According to Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente (whose work I think has raised some eyebrows around here before), men are more adversely impacted by the recession because the downturn bruises their egos:
Men are far more sensitive to status. When they lose it, the psychological impact can be severe. When a man loses his job, he tends to experience it as a catastrophe. (With women, life goes on.) Low-status men also don't do well. They commit more crimes, get sicker, divorce more, and die earlier than high-status men.
This echoes a New York Times article that Ann posted last week, where a man named Jonathan Steuer rendered the male dilemma like so: "A lot of your ego eggs are in the job basket. I can't shake the psychology that I'm supposed to provide." And I get that; I mean, if you're socialised to believe that's your role, then you're going to feel inadequate when you can't do it. But as the NYT article points out, men do better when it comes to finding a new job post-layoff. And given that the recession has impacted women in every sense, from the academic study of gender and sexuality all the way on down to women's lived, everyday economic hardships, this news about the psychological impact of job loss on men just doesn't impress me much. According to Wente, men are more sensitive to job loss because evolution has made them natural breadwinners. Even if this is true, she implies that this is something we should accept uncritically and not attempt to confront.
What really gets me about Wente's piece, however, is that she goes on to say the following:
"Yet, for a generation the social sciences have more or less ignored, reviled and misunderstood evolution's powerful role in shaping us. The consequence has been a fair amount of dumb, misguided, sometimes harmful social policy.
"Take the matter of sex differences. We're beginning to realize some are irreducible. "If you had any evolutionary understanding, you'd understand why there are more men in science," says Dr. [Helena] Cronin [of the LSE]. It's all about math proficiency. The heavier the math content, the heavier the distribution of males. "There's been all kinds of wriggling and writhing to explain this, and much policy to try to amend it." But the real explanation lies in the evolved differences between male and female brains - especially the ability to rotate objects in space, which is "fundamental to deep math problem-solving." The distribution of male and female interests is also markedly different.
"... Not surprisingly, feminists tend to loathe Dr. Cronin (who calls herself a feminist Darwinist). But the facts don't care if you don't like them."
That's right. Never mind the fact that male superiority in science and mathematics has been disproven time and time again, and never mind that men and women are socialised from birth to gravitate towards and even prefer certain fields over others -- engineering, medicine, law, sciences for men; teaching, nursing, liberal arts for women. If a Darwinist says it, it must be true. Wente goes on to discuss Darwinian reasons behind racism and hating stepchildren... for some reason. This logic verges on social Darwinism which, as far as I know, Darwin himself abhorred. It's like hearing a psychologist say they didn't bother to keep reading beyond the chapter on Freud, so therefore girls really are just deformed boys with penis envy. Sure, we can reach a certain "maximum math potential," but we'll never be as good as the boys. But as that last quoted phrase so tellingly indicates, Wente isn't interested in critical engagement. Facts are facts... right?
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: (Social) Darwinism and the Recession.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.feministing.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.fcgi/11934
Sorry for the choppy writing and abrupt ending... I hit "submit" by accident. Wasn't quite finished...
especially the ability to rotate objects in space, which is "fundamental to deep math problem-solving."
Actually, there is very little math which is about objects.
I would disagree, there. There's plenty of math about objects, spaces, functions, things that require a good amount of visualization to understand what's going on. Though you're right, intuition and mental manipulation can only take a person so far in something as abstract as Algebra.
Funny, the grads in my department are about half women. Guess we all must have man-brains.
I echo this - high level math is really deep and spatial understanding is key.
I just wonder how much of the gap is really due to the slightly superior spatial abilities of men versus social conditioning? But then social conditioning is very subtle - I never had a teacher or anyone tell me not to go into math, I just didn't see alot of girls in it. Having said that I have an Honours degree in mathematics, so obviously it didn't hold me back much!
there are also more men (or were for a period of time) in literature, art, interior design, fashion design, journalism, politics, and professional cooking. if you believe social darwinism, or stretch evolutionary psychology, then women aren't good at anything.
or if you're a feminist, you realize how women were kept out of the public sphere and are underrepresented in many areas. not being in a science career doesn't mean women don't use science and math everyday. majority of men in sciences aren't geniuses anyways.
Oh hey. Science called to say they can start making "math is hard" barbie again...
Excellent post. The thing that I find most infuriating about the scientific "facts" of evolutionary gender difference is that really, we don't know. These "facts" are mostly assumptions that can't be proven or disproven yet. Yes, men and women are different, evolutionarily but we are also socialized differently. Its impossible to credit evolution because we can't control in experiments for socialization. So to give causation to the former as "fact" and dismiss the latter as "wriggling and writhing to explain this" is, fundamentally, bad science.
I hate it when people conflate social behaviorism and evolutionary science. Until someone can justify to me how early women had math ability "bred" out of them, I don't buy the sex differences argument based on evolution. Correlation is not causation. I certainly believe that heavy amounts of socialization over several thousand years have gotten us to the point where a woman's value was strongly tied to their ability to produce children. Now that our world has at least partly moved beyond this notion (as well as become overpopulated), we will probably see a rise in women in math and science over time, but only if socialization changes.
It's interesting that though girls tend to do statistically better than boys in school, they are entering masters and other graduate programs in math and science in much lower amounts. I would argue that since math and science tend to require some of the heaviest time drains, many women (who have been socialized to do so) get pushed out based on the time it takes to gain status in the field. We have been socialized to worry about getting and keeping a boyfriend, watching our biological clock, and to take care of aging parents. Women are more reluctant to enter strenuous grad programs because we have been told we must multi-task or lose our status as "real women." Men are generally allowed to disregard social duties while in strenuous programs.
I have a several female friends pursuing masters degrees at my school (one of the tops for computer science in the country), and almost all of them have apologized for not seeing me in a few weeks, when I know that their schedule doesn't allow them to. My male friends experience much less guilt about their schedules. I suppose anecdotal evidence shouldn't count here, though.
"Wente goes on to discuss Darwinian reasons behind racism and hating stepchildren... for some reason. This logic verges on social Darwinism which, as far as I know, Darwin himself abhorred."
Those seem pretty easy to me. My genes want to keep my genes going. Therefore I like members of my tribe more than members of other tribes. I like my children more than other people's children. I'm not sure how that's at all not intuitive.
And Darwin abhorred social Darwinism because he couldn't explain it at first. He talked for years about how the tail of a peacock made him sick because it seemed so pointless and ridiculous that it seemed to completely counter his theory. Once he figured it out... there's a reason it's still called "Darwinism".
Oh, and as usual I think the correct response to articles like this is "who cares?" Even if you agreed that males are statistically better at math, which you don't need to, that doesn't tell you anything about any specific behavior, because the differences are obviously so statistically minute that it is not reasonable to let it affect real world decisions.