The Iron Ring

I read a great article today in the Times about a book that is coming out called The Female Brain. Apparently, many differences between the sexes cannot be explained by socialization alone. Anecdotal evidence presented in the book describes a little girl who was given a truck to play with and her mother found her cuddling the truck in a blanket, soothing it. And babies, even tiny 4 month old ones, vary greatly in what they love to observe. Little tiny girls seek faces, they study expressions and begin to learn about human responses and emotions and little boys love to observe objects, lights and toys.

It seems that at some point during development, the male brain is bathed in testosterone and the female brain is not, leading our brains down extremely specific paths to widely varying skill sets.

I guess this is some of the reasoning behind Lawrence Summer’s outrageous suggestion of differences in ‘intrinsic aptitude’ between the sexes. Consider the SAT bias; women just don’t do as well as men on the math section, despite little to no differences in math grades. And yet, despite the stats I can’t help but ask, how exactly can a test be biased against women? A test of mathematics?

To be honest, I’m not disturbed by Summers comments, and I do agree that it is likely that men and women have distinct biological differences in their brains. But what scares me is not that difference, but the attitude that women who do succeed in the sciences were simply held to a lower standard. I’ve heard on more than one occasion following a graduate school admission, an NSF award or other accolade: she received it because she is a woman. This, to me, is scarier than sexism, because this attitude strips the female scientist of the validity of all her awards. While sexism can be overcome, a woman can never explicitly disprove the hypothesis that she was held to a lower standard.