Sex, brains and the HSC
The January 20 Time magazine cover shrieks at feminists and those who have barracked for nurture in the so-called nature v. nurture debate: "Why are men and women different? It isn't just upbringing. New studies show they are born that way."
The story inside outlines some scientific studies said to confirm the "common sense" views that became "unfashionable" in the lefty 1970s: that men were engineers and women were nurses not because of systematic discrimination but through biological predisposition. They were born that way.
But a closer look reveals that the recent findings about differences between men's and women's brains are rather banal: men can mentally rotate a three-dimensional drawing better than women; women can remember more clearly what was on a page of drawings of umbrellas and electric drills they were shown a minute ago.
The explanation? Men can excel in the three-dimensional stuff due to "ancient evolutionary pressures related to hunting"; women can remember the location of items on a desktop because of the "evolutionary pressure on generations of women who foraged for their food".
Now, sociobiology has always been a big problem for oppressed groups. Their relatively poor performance in cranial measurements, IQ tests, hypothalamus function and whatever other criteria of excellence were set up for them to fail, have been held up as proof of inferiority and the justification for discrimination.
When the hierarchy of souls (angels up near God, men next, women closer to the earth) of medieval western religious thought gave way to a more scientific world view in the 19th century, the old oppressions were propped up by a new ideology. In 1400 you couldn't argue with God; in 1900 you couldn't argue with "facts".
The "post-feminist" Time story is more sophisticated than the arguments for "racial hygiene" of scientists earlier this century, but its presentation still falls into the general category of an attempt to terrify us with science.
Is the feminist project tied, as Time implies, to the theory that each human being is born with an identical brain, into which is poured, entirely from the "outside", a personality, an IQ etc etc.? No. We live in bodies made up of complex chemical materials and capacities which are formed from both the "outside" and the "inside", all of which react with each other and are bound to have some sort of influence on behaviour.
Perhaps there are vestigial genetic traces of hunters and gatherers in modern offices. But Time's staggering leap from that speculation to a biological "explanation" of why men dominate the fields of architecture and engineering is where a simple recounting of research findings (a problematic order in itself) leaves off, and ideology comes flooding in.
Women's liberation does not rest on scientific "evidence" ut on a political struggle for the recognition of a common humanity and equal rights. From what we already know, women are capable of being engineers; we don't need any scientific evidence to confirm this. The simple tendency of men to outperform women in the mental rotation of a three-dimensional object (which could change as sex roles change) is irrelevant to the socially constructed matters of job role, status and pay.
In the meantime, in the Higher School Certificate exams in New South Wales last year, girls won top places in engineering science 2 unit and the industrial technology 2 unit, among others, in a trend which continues despite the predictions of the sociobiologists.
By Tracy Sorensen