Satoshi Kanazawa on Men and Women

Your first book is The Essential Difference by Simon Baron-Cohen. Why have you chosen this one?

Baron-Cohen’s book is one of the best popular books on the evolved sex differences in the brain. It explains how and why men's and women's brains have their distinct strengths and weaknesses. Men’s need to invent, manufacture, and improve tools and weapons throughout evolutionary history has made the male brain particularly strong on systemising (logically and rationally dealing with things), whereas women’s need to leave their natal group upon puberty and marry into a neighbouring group full of strangers has made the female brain particularly strong on empathising (relating to other people). Women’s need to take care of infants, by anticipating their needs when they cannot yet speak, also makes them better able to read others’ minds. At the same time, ancestral men’s need to engage in solitary hunting and to wage wars against enemies has made their brains particularly low on empathising. It is easier to be alone or brutally murder others if you don’t feel for people very well.

Men’s higher average ability for systemising explains why they excel at occupations such as science and engineering, while women’s higher average ability for empathising explains why they are more social and why they are better judges of character. However, when men’s (and, very occasionally, women’s) brains are too systemising and too little empathising, they can exhibit symptoms of autism or Asperger’s syndrome. Baron-Cohen is a world-renowned autism researcher at the University of Cambridge, and his extreme male brain theory of autism makes a lot of sense.

So he thinks these differences are inherent in brain structure, does he?

Through a series of very ingenious experiments, Baron-Cohen and his collaborators convincingly demonstrate that these sex differences in the brain are innate, not learned through socialisation. In one of the experiments, they use babies who are less than 24 hours old, and yet boys still prefer mechanical objects while girls still prefer human faces. It would be very difficult to argue that anything that emerges within 24 hours of birth is not innate and evolutionarily designed. Other researchers have shown that children’s toy preference may also be largely innate, because males and females of other species show the same preference. Male monkeys still prefer the cars and balls that human boys prefer, and female monkeys still prefer the dolls and cooking pots that human girls prefer. Since monkeys are not socialised by human parents, and they have not even seen these stereotypically masculine and feminine toys before the experiment, it’s difficult to argue that their preferences for “sex-appropriate” toys are learned. Preponderance of scientific evidence shows that men and women have entirely different brains, and such differences are evolutionarily designed and therefore innate.

Tell me about the David Buss book, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating.

Buss’s book approaches the evolved sex differences in the brain slightly differently. In the 1980s, David M Buss, one of the Deans of Modern Evolutionary Psychology, conducted a worldwide survey of more than 10,000 people from 37 different cultures. He and his collaborators simply asked men and women throughout the world what qualities they sought in their ideal mate. They discovered that, regardless of their race, religion, history, culture, and geographic location, men and women everywhere sought very similar qualities in their mates. While there are some qualities – such as intelligence and kindness – that both men and women wanted in their mates, there were very marked sex differences. Men sought youth and physical attractiveness in their mates, whereas women sought resources and status in theirs.

Of course, we don’t need evolutionary psychology to know what men and women want in their mates. Our great-grandmothers (and their great-grandmothers) always knew that men liked young beautiful women, and women liked rich and powerful men, without any knowledge of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology is noteworthy, not in what they discovered, but in explaining why. Both youth and physical attractiveness are markers of health and fecundity, so young and beautiful women on average make better mothers. Because of men’s need to protect and invest heavily in their children, resourceful men of higher status make better fathers. What men and women seek in their ideal mates is dictated by their evolutionary needs. They are driven by evolutionary logic that they themselves are largely oblivious to. Buss’s book explains the evolutionary logic behind what men and women desire in their mates and why.

Your next book takes men and women to the workplace. Biology at Work: Rethinking Sexual Equality by Kingsley Browne

Browne’s book demonstrates how these evolved sex differences in the brain (which Baron-Cohen and Buss talk about) manifest themselves in the workplace. Traditional social scientists (like economists and sociologists) have assumed that men and women are on the whole identical, and therefore any widespread and systematic differences in economic and social outcomes must reflect “discrimination” and other external factors. Browne argues that this is not necessarily the case, because men and women are biologically different in their preferences, temperaments, and abilities.

Baron-Cohen’s book shows that male and female brains are different, and men are on average better at systemising and women on average are better at empathising. Thus “occupational sex segregation”, where men and women tend to have different occupations, is a reflection of what men and women want to do and are good at doing.