THE SEXUAL PARADOX

The value of The Sexual Paradox is twofold: It explains, through clear writing supported by a wealth of background information, the nature of the innate differences between men and women as those differences are currently understood; and it provides justification for greater social recognition of disparate individual choices based on them.

Child-rearing is one example. It seems eminently logical to abandon any corporate support for a generic parental leave in favor of one tailored specifically to women who have just given birth. The reason is that experience has shown that men typically do not use such time off to help their wives handle the chores attendant on a new offspring, but instead tend to concentrate on professional activities such as writing a book. The result is that when the leave ends, the men are far ahead of the women as regards their status at the company or university where they work. As Ms. Pinker puts it on page 80, "a woman takes family leave and comes back with a backlog, a man takes family leave and comes back with a book." She notes on that page that at one Ivy League college no woman who had taken family leave in the previous fifteen years wound up getting tenure.1 Given that women are as competent as all but the highest-percentile men in virtually all academic fields,2 and that two-thirds of American colleges get more female than male applicants (and as a result hold the female applicants to stiffer admission standards — a reflection of their generally stronger records in high school), it disadvantages both women and the academic institutions that employ them to treat them as second-class employees.

Other forms of gender injustice are less formal, hence harder to deal with. Ms. Pinker gives several accounts of women who, because of pressure from family members and peers, either entered or stuck with a profession which they found unsuitable. Examples included law and science. In both, at least at the upper reaches of skill level and status, work weeks of 60 to 80 hours are often expected. It is needless to say what fulfilling such an expectation does to the woman's ability to raise a child. Ms. Pinker reports that while married scientists are 10 percent more productive than singles, most women scientists remain childless. And even when the woman manages to combine child-rearing with a high-powered career — by making full use of nannies, maids, and other support staff — the biological urges related to motherhood that Ms. Pinker documents so vividly perforce receive short shrift.

I won't pretend to have a detailed policy formulation to offer. Yet it seems obvious that a maternity leave designed around the biological facts Ms. Pinker elucidates would pay dividends to both the giver and the taker, since it would better accommodate women in their childbearing years while encouraging them to return to the jobs they had before — at which, presumably, they performed well — when their children had grown sufficiently.

Men too would benefit from such a policy, because as a corollary it would foster a straightforward recognition of the complementary job preferences of the two genders — which would mean more masculine-flavor jobs would be open to men.

These two tables are reproduced from the ones Ms. Pinker provides on pages 11 and 12 of her book. I have altered the order of rows in some cases to group the categories in what seemed to me a more logical order. I also renamed the tables, and some of the categories. And I have filled in some gaps in the second table: the original does not specify a country for about half the occupations. I assume this data was for Canada, since Ms. Pinker lives in that nation. It matters a great deal, because Canada and the U.S. have very different business and political cultures. The U.S. tilts more heavily to the male criteria for job performance.3

The tables amply illustrate the tendencies of men and woman to gravitate to different sorts of careers. Their original titles were, respectively, "The percentage of degrees granted to women in male-typical fields" and "The percentage of women working in fields formerly identified as male." It is a mystery, though, why she did not include nursing. At least here in California, that is a field men are entering in ever greater numbers.

There is another biologically-based difference, or set of differences, between men and women. That is their hardihood. Men, as Ms. Pinker reminds us, have traditionally been considered the stronger sex, and often even the model for females to emulate on the job. It is true that men in general are physically bigger and stronger than women. Still, the tradition is mistaken. For a variety of reasons which I don't have the space to go into here, and which Ms. Pinker covers only sketchily, men are generally more fragile than women. To put it as briefly as possible, from gestation through senescence, men are more susceptible to the vagaries of life: fewer survive premature birth; more die from childhood diseases and risky behavior; they get more chronic diseases in adulthood; and they have shorter life spans than women.4 In those other sorts of strength, which add up to a greater ability to endure privation, women have the advantage.

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This page was last modified on 8 August 2024.