This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 5, Issue 5, from 1991.
The book which ruined my reputation forever as a sane tube traveller was recommended to me by an otherwise intelligent, sophisticated, well educated woman. You have to imagine the scene: people sitting quietly on the train, coming home from work. And then there’s me, screaming at this Penguin paperback.
Actually, I suspect the authors of Brainsex, Moir and Jessel, were rather hoping people would be enraged by their book; it would mean they were onto something. In my case, all they’ve come up against is my fury at being categorised. It was exactly the same when people told me that I couldn’t sing songs I liked because I ‘wasn’t the type’. How would I know if I didn’t try?
What bothers me is not the scientific research in Brainsex. If research genuinely shows that there are significant biological differences between the brains of men and women, then we’ll all just have to grit our teeth and accept it. What bothers me is Moir and Jessel’s arguments, which seem to me poor, to say the least.
Moir and Jessel’s central tenet is that we’re different, we might as well accept we’re different, and instead of railing against it accommodate ourselves to it. How are we different? Well, according to them, the male brain is superior at abstract thought, at the single-minded pursuit of a goal that Moir and Jessel have decided is the hallmark of genius, and at spatial relationships. The female brain, on the other hand, is more emotional, more intuitive, blessed with a superior understanding of human relationships. They bolster their theory with quotes from scientific research. Women, they say, are making a mistake and measuring their achievements by the male standard; instead, we should revalue our work (like child-rearing and housekeeping) according to our values, not men’s.
Now, let’s think about this one. I agree that there are happy housewives, and I know from reading their stories that they feel let down by the women’s movement’s assumption that their work is a) valueless and b) unfulfilling. But the dramatic changes in women’s lives we call the women’s movement did not come about because some small hormone-influenced clique decided women ought to be unhappy. It came about because many, many women are and were unhappy and dissatisfied with the limitations of their lives. Women demanded the change.
One of the questionable items Moir and Jessel call upon to bolster their argument is the fact that girls tend to score lower on IQ tests. No matter how scientists worked to remove the sex bias, they say, boys still scored higher. Their conclusion: it can’t be anything wrong with the tests. Really? This sort of reasoning is very well explored in Stephen Jay Gould’s brilliant The Mismeasure of Man, recommended reading for every skeptic (or indeed non-skeptic), which traces the history of white male science’s attempts to prove that white middle-class men are smarter than everyone else on the face of the planet. We have a word for this: bigotry.
Another questionable theory: men are biologically unsuited to marriage (and school, by the way), so the worldwide success of the institution of marriage is entirely due to women’s brilliant social engineering. But men have a choice, in every culture. They are physically stronger (I admit that). Logically, therefore, if men had an innate unsuitability for marriage, marriage would not exist.
Moir and Jessel love quoting mothers about how their children conform to sexual stereotypes even though they’ve made an effort to raise them in opposite ways. Well, take a couple of kids of my acquaintance, aged 11 and 7. She (11) is a whizz at math; he is struggling with it. He is a brilliant reader; she is now, but she wasn’t at his age. He loves cuddling. She is more distant, and was at his age as well. And so on: completely backward. But this, would say Moir and Jessel, is not significant because it’s just one case.
I maintain that Moir and Jessel’s book would not have been written in the US, not because Americans are less willing to accept challenges to our prejudices, but because American gender roles have changed much faster than those in the UK. As a journalist I have had occasion to track down experts in a number of science and technology fields both here and in the US, and there is one thing that stands out in the US: there are a lot of professional women out there. In fact, one consistent lament among expatriate American professional women is that they miss having a community of other professional women around them. They come to this country to be welcomed by snide comments, hostility, and prejudice among their male colleagues, and they are shocked.
Society has taken millions of years to evolve while women were regularly incapacitated by pregnancy; we have only had control of our fertility for 30 years, a very short time in which to change whole cultures. My prediction, for what it’s worth, is that Moir and Jessel will be proved dramatically wrong in their assumptions about what men and women can and cannot do.
Moir and Jessel would undoubtedly look at me and the way I live and work and conclude that I was doused with male hormones while I was still in my mother’s womb. Anyone got a time machine? Let’s go back and check this out.
