Maybe women have high anxiety, assuming it's fact, because when they at work and school they have to deal with sexist standards. They are stressed about being paid .70 for every dollar a man earns. Maybe women are stressed about being forced to fit into gender roles and having to fill old-fashioned gender roles rather than it being the other way around as the professor suggests. I'm lazy and don't feel like googling but you can probably spin it the other way as I did with my comments (working, educated women being forced into gender roles by society).

I know a lot of the sexist commentary and treatment that I have experienced has stressed me out. This includes street harassment, sexist bosses, sexist teachers...Sure school and work can bring stress (it does for men too), but it also brings fulfillment which can counter the stress. Like when I achieve something like a degree, stress is lifted.

I'm going to leave you high and dry for actual articles, but here's what you should look for to help you argue against C:

Women have more financial troubles than men. They have to work harder in their field to excel than men. At home, they have more housework than men, particularly if they are also mothers, in which case raising children is more of their responsibility than men. Women's beauty standards are more stringent than men's. Life is harder for women, due to sexism, so it makes sense that women would have more anxiety. All of these contribute incredible stress more to women than men, which could lead to increased anxiety, and can be allievated by feminism.

In addition, you could look for statistics/anecdotal evidence on stress levels prior to women's lib, or in housewives today. Many women were depressed and anxious before the "added" stress of school and work. I don't know how easy it would be to find information on that, but it depends on what your professor is willing to accept. Would he be opposed to citing Desperate Housewives? Heh.

Or, if possible, compare it to race anxiety. Do black people have more anxiety than white people--and if so, would it be at all acceptable for us to suggest it is because white people deal with stress better? Of course not, even though white and black evolution was different, it's ridiculous and racist to blame it on genetics and not very, very different situations.

Or you could even look at anxiety in different, less sexist countries. If it's genetic, surely women in Germany, Canada, France and Britain would have the same disparity.

Good luck!

I agree with you 100% RiotGrrl. I'm playing with words here and slowly receiving some findings that aren't completely sexist/ignorant, whether it's hormonal differences, men being under-diagnosed (because, you know, men aren't "over-emotional" like us gals) , or even that women are not as reluctant to seek help for emotional difficulties (which is a strength, not a weakness, in my opinion)...

http://www.health24.com/mind/Anxiety/1284-1295,15701.asp

Thank you for commenting! I think I recently added you as a friend on myspace? Small world. Have a good one!

I'm with nightingale here: if the old commutation trick doesn't work then nothing will. It's amazing how many people are horrified if you take some study that's been done about women vs men and replace them with blacks vs whites. Studying differences in brain size? Racist. Why is it racist? Because the premise of the study itself is that there are relevant differences in brain size that underlie the assumed differences in intelligence. So why isn't it sexist? Because there's still a general consensus in our culture that there are relevant differences between the sexes that cause men to be better at everything that has any value in our society. Depressing.

That women are not "fit" to handle the added stress of work and school is bogus and I doubt these evolutionary psychologist are factoring in everything that can contribute to anxiety.

What they seem to have left out of their scientific research is the fact that women still work more hours unpaid than men and less hours paid then men, but with longer working days over all. Household work is still mainly in the hands of women. Cooking, cleaning, laundry, child care, grocery shopping. All this has not diminished at the same rate as our job and school hours have increased.

Also there is no mention of what they are comparing the anxiety levels with (besideds between the genders). Has there been a steady increase in anxiety in women since the 2nd wave of feminism or is this a new study with no comparison to the anxiety levels of housewifes in the earlier half of the 1900's? I think that is important to point out. If there is no comparison how do they know it has anything to do with feminism!?

I think you should be able to find sufficient material to prove that it is the combination of lower pay, longer work hours, more unpaid labor and less paid labor that is contributing to the higher anxiety in women. I tried to find some facts and numbers for you, but yeah...it's not fun to google these things because you find so much crap. I think you should be able to find some numbers though if you look hard, that shows the distribution of household work between the genders in familys where both are working. Also everyone knows the womans 77 cents to the mans dollar is a fact and has nothing to do with women not being as educated or as qualified. That should be factored in as an anxiety trigger.

I hope you teach your teacher a thing or two about feminism and why it is still needed and get an A in the process :-)

Sorry it's so long...got a little carried away...

I found this at Wikipedia:

"EP proposes that the human brain comprises many functional mechanisms,[2] called psychological adaptations or evolved cognitive mechanisms or cognitive modules designed by the process of natural selection. Examples include language acquisition modules, incest avoidance mechanisms, cheater detection mechanisms, intelligence and sex-specific mating preferences, foraging mechanisms, alliance-tracking mechanisms, agent detection mechanisms, and others."

Incest avoidance is not endemic to all societies, particularly among royalty. For example, in Hawaii, brother and sister would marry and produce offspring despite the fact that birth defects often occurred. Therefore, there is no universal psychological adaptation for all of homo sapiens. Therefore, extrapolating from whatever samples they used (and this should be brought out in this question; study design is easy to rig) to suggest a universal trait of women is not scientifically sound.

I would reject the entire line of questioning as specious. Asking you to assume this obvious lie is a childish game to assert dominance. It is NOT a fact; it IS an opinion.

Evolutionary psychology is, imho, a crackpot division of psychology, about as useful as Freduianism is nowadays. This is not to be confused with evolutionary biology which concerns itself with factual evidence from fossils and cultural artifacts. EP's basically take a 'fact' from the present extrapolate it back to the "ancestral Savannah" for a supposed reason for its development and then re-extrapolate back to the present and explain how that fact and its 'history' explain all of human behavior. Minus its egregious and often sexist claims, it can be quite hilarious reading.

For some light reading and fun try out Dr. Kanazawa over at the Psychology Today blogs, right now he's got a series of post about how Barbie is the evolutionary ideal and feminism needs to shut up about socialization.

http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist

Another thought to take into account is that this '3x more anxious' is a very non-scientific fact and is probably self-reported anxiety. There is a great deal of variety in the levels of anxiety and the disorders of anxiety and depression are very gendered in psychology. And men do usually under-report anxiety and depression, hell they usually under-report most stuff like that.

I believe you can find reports that say women live (on average) longer than men do. So if we're less "fit" and less "adapted", why would we live longer--given the "3x the stress" we need to handle? I guess you can counter the question in "c" with other facts like this.

I'm kind of wondering what sort of data exists regarding stress levels of Americans historically, and did stress only go up with the first wave of feminism, or is it steadily rising? What data exactly is this fact based on?

You're correct, it's not fun to google this topic. As for the time reference...

Since the 1880's (when the feminist movement began worldwide)

"the evolutionary perspective suggests that the reason why women have three times the prevalence of anxiety disorders is that their body isn't designed to handle the stress of going to college - working full time jobs - having to provide for themselves on their own - but men have."

Basically this poses that women are not biologically selected to earn their own money, work, educate themselves, (AND be the homemakers)...yet.

Because of this, people are correlating ADHD with feminism, and tying it back to this beloved evolutionary perspective, claiming that because these women are bringing this anxiety into the home, they are causing their children (oh, mostly boys, might I add...which is ANOTHER story) to be diagnosed with ADHD. The argument is that prior to 1880 ADHD didn't exist, and women were at home, so their children weren't taken to daycares (which didn't exist as they do today).

Fun Fun Fun. *sigh* I have much to research, but will try to provide some insights along the way. I appreciate everyone's comments and suggestions. They are welcomed, for this is definately a way for me to add another teaspoon serving in the emptying of the sea of bullshit. (I love that post...Emptying The Sea With This Teaspoon by sillyfeminist)

You're correct, it's not fun to google this topic. As for the time reference...

Since the 1880's (when the feminist movement began worldwide)

"the evolutionary perspective suggests that the reason why women have three times the prevalence of anxiety disorders is that their body isn't designed to handle the stress of going to college - working full time jobs - having to provide for themselves on their own - but men have."

Basically this poses that women are not biologically selected to earn their own money, work, educate themselves, (AND be the homemakers)...yet.

Because of this, people are correlating ADHD with feminism, and tying it back to this beloved evolutionary perspective, claiming that because these women are bringing this anxiety into the home, they are causing their children (oh, mostly boys, might I add...which is ANOTHER story) to be diagnosed with ADHD. The argument is that prior to 1880 ADHD didn't exist, and women were at home, so their children weren't taken to daycares (which didn't exist as they do today).

Fun Fun Fun. *sigh* I have much to research, but will try to provide some insights along the way. I appreciate everyone's comments and suggestions. They are welcomed, for this is definately a way for me to add another teaspoon serving in the emptying of the sea of bullshit. (I love that post...Emptying The Sea With This Teaspoon by sillyfeminist)

You're correct, it's not fun to google this topic. As for the time reference...

Since the 1880's (when the feminist movement began worldwide)

"the evolutionary perspective suggests that the reason why women have three times the prevalence of anxiety disorders is that their body isn't designed to handle the stress of going to college - working full time jobs - having to provide for themselves on their own - but men have."

Basically this poses that women are not biologically selected to earn their own money, work, educate themselves, (AND be the homemakers)...yet.

Because of this, people are correlating ADHD with feminism, and tying it back to this beloved evolutionary perspective, claiming that because these women are bringing this anxiety into the home, they are causing their children (oh, mostly boys, might I add...which is ANOTHER story) to be diagnosed with ADHD. The argument is that prior to 1880 ADHD didn't exist, and women were at home, so their children weren't taken to daycares (which didn't exist as they do today).

Fun Fun Fun. *sigh* I have much to research, but will try to provide some insights along the way. I appreciate everyone's comments and suggestions. They are welcomed, for this is definately a way for me to add another teaspoon serving in the emptying of the sea of bullshit. (I love that post...Emptying The Sea With This Teaspoon by sillyfeminist)

I loathe my computer...
Disregard the fact that my last comment posted 3 times...must the the anxiety.

I loathe my computer...
Disregard the fact that my last comment posted 3 times...must the the anxiety.

It does seem like the studies pointing the finger at feminism are sketchy. The link you (Divine Chaos) provided point out that men are under-diagnosed and don't report/seek help as much. Also, ADHD a result of feminism? I haven't heard that before. It's baffling that these studies don't consider other variables. Very shoddy research. I'm sure the food we eat (sugar/additives/pesticides), industrialization, television, gaming, hormones all have an effect on our attention spans/hyperactivity/stress. Yeah, nothing else has changed in the world since the 1800s besides the rise of feminism... Hopefully these studies aren't being taken seriously and are being criticized for the poor research design.

I don't think we're myspace buddies. My myspace is under Last Caress not Riot Grrl.

The last question doesn't let students share her or his own opinions about the issue. Instead, it might sway a student to write a paper that aligns with the professor's views simply to avoid getting a bad grade. If I were a student of this professor, I would probably feel that way and share the fact that evaluating a student's assignments based on her or his personal views is totally unethical and could cost your professor their job.

There are plenty of feminist psychologists who do research and publish articles and books. I'm sure you can find plenty of evidence that not enough feminism contributes to higher anxiety in women. Being an oppressed minority under the Bush administration certainly blows ass. Furthermore, the fact that women are diagnosed with anxiety disorders more often than men might be due to gender stereotyping and the fact that women are more likely to talk to someone, including a counselor, when they're anxious (which is probably also due to gender norms). Just look up some articles on women's inequality and anxiety on your school's online databases.

Hmmm. You could find an expert from another field of science to find flaws with the evolutionary psychologists' findings.

You could search the feministing archives for useful articles.

You could point to the Feminine Mystique as proof that working outside the home usually makes women less anxious.

That's all I can think of for now, but good luck!

And I forgot to add that women were SO working outside the home before 1880. Actually, so were a lot of children. And the family unit has changed drastically over the centuries, I don't understand how a correlation could be made between feminism and ADHD in children, or even stress in women. Yeah, women were happy and stress free in the good ol days before they could vote and be a legal citizen. And so were children, especially when they were working in factories. Hopefully the people conducting these studies are dismissed as crackpots.

Forget the internet on this one, and go to the university library. You need Anne Fausto-Sterling's book Myths of Gender, which systematically refutes every biological argument about gender roles you can think of. If that doesn't give you enough, search professional journals like Gender & Society. Most universities have library subscriptions to online professional journals, so you can do a keyword search, access the articles online, and bam- you have a list of published, peer-reviewed source material. Good luck!

First call the professor out on his unsupported bullshit distortions about what evolutionary psychology actually says.

The Red Queen, Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature author Matt Ridley argues that men are no more "adapted" for work outside the home than women.

on page 262, Chapter 8 Sexing the Mind, Feminism and Determinism:

"The practice of going out to work in an office or a factory is foreign and novel to the psychology of a savanna-dwelling ape. It is just as foreign to a man as to a woman.

Neither men nor women are evolutionarily suited to sit at a desk all day...or to sit at a factory bench tightening screws....

The fact that "work" became a male thing and "home" a female one is an accident of history"

He goes on to say:

"Therefore there is absolutely no justification from evolutionary biology for the view that men should earn and women should darn their socks."

He asserts that men and women (ON AVERAGE, emphasis mine) may be psychologically suited for certain professions over others, BUT THAT THERE IS NO GENERAL SUPPORT FOR SEXISM ABOUT CAREERS.

*************
For later reference if you want to challenge some of the over-reaching conclusions about evolutionary psychology on a deeper level, you may want the following book on hand:

AdaptING Minds by David J. Buller

This man has a PhD and is employeed by a higher ed institute and is this dense?! So depressing. I can feel my anxiety building ;). I wish you could say taht women have higher anxiety because they have to deal with sexist assholes. BUT that probably won't work....

I like what others have said. I would also encourage you to look at Faludi's Backlash stuff. She does a great job of spelling out how much of these ideas are myths. It seems you could organize your essay around the incorrect assumptions of the questions. And use previous research to prove the point. It may be true that women have more (reported/treated) anxiety but it certainly has NO causal link to feminism. So to use feminism as a scapegoat is ignorant.

Excuse me, but troglodytes didn't have office jobs. And they didn't go to school. How on Earth do you explain this in "evolutionary" terms, exactly? Furthermore, what is this crap about women only *recently* working outside the home??? White women in developed countries, maybe!!! Throughout human history, and in the vast majority of human cultures, women have been workhorses ploughing fields with the added burden of nursing and caring for children. In some places, women do *everything* while men go off and smoke and drink coffee with other men in cafés, which women are not allowed to go to (not that they have time to do this). Why? It's called "slavery."

What about the estimations of the salary that housework would be worth if it were paid? That would sort of seem like you were playing into his gender roles idea while pointing out how much responsibility women have historically handled and how if our mothers could handle all of that, there's no way we aren't "fit" for "real" work.

I forget the number, but so-called "women's work" would be worth well over 6 figures a year if it were paid. I bet it's more than that prof makes.

Get a lawyer.

Keep track of all of the correspondence. Seek legal counsel before you bring it to the attention of the school.

You do not need to disprove what he suggested.

Theories and studies that supported sexist and racist theories were proven not only biased, but also grossly fraudulent, decades ago by anthropologists and etc.

Your professor needs to be dealt with legally.

Research statistics about the effects of domestic violence and rape on mental health. Perhaps women are more stressed because many women are under a constant threat of physical harm. If one in four women have been raped and many rape survivors have post-traumatic stress disorders, that could definitely be a contributing factor.

Plus, as others have said, just because women have(assuming his assertion is true) three times the anxiety of men doesn't mean they had less anxiety before the start of the major feminist movements.

Women are also more likely to be responsible for dependents, having a young child's life in your hands can be pretty stressful.

If you do choose to write the essay, you could also point out that as women in society receive more education, the society as a whole improves, the women have income to spend on their children, thus childhood mortality goes down, while GNP goes up. If protecting your offspring is not evolutionarily positive, I don't know what is.

Oh, and he is a jerk.

http://eserver.org/courses/spring95/76-100g/Meredith.html

Wow. What a sexist pig. I'd bring this up with his higher ups. I most certaintly think they would disapprove of his assignment. As extra backing, you could support your claims of his ethics by submitting to them a transcript exposing his anti-feminist biases and sexist views. I've had to do this both with an online professor and a "real" professor when he claimed that men have created everything and therefore deserves to be attributed exclusively to them by the use of the term "mankind." He claimed that if I had a problem with it then I (along with all of womankind) should get together and discuss this with the men in politics. I took his comments straight to the department head.

I don't have an article (this is something I learned in a psych class), but men have statistically higher rates of stress-related disorders (ulcers, heart attacks, etc.). One of the theories is that men have generally held more stressful careers than women (say, one of those guys selling on the stock market floor) I don't know if that's helpful, but it suggest that maybe men aren't cut out for careers they try to take on either.

AgnesScottie,
In that line, here is a list of suicide rates by gender and country. No matter the country, men are higher. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate

However, just like this dumb prof's thesis is faulty, these stats do hide things. Men tend to use more effective tools, like guns, and thus are less likely to survive. But it does go to the point that men are not so much better off emotionally.

I am really interested in how this turns out and what you plan to do with this situation. And it is kind of fun to have a whole bunch of strangers help with an extra credit assignment.

Someone may have already mentioned this, but I wanted to add that instead of trying to google sources for counterarguments, I recommend finding scholarly articles. PsycINFO is a really comprehensive database for psychological articles, and I doubt you will have trouble finding solid evidence against your professor's claims.
On a side note, I would like to see HIS sources, because his claims sound really sketchy.

the response to part C:

They probably were not evolutionary scientists (or maybe they were from a million years ago).

He needs to show who he is talking about. No evolutionary scientist would talk out of his/her ass like this in modern times, otherwise you couldn't call them a scientist.

His claim needs to be verified seriously! He needs to provide you with a name, credentials, and exactly which peer-reviewed journal he found this claim in.

Then you can examine whether this person was in fact a scientist, if the journal was a legitimate peer-reviewed modern journal and whether there was a response to that article by another evolutionary scientist.

As a scientist, I would personally like to know how your professor came up with this claim. Please let me know of his response if you asked him this question.

ok, now I see that he has not qouted evolutionary sceintists but rather psychologists....

I think he still needs to explain his source. But I guess psychology includes a lot of speculation and opinion.

I also recommend an interesting book to your professor: Sexual Selections by Marlene Zuk

she is a scientist.

Your professor's last question does not show much academic rigor. He is making a claim about what "evolutionary psychologists" “say” as though they were a monolithic group and that this peculiar claim was a well-established theory, like “physicists agree on the theory of gravity”. But it's really not. He should have at least provided a reference to an actual professional evolutionary psychologist making this argument in a peer-reviewed journal, so that you could adequately assess it. It sounds like a really amateurish just-so story to me.

Regarding his claim that "women have three times the anxiety as men" he should have followed this with a reference too, instead of his rather aggressive, argumentative parenthetical, "that is a fact - not an opinion". It's actually an ambiguous claim and almost certainly an incorrect one. Is he referring to all manifestations of anxiety or to the clinical diagnosis of Anxiety Disorder? The report "Coping with Anxiety and Phobias" by Michael J. Mufson, M.D. of Harvard Medical School, gives the following statistics for the US: 6.6% of women will suffer from generalized anxiety disorder in their lifetime, versus 3.6% of men. The Anxiety disorders Association of America similarly claims that women are twice as likely to be affected as men. And why single out anxiety anyway? The World Health Organization claims "overall rates of psychiatric disorder are almost identical for men and women". If mental illness is to be taken as “proof” that one is “evolutionarily ‘unfit’" then men and women are equally “unfit” for the stresses of the modern world.

Also sorry to be pedantic, but his use of the phrase “evolutionarily “unfit”” (which, yeah I imitated above) is frankly ridiculous and shows that he is not very educated regarding evolutionary biology. “Evolutionary Fitness” is measured not by one’s anxiety levels but rather by the numbers of great, great, great, etc. grandkids one ends up with. Maximising one’s evolutionary fitness is not necessarily a desirable goal.

In refuting his argument it is worth noting that women exhibit similar greater diagnosed levels of anxiety relative to men, even in societies where many fewer women are in the workforce or education. For example this pamphlet: http://www.escwa.un.org/divisions/sd_editor/Download.asp?table_name=Documents&field_name=ID&FileID=632 produced by the World Health Organization provides references to studies showing that women in Eastern Mediterranean countries show much higher rates of anxiety and depression compared to men, despite (or because of?) their societies hewing more tightly to traditional gender roles, e.g:
"a population-based study in a poor urban area in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, estimated that 24% of women and 10% of men suffered from depressive disorders"

Women's rights IS found to be correlated with mental health. But the correlation is in the opposite direction to what your professor claims:
"In a sample of young, physically healthy women from primary health care centres in the Syrian Arab Republic, researchers found that the strongest predictors of mental health problems were illiteracy, involvement in a polygamous marriage and experience of physical abuse."

Also in the pre-feminist past women had very high rates of a “disease” called hysteria and men were very rarely diagnosed with it. Some of the symptoms of which would today lead to a diagnosis of anxiety.

Personally, I think if I had a professor who so indulgently entertained such a poor argument asserting that my gender marked me as "evolutionarily “unfit”” for education, that would provoke anxiety in me over whether or not he might try to "prove" his theory (consciously or unconsciously) by giving me lower grades or engaging in other discriminatory behaviour.

I didn't read through each of the responses, so I don't know if someone has mentioned this yet, but one idea you could go with would be that idea that women entering the workplace has not been accompanied by men sharing equally in maintaining the household.

Oh, and one more thing. I would ask him for his sources on this belief that women have that much more anxiety than men, so that you can judge their validity for yourself.

I haven't been able to read through all the responses to your post but I just have to say, your prof is an ass.

Psychology very well may have come up with the statistic/fact that women are more anxious then men. However, this only goes so far as a statistic. The statement that women are found to be more anxious then men does not assume or suggest any reason why and it certainly doesn't suggest that it is because women "just aren't fit for working"... wtf. This prof's bias is showing.

What he is suggesting is a hypothesis that some evolutionary psychologists have posed to explain this statistic. As some others have mentioned, there are clearly multiple factors to why this statistic might be, including: under diagnosis of men, work environment, the type of jobs women typically are employed in, lower wages, the "second shift" at home..etc.

I'm sure if you look into these issues through some scholarly journals, you will find research that refutes this professor's opinion... and that is purely what it is, opinion.

I think the high rates of violence against women can play into higher anxiety levels, not to mention the stress of sexual terrorism that exists in the world of patriarchy! You could also talk about the the rising number of women in the workplace, but the lack of affordable childcare, pay equity, and issues with the women still having a majority of the second shift because women still bear the brunt of domestic work based on our outdated ideals of work (women have entered the masculine world of outside-the-home work while men haven't put in much more work inside the home (there are statistics on that).

Good luck! Anti-feminists profs aren't very fun. And remember, you can take action against him if things get out of hand!