Catherine Traywick's column last Tuesday was filled with egregious errors, unsupported claims and an over arching misunderstanding of science, one that I worry is only too common in literary and political academia today.
In "Discrimination Disguised as Science," Traywick denounced recent research on the biological differences between men and women, attacking Simon Baron-Cohen, a professor of psychopathology at Cambridge and author of "The Essential Difference."
She says that Baron-Cohen paints men as rational, logical and, therefore, "intelligent" and women as caring compassionate and, therefore, "deficient." Those who don't fit this mold aren't what Baron-Cohen would call "right."
This is a wild misrepresentation of the man's actual work, a gross simplification of sexual differentiation and an unnecessarily shrill defense of something that isn't even being attacked.
Baron-Cohen's work on biological sex differences arose out of his studies on autism and Asperger's Syndrome, disorders that are characterized by an inability to communicate or relate socially, reliance on routines and a set of strong, obsessive, narrow interests that often involve intense fascination with rational systems.
Autism occurs much more frequently in males, so Baron-Cohen examined the parents and grandparents of people with autism to see how the genetic line looked up until that point. He found a large number were engineers and analytical-types who were excellent at systematizing but poor at empathizing.
Baron-Cohen theorizes that on one end of the spectrum are the systematizers: people who understand life according to rules and laws and who seek to predict, control and -navigate the systems they see. On the other end are the empathizers: people who identify and react to the emotions and thoughts of others and who are better at judging character and nonverbal communications.
On average, statistically speaking, men systematize, and women empathize.
Baron-Cohen in no way means that you're either one or the other, but rather judges them according to a quotient test, specifically, an EQ (empathy quotient) and SQ (systematization quotient). Everyone systematizes and everyone empathizes, but some tend more towards one or the other.
He does not add any value connotations to either; Traywick's labels of "intelligent" for the systematic and "deficient" for the empathic are hers alone. He also acknowledges "male" and "female" as linguistic conceits for his way of thinking about sexual differences and not necessarily the actual sex of the brain-owner.
But Catherine Traywick's main point is that "science is not responsible for the everyday, on-campus belief that men and women are unequal - society is."
Different does not mean unequal, and no scientist has ever said it does. The British Baron-Cohen describes what he sees as an American academic "sleight of hand" in substituting "gender" for "sex." He says, "The ideology is that we shouldn't be determined by anything; we should be able to be anything we choose. Gender refers to how you think of yourself: as masculine or feminine it's much more subjective, and is commonly believed to be culturally constructed.
"Talking about gender is therefore much more optimistic than talking about sex. It's the rags to riches idea - you can become anything."
Cultural influences may be a huge factor on sexual identity, but so is evolutionary biology.
Eight hundred million years ago, sexual differences in vertebrates noticeably diverged as males distinguished themselves through physical prowess and competition and females through caring and social dexterity.
Natural selection ensured that these divergences reinforced themselves, in every sexually reproducing species, down through the millennia. Sexual distinctions became the result of very different reproductive strategies.
It's not a matter of labeling capabilities according to sex. It's a matter of understanding the psychological, biological and sexual characteristics of human brains as demonstrated by human behavior and how and why they got that way: gender politics be damned.
Matthew Neff is an English literature senior and can be reached at: matthew.neff@asu.edu.
