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Chapter 1. Introduction
- Rutgers University Press
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Despite a virtual orthodoxy in the social sciences for much of the last century, according to which observed differences between the sexes are mere “social constructions ,” evidence from evolutionary biology and psychology is coalescing to provide a very different picture. The human brain, like the human body (and also like all other mammalian brains), is sexually dimorphic as a consequence of selection pressures experienced by ancestral generations. The sexual division of labor, a cultural universal, appears to be at least in part a consequence of this sexual dimorphism. The formal division of labor is breaking down in Western societies, with women increasingly penetrating many formerly all-male preserves. Nonetheless striking disparities remain. Women are sparsely represented at the highest level of corporate hierarchies; many jobs continue to be largely sex segregated; and female employees earn, on average, less than men. The variegated pattern of female progress suggests causes more complex than such commonly blamed systemic factors as patriarchy and sexism. Recognition of biological contributors to contemporary workplace patterns does not establish that the patterns are either desirable or immutable, but an understanding of their origins may inform our judgments about whether intervention is appropriate and, if so, what form that intervention might take. In the 1985 movie based upon H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, the hero, Allen Quatermain, encounters an African tribe that has adopted the unusual cultural practice of living upside down.1 They court upside down; they fight upside down; they even do laundry upside down. “Unhappy with the world the way it is,” we are told, “they live upside down hoping to change it.” Despite their unusual mode of life, they seem an eminently happy and welladjusted lot. Might there be—perhaps in still-remote parts of Africa or New Guinea— a group of real humans that has chosen to live in such a way? Despite the dizzying array of cultural practices chronicled by ethnographers, ranging from the charming to the bizarre, we can be quite certain that the answer is no. Our confidence does not depend upon the fact that so much of the planet has Introduction 1 01-R2159 4/15/02 11:55 AM Page 1 already been canvassed by anthropologists and others; we would be virtually as certain if there were still vast inhabited continents that had never been visited by Western scientists or explorers. That certainty would derive from our understanding of what it means to be human. As philosopher David Hume commented , we would immediately denounce as a liar a traveler returning from a far country with tales of “men, who were entirely divested of avarice, ambition, or revenge [and] who knew no pleasure but friendship, generosity, and public spirit” because such a claim would be no more plausible than “stories of centaurs and dragons, miracles and prodigies.”2 A tale of a people who lived upside down should be no more eagerly accepted. Human anatomy, physiology, and psychology are all oriented toward a “right-side up” existence, so that we need not specify for any given culture whether “right-side up” means “head up” or “feet up.” By describing them as human, we have already specified which end is up. What about a different kind of society? What about a society in which women have a monopoly on political power; where women out-compete men in the quest for positions of high status; where women leave their babies with their husbands who stay home and keep house; where the army, navy, air force, and marines are made up mostly of women; and where almost all mathematicians , physicists, and engineers are women? Is such a society any more likely than the one found by Allen Quatermain? For those who believe that sex roles are arbitrary products of social conditioning, current cultural patterns could be reversed to provide mirror images of familiar patterns. For those who believe that the human mind is a legacy of our evolutionary history as primates and mammals, however, a completely sex-role–reversed society is no more likely than one that chooses to live upside down. In the early 1930s, anthropologist Margaret Mead returned from New Guinea to a credulous world with tales of a preliterate equivalent of the sex-role reversal described above. In her influential book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, she recounted her experience with three tribes: the Arapesh, in which both males and females exhibited a “feminine” gentleness; the Mundugumor, in which both males and...