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LLMYADULTLIFE, I’ve heard a steady stream of information, largely uninterrupted, about how women are better than men. It’s exceedingly rare to hear a news story about men being found to be superior to women in anything, but every so often there is another new set of fi ndings on another area where women are better than men.

Certainly one doesn’t hear much good news about men these days. Books with titles like Men Are Not Cost Effective speak for themselves. Maureen Dowd’s book Are Men Necessary? never explicitly answered its titular question, but anyone who read the book knows her answer was fairly clearly no. She spent many gleeful pages saying women are better than men at this or that, but despite the title I couldn’t fi nd any sections devoted to what men were necessary for, except maybe the parts about paying for dates. And even there, she didn’t think men were necessary, just suckers.

The news media are not much better. For example, as I write this, a recent issue of The Economist, my main source of news, had this to say. “Future generations might ask why a man can’t be more like a woman…. Arguably, women are now the most powerful engine of global growth.” The assumption of the superiority of women was hardly concealed there. “To make men feel even worse, researchers have also concluded that women make better investors than they do.” Makes you wonder why stockbrokers aren’t all women. “Studies have also suggested that women are often better than men at building teams.” Watch out, NFL! The article ended by saying that it is time men did more of the housework.

24 Is There Anything Good About Men?

A recent column in the highly respected Chronicle of Higher Education

(that’s what university presidents and deans read, among others) was called “Who needs men?” You get the idea. Actually it did make a feeble attempt at balance and conceded that men had done a few good things in the past, but it concluded that men had outlived their usefulness, and, apart from the logistical problem of getting rid of all men, said the world would be better off without them. Imagine anyone saying that about women!

On television, things are even worse. Back in the early 1990s my wife and I heard about a report on gender bias in advertising. The researchers in that study compiled all the commercials they could fi nd depicting men and women competing against each other, such as when two people were trying to rush to get to their business meeting using cars they had rented from different companies. The researchers found that the women were depicted as winning these competitions 100% of the time. My wife and I were skeptical of this, because we are social scientists and know there is always variation. No pattern holds up 100% of the time! And so we’ve kept an eye on commercials ever since. Perhaps twice in more than a decade we may have seen saw a commercial that in a halfhearted way depicted the man being right and the woman wrong about something. But in general, the study was correct. Try it yourself. On television, when commercials pit men against women, the women always win.

That’s advertising. The shows and situation comedies are hardly better. Older shows such as My Three Sons and Father KnowsBest depicted fathers as intelligent, competent, caring human beings, but I haven’t seen any such shows in a long time. Most Hollywood fathers are simply buffoons and caricatures. A few are downright evil, though more so in TV movies and dramas than in comedies. See if you can fi nd a show that makes the woman look stupid while the man looks wise or kind. I doubt you’ll succeed. But the reverse scenario, with only the man looking bad, is standard fare.

Children’s books are much the same. Sometimes, to be sure, both parents are depicted as stupid, but if only one parent is depicted as wise and kind, it is almost always the mother. Fathers come across the worst in the stories that little children hear as they grow up.

You can hear it even in the way people talk. I recall listening to two lit- erature professors discussing their interpretive strategies, and they bandied

Are Women Better than Men, or Vice Versa? 25

about the terms “masculinist” and “feminist.” Although both of the professors were men, it was obvious that to them, “masculinist” was bad and “feminist” was good, and they were striving to outdo each other as to whose ideas were more feminist.

Maybe this can all be dismissed as propaganda, as political correctness, as fear of boycotts, as mere fi ction and poetic license. What do real human beings actually believe?

The most thorough research on the question has been that conducted by Alice Eagly and her colleagues. They compiled mountains of data by asking large numbers of people, both men and women, about what traits they associated with men and women. In this age of political correctness, people are somewhat careful about what they say, but across thousands of questionnaires with dozens if not hundreds of ratings on each, one can gradually get an idea of what people really think. And despite any PC pressure to say that men and women are the same and to reject traditional stereotypes, Eagly’s group found that people do indeed think men and women are different.

After wading through years’ worth of questionnaire data and reams of statistical analyses, Eagly and her group concluded that there is one, over- riding, general pattern. They called it “the WAW effect.” WAW stands for “women are wonderful.” That’s the gist of the way people perceive differ- ences between men and women today. Women are wonderful human beings. Or at least they seem wonderful in comparison to men.

Again, this is not the biased view of a small coterie of man-haters, but one emerging from multiple samples of mostly young people today, both men and women included. Both men and women think women are better people than men.

To be sure, men still outnumber women as top achievers in some domains. Does that mean that in some respects men are better than women? Hardly. We have all been taught to dismiss superior male achievement as evidence of prejudice and oppression.

Some do feel bad for the men, especially the young guys today, because they can’t win. When men do worse than women, people say it’s because women are better at this or that. When men do better than women, people say it’s because women are oppressed, presumably by men, and so men are evil. Either way, men end up looking bad.

26 Is There Anything Good About Men?

It Wasn’t Always Thus

Some years ago there was a news story claiming that women were better than men at multitasking. Everyone seems to have heard of this and accepted it, though if you search for actual scientifi c evidence the conclusion is dubious. (Some brain scans offer reason to think women would be better at it, and an occasional study with an esoteric procedure fi nds it, but more systematic studies fi nd no difference. Plus, recent evidence suggests that multitasking—doing several things at once—mainly leads to doing a worse job at all of them.) I even heard it mentioned on the reality show

Survivor. But somebody said it once, and it was widely accepted. If some- one had asserted that men were better at it, immediately there would have been skepticism and outrage and it would have been shot down pretty fast. A false statement about the superiority of women may go unchallenged.

Why the relentless stream of such stories? Student journalists are taught the “man bites dog” principle. Dogs bite people all the time, and so this is hardly news. But a man biting a dog, that is rare, and so deserves a headline and a story.

Obviously, many in the media still think that female superiority has a bit of the newsworthiness of man biting dog. They think people are still surprised to hear about women being superior to men. As this kind of story has become the norm and the established prejudice of the majority of people, its novelty has begun to fade, but it may also get a boost from precisely that prejudice, because people do like to hear news that confi rms their stereotypes, and so women surpassing or outperforming men will be well received (and thus increase sales and advertising). Stories about the fi rst woman this-or-that obviously do still qualify as man biting dog, because by defi nition the fi rst woman to do something is unusual, even if hundreds or even thousands of men have done it before.

The point is that in the past, most people thought men were better than women—precisely the opposite of now. No doubt, the endless stream of stories about female superiority are still feeding off of this (increasingly quaint) assumption of male superiority.

In essence, we have been rebelling against the assumption of male supe- riority by going to the opposite extreme. After all, one of the great themes of the women’s movement has been that women aren’t inferior to men. Going back a bit in time, both men and women shared the assumption that

Are Women Better than Men, or Vice Versa? 27

men were superior. The most optimistic advocates of women thought that women could be almost as good as men at most things.

Prevailing Views About Men and Women

There are four possible answers to the question of whether men or women are better. At different times, three of them have reigned as the prevailing view. The fourth, somehow never popular, is probably the right one.

Up till the 1960s, psychology focused on men and used men as the model for the human psyche. Women were considered an inferior version. Psychologists, mainly men, studied mainly college students, who were also mainly men. Nobody much thought of this as a psychology of men. The goal was to build a psychology of people, and men were the obvious ones with which to get started. Periodically psychologists would suggest that one or another general principle might be slightly different for women. These differences sometimes took the form of implying that women lacked a bit of something, like ambition or resilience or a penis or logic or emotional restraint.

Then in the 1970s there was a brief period of denying that there were any real differences between the sexes. Supposedly it was cultural stereo- types and biased upbringing that made boys and girls turn out differently, but the differences, weren’t even skin deep. If we could eliminate preju- dices and discrimination and stereotypes from how we raised our children, then boys and girls would grow up to be the same.

This idealistic belief in how to fi x parental prejudice led to one of the great surprises of my generation. As students, we learned and embraced the idea that gender inequalities and even gender differences were all due to socialization and so that if we simply treated our sons and daughters the same, they would grow up the same. A generation of modern, enlightened parents tried this as best they could. Surprise! It didn’t work.

In one fairly typical story, two of my professional colleagues gave their fi ve-year-old daughter a truck and their two-year-old son a big doll for Christmas, thereby reversing any stereotypical infl uences and teaching them that it was all right to play with different toys. The parents congratulated themselves on how progressive and forward-thinking they were, but it didn’t last long. “They just swapped,” as the adults tell the story with a mild laugh and shrug. Apparently there wasn’t even any negotiation or discussion

28 Is There Anything Good About Men?

between the two little ones. Each just immediately preferred the other toy and somehow knew the other was feeling the same way.

Since the late 1970s, the fi eld has largely taken the view that women are superior, and men are an inferior copy. In essence, it is the same approach that was used before 1960, but with the genders switched. Now women are the model and the ideal, and men are seen as the fl awed version of the human species.

So we have had three different prevailing theories: men better than women, no difference, and women better than men. These require a bit of comment before we get to the fourth possible theory.

These shifts in theory came about more from political than scientifi c factors. The assumption of male superiority was central to our culture during most of its history, as in most cultures. The rebellion against it was largely political, and scientists climbed on the feminist bandwagon. Scientists make their careers by fi nding new patterns, and when it became acceptable to fi nd proof of female superiority, there were plenty of things to fi nd. There was a period of arguing that there were no differences other than products of stereotypes and socializing infl uences, fueled partly by the discovery that many differences were not so deep and ironclad as had been thought.

The study of gender differences attracted women and especially femi- nists. The early feminists wanted equality, and it served their goal to deny that there were any real gender differences. But female chauvinists were among them, those who resented and disliked men, and they gradually took control of the feminist movement. Hence, they embraced any fi ndings of women being better than men, even if it went against the equality theme. Gradually the feminists in gender studies abandoned the idea of equality. Why settle for a tie when you can be sure of winning?

The Puzzling Thing

Much can be said about the switch from male superiority to female supe- riority as the predominant (though in both cases scientifi cally dubious) belief, but I here focus on a particular aspect. How could such a dramatic switch occur in such a short time? Why did men go from respected to despised beings in a little over a decade? How could society fl ip from one extreme to another so quickly and easily?

Are Women Better than Men, or Vice Versa? 29

Obviously, an aspiring science such as psychology loses credibility when it just shifts from one theory to the opposite without convincing evidence. How could psychology jump from men being superior to women being superior? Part of the answer is that psychology’s switch mirrored what was happening in the society at large, but that doesn’t really answer the question. To begin with, how could society switch so fast?

The answer will provide a valuable fi rst lesson about one important, basic difference between men and women. The next several sections will develop this point.

Women and Science

In January 2005, Lawrence Summers, at the time the president of Harvard University, ignited a national controversy by speculating about why there were more men than women among the tenured professors in the natural sciences departments at Harvard. As far as I can tell, he didn’t actually say anything that constituted oppression or discrimination, nor did anyone accuse him of having been biased against women in his policies. His crimes were crimes of thought. He expressed some ideas that aren’t permitted to be thought. He wondered whether there were more men than women at the highest levels of intellectual ability.

What followed has been described as a heated debate, though “debate” implies an exchange of views between two sides, and most of what was said was simply critical of him and his right to say what he did. “Scandal” would be a more appropriate word than “debate” or “controversy,” because nobody was saying he was right. The only debate was as to how severely he should be punished for thinking and saying that there might be more men than women with the high level of innate ability required for making major breakthroughs in the natural sciences.

Summers was forced to back down and apologize and, not long after, he resigned, though the resignation was forced by multiple factors in the institutional politics of the university. Before he resigned, he had to go beyond apology and pledge to spend 50 million of Harvard’s dollars to help solve the problem of the lack of women scientists. This was pledged in the name of “diversity,” though as various pundits drily pointed out, it clearly wasn’t for promoting diversity of opinion. On the contrary, the episode suggested that diversity of opinion is not welcome at Harvard.

30 Is There Anything Good About Men?

Rather, the money was essentially to provide funding for women scientists and feminist administrators to analyze what is wrong with Harvard to cause it to have fewer women than men among its top scientists.

Our interest here is less in Summers’ sorry saga than in the terms of the so-called debate. Almost everything I read about this discussion focused on the divisive issue of whether women are less capable than men at performing high-level science and math. He has been quoted, usually with derision, on that issue ever since.

Everyone insisted how wrong he was. For example, Louann Brizendine, in her book The Female Brain, says Summers was “dead wrong” to assert that men are better at science than women. Responsible scientists almost never use terms like “dead wrong,” though self-righteous chauvinists, when they are confi dent of their political correctness and reader sympathy, don’t mind using such language.

What do the data actually say? Summers’ critics do have data to which they can point. To be precisely fair, there is a small difference between average male and female scores on math and science aptitude tests, with males scoring slightly higher. But it is hardly enough to explain the severe gender imbalance in Harvard physicists or Nobel Prize winners.

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