Biology at Work: Rethinking Sexual Equality

Rutgers Series on Human Evolution

by Kingsley R. Browne

Does biology help explain why women, on average, earn less money than men? Is there any evolutionary basis for the scarcity of female CEOs in Fortune 500 companies? According to Kingsley Browne, the answer may be yes.

Biology at Work brings an evolutionary perspective to bear on issues of women in the workplace: the "glass ceiling," the "gender gap" in pay, sexual harassment, and occupational segregation. While acknowledging the role of discrimination and sexist socialization, Browne suggests that until we factor real biological differences between men and women into the equation, the explanation remains incomplete.

Browne looks at behavioral differences between men and women as products of different evolutionary pressures facing them throughout human history. Womens biological investment in their offspring has led them to be on average more nurturing and risk averse, and to value relationships over competition. Men have been biologically rewarded, over human history, for displays of strength and skill, risk taking, and status acquisition. These behavioral differences have numerous workplace consequences. Not surprisingly, sex differences in the drive for status lead to sex differences in the achievement of status.

Browne argues that decision makers should recognize that policies based on the assumption of a single androgynous human nature are unlikely to be successful. Simply removing barriers to inequality will not achieve equality, as women and men typically value different things in the workplace and will make different workplace choices based on their different preferences.

Rather than simply putting forward the "nature" side of the debate, Browne suggests that dichotomies such as nature/nurture have impeded our understanding of the origins of human behavior. Through evolutionary biology we can understand not only how natural selection has created predispositions toward certain types of behavior but also how the social environment interacts with these predispositions to produce observed behavioral patterns.


 

Genres: Science, Nonfiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published June 6, 2002

Reviews

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

9.75/10.

A masterpiece of an evolutionary work. This book is impeccably cited and had a ton of work put into it. If you want to learn about evolutionary sex differences and their impact on the workplace, Browne's book will be your best option.

Browne first reviews sex differences in personality and cognitive abilities. Men, on average, are more competitive, desirous of status, and take more risks. They exceed women in visio-spatial abilties (which translates to mathematics), whereas women exceed men in verbal abilities. However, males' variation of intelligence is larger than that of women, which means there are more very dumb and very smart men. A result of this is that there was a 13:1 male-to-female ratio for scores of 700 or more on the mathematical section of the SAT test. Men are also much better at mechanical ability than women. In the top five percent of test scorers of "auto and shop information", there was found a 464:1 ratio of men to women (!!). This is due to a combination of increased male interest and mechanical intelligence.

Along with these ability differences, there are also differences in interests which lead to different workplace outcomes between the sexes. Women have a higher interest in their artistic and socially-oriented jobs, whereas men like novelty (sensation-seeking), risk, and working with "things" (as opposed to people). Males are also much more status-seeking, which is due to the high correlation between social status and male reproductive success throughout evolutionary history. As an example of this, "a 1995 survey found that while 45 percent of male executives aspired to be CEOs, [whereas] only 14 percent of women did so".

The above traits lead to unequal outcomes in the workplace, which is completely to be expected. If men and women have different desires and abilities in relation to the workplace, they will of course have different outcomes. For example, mathematical ability is much more prized than verbal ability in today's workforce, and the combination of better male visio-spatial IQ added to their higher IQ standard deviation means that there will be large sex disparities at the top echelon of mathematics-related disciplines (mathematicians, scientists, computer scientists, engineers). As Browne explains, "males especially outnumber females in the top quarter of the top 1 percent of mathematical ability, and while it might seem that there is a point of diminishing returns beyond which additional ability has no payoff, that does not seem to be the case. On a variety of criteria, such as earning a degree in science, level of college attended, grade-point average, and intensity of involvement in math and science, significant differences exist between the top and bottom quarters of the top 1 percent."

But it is not just the top of the workplace that the males dominate, but also the bottom. Men take up the vast majority of the most dangerous professions. Here's a list of them with the relative death risk compared to average in parentheses: "fisherman (21.3); logger (20.6); airplane pilot (19.9); structural metalworker (13.1); taxicab driver (9.5); construction laborer (8.1); roofer (5.9); electric power installer (5.7); truck driver (5.3); and farm occupations (5.1)". Do these sound like jobs most women take?

To be continued . . .

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

For what anybody would care to read this book for, it's a very good book. I flipped through part of it, so I can't really comment on second half stuff too well.

I think the author might actually be selling the implications short, despite the fact that he makes them out to be hugely consequential.

[VEL – The Contemporary Heretic · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Biological Basis of the Pay-Gap
Far superior to his own excessively-condensed and popularized Divided Labours: An Evolutionary View of Women at Work, Kinglsey Browne’s ‘Biology at Work: Rethinking Sexual Equality’ represents the definitive exposition of the causes of the gender pay-gap.

Browne explains:

1) The divergent life choices underlying the pay-gap;

2) The innate sex-differences underlying these divergent life-choices; &

3) The evolutionary pressures that selected for these biological sex-differences

Men work longer hours, in less pleasant and more dangerous conditions and for a greater proportion of their adult lives. Given these and other factors, the gender-gap in compensation is inevitable even in the absence of discrimination—and even in the presence of mild ‘reverse-discrimination’.

Indeed, quite apart from his forays into the biology, Browne’s checklist of factors directly contributing to the gender-gap in compensation is even more comprehensive that Warren Farrell’s less academically-oriented but similarly meticulously-researched Why Men Earn More (which I have reviewed here).

For example, citing data from piecework and academia, Browne reports evidence of greater male productivity, a factor omitted by Farrell (p79-82).

Ability
Despite his background being in law rather biology or psychology, Browne’s explanation of both the proximate hormonal basis of and ultimate evolutionary explanations for cognitive and temperamental sex differences is better than most accounts by specialists.

He begins by discussing the differences themselves.

He does not question the usual consensus that men and women have about equal IQs—though recent evidence compiled by Richard Lynn suggests adult men have slightly higher general intelligence, a difference previous researchers failed to undercover because most testing in done on school-age children and the difference only emerges during adolescence (see Lynn, Sex Differences in Intelligence).

However, Browne makes the important point that IQ tests record equal average IQs for men and women only because they are designed to give equal IQs for both sexes.

“It is impossible to reach any firm conclusions from standard IQ tests about sex differences in intelligence since they are deliberately constructed to minimize sex differences” (p27).

Thus, men tend to perform better on some types of test item (namely those testing spatial and mathematical ability) while women better on other test items (those testing linguistic ability) and tests are constructed with a balance of each type of test item so as to give equal scores for both sexes.

It would be easy to construct an IQ test on which men scored higher, or on which women scored higher than men, simply by manipulating the relative proportion of each type of test item.

But even these generalizations—men better at math and spatial ability, women at language—are a simplification.

Thus, women perform better at one type of spatial ability, namely object location recall, something that evolutionists have linked to women’s ancestral role as gatherers of plant food, which tend to grow in the same places seasonally, whereas male spatial ability may have evolved in the context of tracking prey species over long distances (p127; Silverman & Eals 1992).

Though men perform better in most math, “females outperform males on tests of computation”, i.e make fewer errors in calculations such as addition and multiplication—ironically what most people usually have in mind when they talk about “math” (p29).

Likewise, while women generally have greater linguistic ability:

“The verbal portion of the… WAIS shows small but consistent differences in favor of men, and women do not have larger vocabularies than men” (p31).

Sex Differences in Occupational Preferences
The sexes differ not only in ability, but also in occupational preferences. Thus, Browne criticizes the admission of statistical evidence of underrepresentation as evidence of discrimination in discrimination cases, arguing that:

“The presumption that the workforces of all nondiscriminating employers would be sexually balanced—which is the ‘central assumption’ underlying the use of statistics in discrimination cases—is so at variance with reality that one must question a legal system that erects it” (p154).

Indeed, sex differences in temperament and occupational preferences are, I suspect, of greater importance in explaining both occupational segregation and the pay-gap than are differences in ability, which are probably of importance in accounting for occupational segregation in only a few specialist careers (e.g. the hard sciences, engineering, computer programming).

The gender-gap in compensation can largely be attributed to:

1) Higher levels of competitiveness and status-orientation among men;

2) Higher levels of direct investment in offspring among women, which interferes with career advancement

Both these patterns are apparent throughout the mammalian order.

In all mammals, only females are capable of gestating and nursing infants; while greater male status orientation probably reflects the steeper correlation between reproductive success and status among males since women can generally gestate and nurse only one or two offspring at once, whereas a single male, like Ismail the Bloodthirsty, can theoretically father hundreds of offspring.

Yet even here Browne sounds a note of caution, quoting Sarah Hrdy in The Woman That Never Evolved as suggesting that women may be just as competitive as men “in the spheres that really matter to them” (p16).

What these spheres are, Browne does not speculate, only concluding that such spheres are of little importance in explaining the pay-gap and occupational segregation, and can therefore, for his purposes, be ignored—but, anecdotally, I would suggest women are most competitive when it comes to being pretty.

Difference or Disadvantage?
Feminists famously contend that women must choose between family and career, and, unlike men, cannot ‘have it all’. Browne responds:

“One might question exactly what the ‘all’ is that he has: complete financial responsibility for his family and less time to spend with his children” (p138).

In fact, he argues, women have more available choices than men:

“Men are expected to work whether or not their wives ‘choose’ to” (p139).

Indeed, even in childhood, sex-roles are much more restrictive for boys than girls. As Browne observes:

“‘Tomboy’ and ‘sissy’ are not equally pejorative terms; many women boast of having been tomboys, but few men boast of having been sissies” (p100).

As for the pay-gap, Browne denies that it reflects female disadvantage.

“Because earnings are easier to quantify and compare than other job attributes, excessive attention has been paid to wage disparities. If we seek ‘equality as identity’… we have to talk about ‘death-gaps’, ‘pleasantness gaps’ and ‘hours gaps’, as well as ‘wage-gaps’. Yes, women earn less on average, but men die on the job more, work in less pleasant environments, and work more hours; if women have a cause for complaints about equality, presumably men do as well” (p90).

Housework: Unpaid Labor or Overpaid Laziness
Of course, feminists would deny the claim that men work longer hours by pointing to women’s so-called ‘unpaid labor’ in the home.

According to feminists, men unfairly benefit from the unpaid housework performed by their wives.

Yet this is, Browne shows, a flawed assumption.

In fact, Browne reports, married men do almost as much housework as they did when they were single. Thus, Browne concludes:

“The husband is not saying ‘Now that I have a wife, I don’t have to do housework,’ but rather something more like ‘no that I have a wife, I shouldn’t have to do more housework than I did when I was single’” (p169-70).

Moreover, not only do married women do more housework than married men, so do single women (p169).

This suggests that women are doing housework primarily for the benefit of themselves, not their husbands and that, far from being exploited or coerced into doing housework by their nefarious husbands, women do more housework simply because they regard more housework as necessary than do men.

In short men and women have different priorities vis a vis the value of housework.

Thus, Browne quotes economist Jennifer Roback as admitting:

“When I want my husband to do ‘his half’ of household chores, what I really want is for him to do half of everything on my list of important things. But he has his own list. He values some things that I do not. He does not value all the things that I do.” (p170).

In short, as Jack Kammer facetiously complains:

“How come you never hear a man complaining that his wife doesn’t do her fair share of polishing the chrome on the [sports car]?” (If Men Have All the Power How Come Women Make the Rules: p79)

Indeed, there is even evidence that women enjoy some forms of housework. Thus, Browne reports:

“On the Strong Interest Inventory, some of the largest sex differences are found on tasks such as cooking, sewing and home economics” (p170).

The same applies to childcare.

After all, women voluntarily choose to have children presumably because they anticipate enjoying such activities, which are “widely perceived as part of the joys of parenting” (p171).

Having children is thus analogous to a hobby such as, say, buying and caring for a pet or renovating a classic car.

Yet, unlike women, men do not always choose to become fathers: it is a woman’s choice whether to have an abortion—but a man’s obligation to pay child maintenance for the next twenty years as a consequence of that unilateral decision.

I discuss this topic in greater depth in my blog post, Unpaid Labour or Overpaid Laziness: Why Housework in Your Own House Isn't Really Work.

Harassment
Browne’s penultimate chapter discusses the issue of sexual harassment. Dismissing the feminist claim that harassment is about power not sex, Browne characterizes sexual harassment as “a mating strategy” (p202; Studd & Gattiker 1991).

Just as rape is, contrary to claims of feminists, a crime of both violence and sex, sex being the motive, and violence the means of achieving it, so harassment is about both sex and power:

“The supervisor is using his power to extort sex. To say that it is only about power makes no more sense than saying bank robbery is only about guns, not about money” (p202).

Thus, most victims are young and single. Whereas feminists explain this in terms of vulnerability, Browne asks:

“As between a twenty-five year old waitress with six months seniority and a fifty-five year old widowed secretary who has put in thirty five years on the job and who has no pension, who is in a better position to walk off the job and get a new one that is just as good? Most people would say the twenty-five year old. Which of them has the greater likelihood of experiencing harassment? All the data suggest it is the waitress” (p204).

As for the requirement that, for the conduct to be actionable, it must be such that “a reasonable person” would perceive it as harassment, Browne insists that there is no such thing as a “reasonable person” since men and women have very different standards when it comes to sexual advances

“A substantial number of men ‘viewed an advance by a good-looking woman who threatened harm or held a knife as a positive sexual opportunity’” (p196).

Thus, Browne concludes, the courts should employ different standards for men and female plaintiffs, with higher standards required in cases of the sexual harassment of men by women, but lower standards for harassment of men by other men, since most heterosexual men are especially repelled by homosexual advances.

Certainly, men and women differ in values and attitudes regarding sex. However, so do other groups (e.g. Christians, Muslims, young and old). Are we to have different standards for each of these demographics too?

While it purports to be an ‘objective test’, what constitutes a “reasonable person” is a subjective judgement that is made ultimately by the courts, who effectively declare some standards “reasonable” and others “unreasonable”.

To say, as Browne does, that the conduct of male defendants in sexual harassment cases brought by women should be judged by a “reasonable woman” standard rather than “reasonable man” standard is to privilege women’s standards and values over those of men and to assert that the appropriate norms for workplace heterosexual advances are to be dictated by women alone.

Browne’s Omission: The ‘Spending Gap’
In the conclusion to his chapter on ‘Difference or Disadvantage’, Browne controversially ventures:

“Rather than identifying women as the victims of current arrangements, one could just as easily argue that it is men who are disadvantaged. Men are expected to work whether or not their wives ‘choose’ to” (p139).

Yet he hastily retreats from this conclusion, declaring:

“This is not to suggest that the mantle of victimhood should be lifted from women and conferred on men. What needs to be questioned is the notion that either sex is a victim” (p139).

But, in arguing that the additional hours worked by, and the more dangerous and unpleasant working conditions endured by men offsets the advantage of men’s higher wages, Browne fails to factor in one crucial factor—who gets to spend the money thereby earned.

Although men earn more than women, research from the marketing industry suggests that women control about 80% of consumer spending (see Marketing to Women: p6). Women are also estimated to make about 88% of retail purchases in the US (Pocketbook Power: p5)

In short, although the fact that men work longer hours and are the victims of over 90% of workplace fatalities clearly disadvantages men, the fact that men earn more than women does not necessarily disadvantage women—because women still get their hands on a large proportion of this income indirectly.

Browne rightly acknowledges:

“We have to talk about ‘death-gaps’, ‘pleasantness gaps’ and ‘hours gaps’, as well as ‘wage-gaps’” (p90).

However, he fails to factor in the final and decisive factor, namely what we might call the ‘spending gap’.

Farrell's treatment in Why Men Earn More is more comprehensive than Browne’s in this respect.

Farrell refers to ‘Marrying up as invisible income’ and explains how women’s sexual power over men can be easily converted into economic power. (See also the delightfully titled Sex-Ploytation: How Women Use Their Bodies to Extort Money from Men and Esther Vilar’s The Manipulated Man, which I have reviewed here, as well as the nineteenth century Women as Sex Vendors, reviewed here.)

Browne’s failure to attend to this factor is odd given his interest in, and obvious knowledge of, the field of evolutionary psychology, in which a substantial literature has developed relating to hypergamy, the trading of sex for resources and male social status as a factor in female mate-choice.

However, given his courage in challenging a central politically-correct yet factually-incorrect contemporary dogma, Browne can hardly be faulted for lacking intellectual courage in failing to acknowledge this final but decisive factor.

References
Silverman & Eals 1992 Sex differences in spatial abilities: Evolutionary theory and data. In Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby (Eds), The Adapted Mind (pp. 533–549) OUP
Studd & Gattiker 1991 The evolutionary psychology of sexual harassment in organizations. Ethology & Sociobiology, 12(4):249–290

[Akash · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a highly academic one with plenty of jargon thrown in so if you are a student of the subject it would be quite easy to understand. Not so for the layman.