All About Eve

New York Press, July 14-20, 1999
SCOTT McCONNELL

There are no detractors of women’s liberation among fathers—even conservative ones—of clever girls. Most would also agree that women’s tennis is now a better show than the men’s game, and that the soccer is great. But none of this requires believing that the minds of women are constructed the same way as men’s, or that sex differences run no deeper than what is visible to the eye.

Officially men and women are supposed to be essentially the same. Even the so-called "difference feminists" who celebrate womanly nurturing and sensitivity claim these traits are not innate but culturally constructed. And those areas where the differences favor men are said to be the result of centuries of keeping women down. By this logic, the reason women’s SAT scores differ from men’s (the math scores are lower) and women are not thick on the ground in university physics departments (as compared to the Modern Language Association) is sexual discrimination, which is of course illegal. On such grounds, Educational Testing Service, maker of the tests used by the National Merit Scholarship Board, has been subjected to legal action because of the lack of gender parity amongst scholarship winners.

But standing against the official line is not only the dead weight of chauvinist patriarchy, but the more potent hand of science, and evolutionary psychology and its related fields are pushing forward all the time.

A fascinating recent example is the work of Patricia Hausman, a nutritionist and author who went back to graduate school in middle age and produced at the Fielding Institute the dissertation "On the Rarity of Mathematically and Mechanically Gifted Females."

Hausman did a "life history" analysis of two sample groups of females taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. This is the mother lode of American sociological data: Some 12,000 young people aged 14-22 in 1979 were given aptitude tests, interviewed extensively and subsequently followed throughout their lives. Hausman picked out two sample groups. One—High Math, High Mechanical, or "HMHM" females—performed in the top tenth in math and mechanical aptitude tests. Group Two was a "control" set of females in the top 25 percent of general ability. Hausman explored the idea that HMHM females were in some ways biologically different from most women—with higher testosterone-to-estrogen ratios.

Such an idea is suggested by the gap between the mathematical and spatial reasoning abilities of boys and girls (well known to both teachers and cognitive psychologists), which is not readily apparent during childhood but begins to display itself around the onset of puberty. While it is commonly asserted that societal cultural conditioning bears the "blame" for this disparity, Hausman believes hormones are the cause. Her study explored whether the HMHM girls would prove to be taller, thinner, have a later onset of menstruation. They did.

What Hausman didn’t anticipate was the emergence of a striking finding: that the HMHM women had much higher rates of miscarriage and stillbirths than the controls. Between the ages of 19 and 27, 47 percent of those who had been pregnant reported miscarriages or stillbirths, versus 8 percent in the control group. This was astonishing for a cohort that had such high intelligence and reported none of the common risk factors for losing a pregnancy.

Hausman is aware of the limits her research, which should be replicated with larger samples than she could deploy. Indeed, because estrogen levels in the blood can be measured directly, a more straightforward exploration of the link between hormone levels and certain cognitive strengths is possible. But her results seem to me to point toward a tantalizing conclusion: that certain cognitive abilities really are more "male" and that women who possess them have had, because of hormonal factors, a harder time passing their genes on to future generations.

Gender-difference research of this sort is never welcomed by professional feminists. But others might find it liberating. Once one moves beyond the assumption that 50-50 is the natural ratio for men and women in every field of endeavor, there would be no need for gnawing anger at those who design math aptitude tests, no need for rage at engineers and physical scientists for their alleged bias against women.

Poets and philosophers through the ages have celebrated sexual differences—taking them as ordained by God and nature. Now research in both the hard and social sciences is proving them right. None of this is an argument for the denial of educational or professional opportunity to women—which would fall on deaf ears in any case. But it does suggest that neither more lawsuits nor more intrusive legislation will wear away the last distinctions between the sexes anytime soon.