| THE SEXUAL PARADOX Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap Susan Pinker New York: Scribner, 2008 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-7432-8470-7 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-7432-8470-4 | 340p. | HC/BWI | $26.00 | |
Developmental psychologist Susan Pinker lives in Montreal and is the sister of Steven Pinker.1 Her recent book The Sexual Paradox was awarded The William James Book Award by the American Psychological Association in 2009. It is available in 16 countries, under a great variety of covers. In it, she explores the innate differences between men and women and the effects of these differences on their choice of career paths.
"In The Sexual Paradox I examine the trajectories of these two extreme groups—fragile boys who later succeed, and the gifted, highly disciplined girls who eclipse them in third grade—as a way of exploring sex differences. These apparent opposites challenge our assumptions. We expect that fragile boys will continue to struggle. We expect that high-achieving girls will shoot straight to the top. That so many in these groups violate our expectations tells us something important about sex differences. If boys and girls are, on average, biologically and developmentally distinct from the start (and I'll walk you through some of the more intriguing evidence), wouldn't these differences affect their choices later? Could men's and women's diverging developmental paths and different work priorities be linked?" – Page 7 |
The paradox is that most boys have trouble in school (K-12) while girls are better students, but the boys (having become men) wind up more successful2 in their careers than the women the girls become. Is this, Pinker asks, due to biological differences between the sexes?
As Ms. Pinker explains very clearly (several times), women tend to cooperate, while men tend to compete. Women are better at reading, writing and linguistics, and have keener emotional awareness; men tend to excel at dealing with things as opposed to people. Thus, women tend to choose careers such as medicine, teaching, and psychology — involving personal interactions — while men gravitate to the hard sciences, engineering, or mechanical trades like auto repair and HVAC installation.
These tendencies lie along a continuum, of course, in both genders. But the extremes are illuminating, in no small part because the extremes are mostly male. Men are more likely to have subnormal intelligence or IQ at genius level, to be couch potatoes or champion athletes, to be lazy louts or work themselves to death.
I find none of the author's major points very original or startling. But the way she marshalls the results of multiple studies to support them — without drenching the reader in data — and the way she interleaves these statistics with quoted conversations, anecdotal accounts and individual profiles like that of Daniel Tammet augment the book's appeal to a general audience. She frequently uses complex sentence structure but varies her sentence length enough to avoid being stultifying. Similarly, she employs a large vocabulary and many technical terms, but always defines the technical terms, and mixes in enough references to history, literature and pop culture to hold the reader's interest. The result is a very accessible treatment of a complex (and, for some, controversial) subject.
The book is not without defects, however. There is a larger than usual number of grammatical errors, though not an excessively large number. More significant are several instances where studies are mentioned without being cited, and some statements that contradict others elsewhere in the book. For example, Ms. Pinker explains clearly that the hormone testosterone enhances men's ability for spatial visualization. Then why (as she states on page 150) does an early-morning increase in testosterone reduce this ability in men? And there are two occasions (pages 188 and 197) when she omits the relative numbers of men and women, where this information is germane to the conclusions she reports. The book's production values are a bit below par, in my opinion. The photographs vary in quality, the upper portion of the text on page 186 is tilted, and the tables on pages 11 and 12 have some puzzling aspects.
Because The Sexual Paradox is intended for general audiences, I think its shortcomings are important enough to drop my rating one notch, to 4.5. That does not alter my assessment that Ms. Pinker covers the several topics she addresses very well, and does it in a very readable style. Everyone should read this book, and many — parents raising an Asperger's child, for example — will want to keep a copy on hand.3 It excels as a reference to the subjects, having an accurate index, extensive endnotes, and a bibliography running to 19 densely printed pages.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.