Gender: The Last Word

Sex differences may not be as clear-cutas they seem.

By Susan Baxter, published on March 01, 1994 - last reviewed on June 03, 2009

In fact, what the SATs need, quipped Glamour, are questions like, "Donna's chemistry teacher calls on boys 75 percent of the time. If there are twice as many boys as girls in the class, what is the chance that Donna will become a famous scientist?"

Slim. Because whether Donna knows it or not, girls' scholastic performance nosedives at puberty. (Gee, I wonder why that could be? Hormones?) "Unless nature selected for smart girls and dumb women, something goes very wrong at the middle-school level," writes Barbara Ehrenreich. Maybe it's teachers who call on and encourage boys more. Or maybe it's the high-school politics that equate good grades with terminal geekdom. Even more important than teachers, though, is girls' growing realization that straight As aren't necessarily the fastest way to point B (for boyfriend).

"Males [still] tend to prefer females who make them feel stronger and smarter," says Ehrenreich. "Any girl who's bright enough to solve a quadratic equation is smart enough to bat her eyelashes and pretend she can't."

Psychologist Janet Hyde of the University of Wisconsin recalls discussing her SAT scores with colleague Marcia Linn after the Benbow and Stanley study. "Here we were, sitting and talking to each other and trying to figure out why we aren't good at math," she laughs. "Marcia got an 800 on the SAT and I got a 780." Hyde's interest is not incidental: to examine gender differences in mathematics performance, she analyzed results from more than three million subjects. The conclusion? "Approximately 51.5 percent of females score above the mean for the general population versus 48.5 percent of men. Thus, the overall-effect size is so small that it indicates little practical significance."

Even more interesting, what differences there were have declined over the years. "Women's hormones haven't changed in the last 20 years, but we found that the magnitude of the gender differences declined," says Hyde. Verbal ability? Gone. Spatial ability? Gone, except for three-dimensional rotation, where boys still do better. (Boys play a lot more games that involve throwing balls through three-dimensional space.) "And if a phenomenon can disappear, how could it have been biologically correct?"

In any event, intellectual similarities between women and men far outweigh the differences. Yet while biology is no longer an acceptable reason for barring women from higher education, the innate-difference argument is still used to rationalize why female engineers, architects, or brain surgeons are rare. "Boys don't go into nursing," says Kimura, "because they're less nurturing than girls." Oh, are we talking about Florence Nightingale here? Because nursing happens to be one of the most violent professions--after police work and taxi driving. Shouldn't men, physically stronger, be the more natural candidates?

"Everything starts as mystique and ends up as politics," someone once scrawled on a wall in Paris. And politics is exactly what the sex-difference debate is about. Not the politically correct "Who's the victim?" game we're so fond of these days ("Pick me, I'm a woman!" "No, me, I'm a straight white male"), but a subtler divide that rationalizes history and obscures rationality. The smug empiricists of neuroscience are telling me that, as a female, my genetic lot is inferior. Doomed by my DNA, I must be nurturing (I am. So what? So are all the men I know); bad at math (wrong); useless with maps (okay, I confess, I prefer landmarks); good at precision tasks (lousy at them--no patience).

On the flip side, the implication is that those wonderful fathers I know (like my own) are some sort of evolutionary anomaly. That men of letters (like Yeats, who luckily didn't realize he shouldn't excel at verbal tasks) are somehow lacking as real men. And that men who hate cars and like babies are pseudo-females.

To give researchers such as Kimura their mathematical due, they make no claims about the individual. "If you're guessing on the basis of a person being a woman what her abilities are going to be, you're going to do a very poor job," Kimura says. "When I study sex differences, I feel like I'm studying human variation. It's important to make that distinction."

But how many people reading Newsweek do make that distinction? Especially when Kimura herself makes vast, sweeping generalizations about how boys shouldn't be nurses or girls engineers. Hyde reports (with some heat) that after the girls-can't-do-math flurry, psychologist Jackie Eccles, in a longitudinal study, found that mothers who had read the news reports subsequently had lower expectations of their daughters' math competence than before.

Differences, alas, make headlines. "A no-result isn't news," says Ehrenreich. "But a result showing any kind of teensy-weensy intellectual or behavioral difference is."

Again, part of the problem lies in the language, this time of statistics. Words like " significant" or "average" mean something very different to the average (see what I mean?) person than they do to those versed in the study of raw data. Then there's experimenter bias, Crude tests, even nonverbal nuances. For instance, psychologist Robert Rosenthal observed that more than 70 percent of male experimenters smiled when they gave instructions to female subjects; only 12 percent smiled at males. "It may be heartening to know that chivalry is not dead," Rosenthal said. "But it's disconcerting [vis-a-vis] methodology."