casual sex than women’s, and their willingness to use any available means to achieve their goal. While feminists often claim that sexual harassment is “not about sex but about power,”36 Browne astutely points out that it is both; it is about men using power to get sex. “To say that it is only about power makes no more sense than saying that bank robbery is only about guns, not about money.”37
The male-female differences in the desire for short-term casual sex are exacerbated by another male-female difference in evolved psychological mechanisms: the woman’s desire to understate her sexual desire in a particular man and to engage in “token resistance.”38 In one study,39 nearly 40 percent of undergraduate women admitted to saying no to sexual advances from a man even though they actually wanted to have sex with him. More than a third of these cases where the women initially said no eventually resulted in consensual sex. As the late behavior geneticist Linda Mealey eloquently puts it: “That females are selected to be coy will mean that sometimes saying ‘no’ really does mean ‘try a little harder.’”40 Of course, women sometimes do mean no when they say no, but this isn’t always the case.
Hostile Environment: When Men Are Equal-Opportunity Harassers
Browne explains the incidence of sexual harassment cases of the second variety (hostile environment) as a result of the sex differences in what men and women perceive as “overly sexual” or “hostile.” While the courts in the United States often employ the standard of a fictitious “reasonable person” to determine whether a given workplace constitutes a hostile environment, Browne points out that there is no such thing as a “reasonable person”; there is only a reasonable man and a reasonable woman. What a reasonable man and a reasonable woman perceive to be a hostile environment may be entirely different. Browne questions the exclusive focus on the alleged victim’s perspective.
While many women legitimately complain that they have been subjected to abusive, intimidating, and degrading treatment by their male colleagues and employers, Browne points out that long before women entered the labor force, men subjected each other to such abusive, intimidating, and degrading treatment. Abuse, intimidation, and degradation are all part of men’s unfortunate repertoire of tactics employed in competitive situations. In other words, men are not harassing women in this fashion because they are treating women differently from men (which is the definition of discrimination under which sexual harassment legally falls), but the exact opposite: men harass women precisely because they are not discriminating between men and women.
Because of all the media attention
and the soaring costs of litigation, most American firms and universities now have sexual harassment policies that categorically prohibit any sexual relations between and among their employees. Browne makes a sharp observation in this connection. Although sexual harassment surveys typically ask whether the respondent has ever been subjected to unwanted sexual advances in the workplace, they seldom, if ever, ask whether she has been subjected to welcome sexual advances. The answer must commonly be in the affirmative, since a large number of workers find their romantic partners at work.41
Men’s and women’s behavior that sometimes results in charges of sexual harassment is most often simply part of the normal repertoire of human mating strategies. They work well most of the time (as when a large number of men and women find satisfactory long-term and short-term mates in their workplace) but occasionally result in miscommunication and misunderstanding due to the evolved differences between the sexes, which is then given the label of sexual harassment. (See “He Said, She Said: Why Do Men and Women Perceive the Same Situation Differently?” in chapter 3.) While it might deter some legitimately abusive behavior, the current sexual harassment policy commonly practiced in many American organizations, which categorically prohibits any sexual relations between employees, is therefore likely to be detrimental to women’s sexual interests as much as men’s, because such prohibition eliminates welcome sexual attention and advances along with the unwelcome.