Making Sense of la Difference

Few areas of science are as littered with intellectual rubbish as the study of innate mental differences between the sexes. In the 19th century, biologists held that a woman's brain was too small for intellect but large enough for household chores. When the tiny-brain theory bit the dust (elephants, after all, have bigger brains than men), scientists began a long, fruitless attempt to locate the biological basis of male superiority in various brain lobes and chromosomes. By the 1960s sociobiologists were asserting that natural selection, operating throughout the long human prehistory of hunting and gathering, had predisposed males to leadership and exploration and females to crouching around the campfire with the kids.

Recent studies suggest there may be some real differences after all. And why not? We have different hormones and body parts; it would be odd if our brains were 100% unisex. The question, as ever: What do these differences augur for our social roles, in particular the division of power and opportunity between the sexes?

Don't look to the Flintstones for an answer. However human beings whiled away their first 100,000 years or so, few of us today make a living tracking down mammoths or digging up tasty roots. Much of our genetic legacy of sex differences has already been rendered moot by that uniquely human invention: technology. Military prowess no longer depends on superior musculature or those bursts of hormones that prime the body for combat at ax range. As for exploration, women -- with their lower body weight and oxygen consumption -- may be the more "natural" astronauts.

But suppose the feminists' worst-case scenario turns out to be true, and males really are better, on average, at certain mathematical tasks. If this tempts you to shunt all the girls back to home ec, you probably need remedial work in the statistics of "averages" yourself. Just as some women are taller and stronger than some men, some are swifter at abstract algebra. Many of the pioneers in the field of X-ray crystallography -- which involves three- dimensional visualization and heavy doses of math -- were female, including biophysicist Rosalind Franklin, whose work was indispensable to the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA.

Then there is the problem that haunts all studies of "innate" sex differences: the possibility that the observed differences are really the result of lingering cultural factors. Girls' academic achievement, for example, as well as apparent aptitude and self-esteem, usually takes a nose dive at puberty. Unless nature has selected for smart girls and dumb women, something is going very wrong at about the middle-school level. Part of the problem may be that males, having been the dominant sex for a few millenniums, still tend to prefer females who make them feel stronger and smarter. Any girl who is bright enough to solve a quadratic equation is smart enough to bat her eyelashes and pretend that she can't.