Hormones, Genes And The Corner Office

Why do girls on average lead boys for all their years in the classroom, only to fall behind in the workplace? Do girls grow up and lose their edge, while boys mature and gain theirs?

THE SEXUAL PARADOX

Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap.

By Susan Pinker.

340 pp. Scribner. $26.

Ten years ago, no one would have thought to ask. The assumption that boys dominated at school as well as at work, while girls were silenced or ignored, seemed beyond dispute. But in her new book, The Sexual Paradox, a ringing salvo in the sex-difference wars, Susan Pinker stacks up the evidence of boys classroom woes and girls triumphs. In the United States, boys are three times as likely to be placed in special education classes, twice as likely to repeat a grade and a third more likely to drop out of high school, she writes. Tests of 15-year-olds in 30 European countries show girls far outstripping boys in reading and writing and holding their own in math. Boys are overrepresented in the top 1 percent of math achievers, but there are also more of them at the bottom. A 2006 economics study showed universities practicing affirmative action for men so that superior female applicants wouldnt swamp them. If you were to predict the future on the basis of school achievement alone, Pinker writes, the world would be a matriarchy.

And yet, of course, it is not. Once they move from school to work, men on average earn more money and run more shows. They particularly dominate in national government, the corporate boardroom and the science laboratory. Meanwhile, women are more likely to leave the labor force and to end up with lower pay and less authority if they come back.

Pinker, a psychologist and a columnist at The Globe and Mail in Canada, is careful to remind her readers that statistics say nothing about the choices women and men make individually. Nor does she entirely discount the effect of sex discrimination or culture in shaping womens choices. But she thinks these forces play only a bit part. To support this, Pinker quotes a female Ivy League law professor: I am very skeptical of the notion that society discourages talented women from becoming scientists, the professor writes. My experience, at least from the educational phase of my life, is that the very opposite is true. If women arent racing to the upper echelons of science, government and the corporate world despite decades of efforts to woo them, Pinker argues, then it must be because they are wired to resist the demands at the top of those fields.

Thus, Pinker parks herself firmly among difference feminists. Womens brains arent inferior, she argues, but they vary considerably from mens, and this is the primary explanation for the workplace gender divide. Women care more about intrinsic rewards, they have broader interests, they are more service-oriented and they are better at gauging the effect they have on others. They are wired for empathy. These arent learned traits; theyre the result of genes and hormones. Beginning in utero, men are generally exposed to higher levels of testosterone, driving them to be more competitive, assertive, vengeful and daring. Women, meanwhile, get a regular dose of oxytocin, which helps them read peoples emotions, the truest social enabler. Then theres prolactin, which, along with oxytocin, surges during pregnancy, breast-feeding and caretaking. Together, the hormones produce such a high that mother rats choose their newborns over cocaine.

Many of the scientific claims are familiar from previous books that pump up findings on sex difference, like The Female Brain, by the neurologist Louann Brizendine. Pinker goes even further by drawing a straight line from those blissed-out rats to human mothers who dial back at work. Because of their biological makeup, she argues, most women want to limit the amount of time they spend at work and to find inherent meaning there, as opposed to domination. Both conflict with making lots of money and rising through the ranks, she points out.

Pinker is surely right to contest what she calls the vanilla male model of success — that women should want what men want and be heartily encouraged to choose it 50 percent of the time. Or that when employers say jump, employees should always say how high. Even as they work fewer hours for less status and less money, on average, more women report that they are satisfied with their careers. Maybe men might well think the same if more of them felt they could cut back. But Pinkers difference feminism doesnt really allow for that possibility. She is a believer: The puzzle is why the idea of sex differences continues to be so controversial, she writes.

Emily Bazelon is a senior editor at Slate.

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