synthesis

Social scientists have studied it, lawyers have tried to fix it and post-feminist society is over it. But women are still outnumbered by men in math, science and engineering fields.
Most overt discrimination against women in the sciences has been reduced or eliminated in recent decades through legal, academic, corporate and government measures. But a climate that is less than fully friendly to women remains, and its texture is often still so taken for granted that it tends to be invisible.
The proportion of women receiving doctorate degrees in science and engineering has increased slightly in recent years, and in 2003, women accounted for 30 percent of the doctorate degrees in science and nearly 9 percent of those awarded in engineering, according to a National Science Foundation report.
However, relatively few women continue on to high-level faculty positions. In 1972, women made up just 3 percent of full professors in science and engineering fields, a figure that inched up to 10 percent by 1998, according to the NSF.
A recent study, detailed in the October issue of the journal Psychological Science, claims to bring a new feature of gender bias to light. Women are less likely to participate in science and engineering settings in which they are outnumbered by men, found Stanford University psychologist Mary Murphy.
"A lot of the situational cues that might seem innocuous to some have real important meaning and effect for others," she said.
Science barriers
The finding adds to a slew of reasons that have been put forth to explain why male-dominated fields are, well, dominated by males. These have included socialization in which girls are taught, directly and indirectly, to steer clear of studies and jobs typically pursued by boys and men. In addition, past research has revealed an unconscious bias at universities where evaluators rate resumes and journal articles lower on average for women than men.
The responsibilities of family caretaking still fall disproportionately on women's laps. And so women often choose the stay-at-home-mom position or their household responsibilities make it nearly impossible for them to meet the long hours required for a high-level faculty position.
Stephanie Pincus, founder of the RAISE project, a campaign to increase the number of women receiving science-related awards, agrees with the findings. She notes that in order to bring gender equity to science fields, the social and cultural aspects of the fields must be revamped.
"We have to start looking at the cultural factors, the social factors, that discourage women from math, science and engineering," said Pincus, a graduate of Harvard Medical School who did not work with Murphy on her latest research. Boys club?
Murphy and her colleagues recruited and paid 47 Stanford undergraduate juniors and seniors (25 males and 22 females) to participate in their study. All of the participants had majors in math, science or engineering. Individually, the participants watched two videos disguised as advertisements for a Math/Science/Engineering summer leadership conference.
While identical in content, the seven-minute videos showed around 150 people in either an unbalanced gender ratio (3 men to 1 woman) or a balanced ratio of 1 to 1.
While watching the videos, students were equipped with body sensors that measured their physiological responses, including heart rate, skin temperature and level of sweating.
Female students showed faster heart rates and more sweating while watching the gender-unbalanced video compared with the gender-balanced video. They also reported a lower sense of belonging and less desire to participate in the conference when gender was skewed toward men.
Women were able to recall significantly more details about the video and the test room when they watched the male-skewed video. For instance, they could remember science-related objects placed throughout the room, such as academic journals and a portrait of Einstein.
"What I think is going on is that women are really vigilant to the 'who, what, when, where and why' aspects of the situation," Murphy told LiveScience. "They're trying to figure out whether they belong as a group here."
These identity-related cues, the scientists say, could interfere with their mental abilities and could explain why women show lower performance in fields of math, science and engineering.
Women welcome
Men responded in the same way to both videos in terms of their physiological responses, attention to settings and their sense of belonging.
However, like women, the men were more interested in attending the conference when the ratio was gender balanced. Murphy and her colleagues suggest men and women may have different reasons for their draw toward a male-female balanced setting.
“Women probably feel more identity-safe in the environment where there are more women. They feel that they really could belong there," Murphy explained, "while men might simply be attracted by the unusual number of women in these settings. Men just aren’t used to seeing that many women in these settings.”
While Murphy didn't study how this phenomenon could affect men, she noted that men might stay away from female-dominated fields, such as nursing, because of a sense of not belonging.
The Politics of Gender
Book Review: Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance, by Steven Goldberg, Ph.D. (1993, Open Court).
"It is terribly self-destructive," Steven Goldberg tells us, "to refuse to accept one's own nature, and the joys and powers it invests."
In this scholarly and meticulous essay, Dr. Goldberg, Chairman of the Sociology Department at City University of New York, analyzes the distortions of gender studies, which have become a "sacred cow" of academia.
Thus it is no surprise that over a period of ten years, his first work on this subject (The Inevitability of Patriarchy) was turned down 69 times by 55 publishers, earning him recognition in The Guinness Book of World Records for the most rejections of a manuscript before final acceptance.
"We live in a time when many academics like to believe that the variations of human behavior and social institutions are virtually unlimited," Dr. Goldberg says. But society must, to a certain extent, conform itself to psycho-physiological reality.
"In real life, most parents want to prepare their children for the real world, and are unwilling to sacrifice them to the demands of ideology--which is what they do when they grossly misrepresent the world..."
An analysis of sex-related differences is important to sexual-reorientation therapists, because it opens discussion of an essential question: Is there a human nature to which man must conform? Or are gender and sexual orientation infinitely malleable?
Socialization "does not consist primarily of parents telling little boys to be 'aggressive' and little girls to be 'nurturant'--these tendencies exist without socialization--but of developing the skills and attitudes that make best use of such tendencies as already exist." He adds, "To believe that males should not have a stronger dominance tendency...is to hope for the impossible."
It is the idea of male dominance which most annoys feminists, Dr. Goldberg says, but, "It does not matter whether the reader enjoys the idea that the male dominates and protects the female, or detests it"--it is simply, he says, a fact.
"Every society recognizes a particular emotional difference between men and women...the male strength and dominance, and the female gentleness and endurance portrayed in our novels and movies mirror not merely our society's view of the emotional natures of men and women, but the views of every society that has ever existed..."
Science reveals empirical realities which we must recognize. However, "empirical analyses alone cannot find the answers to moral-political questions." Science speaks only of what is, while social-moral philosophy tells us what should be.

For example, a recent study found some evidence that promiscuity is in a man's genes. If this study is correct, then it is "normal and natural" for a man to be tempted to adultery; but we do not build a social-moral philosophy around the idea that faithful marriage is therefore impossible. In fact, recognizing that stable families are vital to society, we might use our knowledge that "promiscuity is in the genes" to strengthen social sanctions against adultery, thus making unfaithfulness less likely.
Valuing of Male Attributes Distorts Feminist Reasoning
Feminism was once dominated by the idea that sex-related tendencies are purely cultural in origin. Today, he says, most feminists now recognize that physiological differences play at least some part in sex-related behaviors. But many feminists clearly value masculine qualities more highly than feminine ones--thus, there has been a long effort to establish the idea that women have been less prominent in professions like mathematics, philosophy, and music composition simply because society has socialized them not to compete in these areas.
A recent study of the top 4,000 executives at the Fortune 500 companies found that men outnumbered women 3,993 to 19.
"The higher the status--the more competitive the position--the lower will be the percentage of women," he says. But many feminists claim that it is simply bias and discrimination that has prevented equal representation. However, Dr. Goldberg disagrees.
Males occupy more high-status roles because they are motivated more strongly to achieve that high status. He gives many examples of what appear to be role-reversals in other societies--where women do the usual men's work, and men do the "women's work"--but invariably, he says, the apparent "man's work" the woman is doing is lower-status in that particular society, and is therefore less sought-after by the male. "Males occupy higher-level roles because high status motivates the male more strongly."
He does not argue that either sex is uniquely associated with competence. But he does say that few women would devote the lifelong expenditure of energy necessary to achieve such positions, and any increase of women in these positions will be slight. "In the future, America may well have a female leader, but we shall never see a time when males fail to attain the overwhelming percentage of top hierarchical positions."
When Females Supervise Males
"Even if the male's greater dominance tendency were over-ridden and large numbers of women placed in positions of authority, it is unlikely that stability could be maintained. Even in our present male bureaucracies, problems arise when a subordinate is more 'aggressive' than his superior and, if the more 'aggressive' executive is not allowed to rise in the bureaucracy, delicate psychological adjustments must be made. Such adjustments are also necessary when a male bureaucrat has a female superior...It seems likely...that if women shared equally [with men] in power at each level of the bureaucracy, chaos would result..."
In every society, women are responsible for the care and rearing of the young, "the single most important function served in any society, or in nature itself."
The Universality of Patriarchy
An idea that undergirds much of feminist thinking is that patriarchy, matriarchy and "equiarchy" are all equally possible, and that there is no natural order which decrees that men will rule in every society. Accordingly, feminists tend to say that our expectations of men and women are culturally determined, and therefore infinitely malleable. Many feminist writers "camouflage their intellectual inadequacy behind a facade of scholarship...and...a profusion of footnotes...One would be hard put to find another group that talked so much about science, without doing any science."
"In science," Dr. Goldberg says, "...truth is the perfect defense, and nature will give you a lift only if you're going her way." Our physiology imposes limitations on social possibility, he warns us, and society must not expect its institutions to ignore these limitations.
Of all social institutions, there is probably none whose universality is granted so unanimously by anthropologists as patriarchy. "There is not, nor has there ever been, any society that even remotely failed to associate authority and leadership in suprafamilial areas with the male. There are no borderline cases." He says there has never been a matriarchy. "If the reader insists on maintaining a belief in a once-existent matriarchal society, all we can do is demand evidence more convincing than his desire that there should have been one."
Misinformation has a long life. Dr. Goldberg studied 32 introductory sociology textbooks, and discovered that all but two begin their chapters on sex roles with the claim that anthropologist Margaret Mead said the Tchambuli of New Guinea reversed male-female sex roles.
Dr. Mead had, in fact, had been denying this claim for fifty years. In a review of Dr. Goldberg's book, she acknowledged that "It is true, as Professor Goldberg points out, that all the claims so gliby made about societies ruled by women are nonsense. We have no reason to believe that they ever existed...men have always been the leaders in public affairs, and the final authorities at home."
"More than sloppiness is at work here," says Dr. Goldberg. "Some of the authors of current texts have admitted to me in private that they know the Tchambuli are not an exception." He adds, "We used to call this 'lying.'"
Cognitive Differences Between the Sexes
Men are more dominant and driven toward high-status positions, and this explains some of their preeminence in social heirarchies. But there is another factor--there are also cognitive differences between men and women.
Feminists, he says, often assume that women, if not for social conditioning, would be just as capable as men of a career in nuclear physics. In fact, a simple and accurate descriptive statement--such as "women are not as good at math as men"--often evokes antagonism. "Rejections of descriptions because one does not like them are hardly justified," he says. "We know that men and women think and behave differently, whatever the cause...The social is given its limits and direction by the physiological...Falsity of assumption cannot be balanced by a doubling of emotional investment."
"There exists in our culture," he says, "a powerful hunger to believe that gender differences in cognitive aptitudes are exclusively cultural." Men surpass women in dealing with high-level logic and abstraction, which leads them to excel in math, composing, chess, philosophy, and so forth--fields in which, he says, there is no woman of genius.
Women equal or surpass men on all cognitive tests not related to mathematical reasoning or associated aptitudes, although neither sex is more intelligent than the other, he says, when we speak of intelligence in a broader sense--in all its different forms.
He stresses that none of this information justifies discrimination against the woman who happens to be as qualified as a man in a male-dominated field--but she must be aware, realistically, that "she can never hope to live in a society that does not attach feminine expectations to women."
Patriarchy, Male Dominance, and Male Attainment
Three factors are universal throughout all known cultures: patriarchy, male dominance and male attainment. He argues that these tendencies are manifestations of neuro-endocrinological differences between men and women, and that male dominance serves obvious survival functions.
He defines patriarchy as the occupation, by males, of the overwhelming percentage of upper heirarchical positions in political and other heirarchies.
Male attainment is defined as acquisition by males of the high-status roles--whatever these may be, in any given society.
Male dominance is indicated when both sexes believe that dominance in male-female relationships resides with the male, and that social expectations and authority systems reflect this balance of power.
Wherever there is a hierarchy, high-status role, or member of the opposite sex present, he says, the male more readily and more strongly responds with--
Competitiveness (the impulse for attainment and dominance);
Relative suppression of other emotions and needs, and a sacrifice of rewards (health, family, relaxation and so forth) that conflict with the need for attainment and dominance;
Whatever actions are required for attainment of the aforementioned position, status and dominance. (Society, he says, conforms to nature by recognizing and institutionalizing this male ambition.)
If patriarchy, male dominance and male attainment are indeed a function of human physiology (as he believes they are), then "the emotional, behavioral, and--ultimately--social-institutional manifestations...may be inevitable..."
The theory does not imply that males perform better than females in their positions, but that they are more strongly motivated to attain these high-status positions. He also says, "I am in no way implying that there is some law of nature which requires that the males of a species should dominate...No scientific analysis of empirical relationships can ever entail a social policy (what is cannot entail what should be)."
The Physiological Roots of Male Dominance
"There is an enormous amount of evidence," he says, "which demonstrates beyond doubt that that the testicularly-generated fetal hormonalization of the male central nervous system promotes earlier and more extensive maturation of the brain structures that mediate between male hormones and dominance behavior; this makes the male hypersensitive to the presence, later on, of the hormones which energize dominance emotions and behavior, and result in his stronger tendency to respond to the environment with dominance behavior."
He mentions the cases where a boy was raised as a female through removal of the external male genitalia, and socialization as a girl; but the experiment was unsuccessful because fetal hormonal masculinization had already occurred. "As the evidence demonstrates conclusively," he says, "dominance tendency is primarily a result of hormonal development and not primarily of anatomy, gender identity, or the socialization that reflects anatomy and gender identity."
In his discussion, Dr. Goldberg reminds of us some important principles of logical argumentation. The fact that some women are more dominant than some men does not invalidate the statistical fact that men are, on average, more dominant than women. Furthermore, when he says that women will "never" form a majority in the upper levels of corporate hierarchies, he reminds us that science speaks in the language of probability.
For psychotherapists, Why Men Rule should lead in a useful direction. An acknowledgment of physiologically-based sex differences could help explain the particular problems common to same-sex love relationships (jealousy, competition, violence, instability) which some clinicians believe to be inherent to any same-sex coupling. While gay advocates see the supposed "equality" of same-sex coupling to be an advantage, reparative therapists often theorize that sexual sameness actually fosters inherent competitiveness. (For example, dog trainers know that two female dogs, or two males dogs, never live together as equals; whereas male-female pairs live in relative harmony, because they do not compete within the same dominance heirarchy.)
Why Men Rule represents one step toward honest inquiry into the vast, unexplored, and compelling area of physiologically-based sex differences.

Why Males Rule
A review of King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership, by Arnold M. Ludwig

Why are the highest positions of political leadership almost always filled by men rather than women? Oddly enough, political scientists rarely acknowledge—much less explain—this universal pattern of male political dominance. In his biological writings, Aristotle compared human beings with other political animals, and he concluded that the males are by nature "more hegemonic"—more inclined to rule or dominate—than the females. Charles Darwin confirmed this and explained the natural inclination of males to dominance as a product of evolutionary history in which natural selection worked through male competition both between and within tribal groups of males. Most recently, Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson has included male political dominance as part of his sociobiological account of human nature.

Proponents of sexual equality have challenged this Aristotelian and Darwinian explanation of male dominance. Some feminists have claimed that there have been many matriarchal societies in which women ruled over men, or egalitarian societies in which women and men ruled as equals. Some Marxist feminists have adopted Friedrich Engels's claim that in the earlier hunter-gatherer societies, women were equal or superior to men in status and power. Engels was influenced by Lewis Henry Morgan's anthropological account of the high status of women in Iroquois communities in North America.

It has become clear, however, that there is little evidence for truly matriarchal societies. Even Morgan indicated that although Iroquois women helped to select the male leaders, women were not permitted to hold leadership positions in the hierarchy. Describing the "absence of equality of the sexes," Morgan observed that "the Indian regarded woman as the inferior, the dependent, and the servant of man." In recent decades, even the most radical feminist scholars have generally given up on the search for matriarchy in human history.

When sociologist Steven Goldberg published his book The Inevitability of Patriarchy in 1973, he was denounced for his claim that the desire for dominance is naturally stronger in men than in women, as a consequence of biological differences, and that this explains why male dominance is universal. But when he published a revised version of his argument in 1993 in his book Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance, he provoked less controversy because scholarly opinion had begun to shift in his favor. Goldberg's most persuasive evidence came from his surveying the cases of purported matriarchies and showing that they were not matriarchies at all. Goldberg concluded that there had never been a society in which the proportion of women in the highest positions of leadership surpassed about seven percent. We can easily think of examples of politically dominant women in recent history—women such as Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain, Indira Gandhi of India, or Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan. But the dominance of these women as individuals only highlights the fact that the political hierachies of England, India, and Pakistan are generally dominated by men.

Of course, it is still possible that the universality of male dominance in politics throughout history shows the persistence of cultural traditions of patriarchy that are only now beginning to weaken. After all, some feminists would insist, it is only quite recently that women have had the opportunity to rise to the highest positions of power. If so, then one would expect that the 20th century would show some trend towards female dominance or at least some weakening of male dominance in politics.
And yet Arnold Ludwig's book shows that the political history of the 20th century confirms the claim of Aristotle and Darwin that male dominance of politics is rooted in human biological nature. Ludwig argues that the male desire to be the supreme political ruler expresses the same biological propensities that support the dominance of alpha males among monkeys and apes. He supports his argument with a meticulous analysis of the 1,941 chief executive rulers of the independent countries in the 20th century. He illustrates his points with lively anecdotes from the lives of the 377 rulers for whom he had extensive biographical information.

Of the 1,941 chief executive rulers in the 20th century, only 27 were women. And of those 27, almost half came to power through their connection to their politically powerful fathers or husbands. For example, Benazir Bhutto rose to power in Pakistan after the assassination of her father; and Corazon Aquino rose to power in the Philippines after the assassination of her husband. The odds against a woman rising to the dominant position in a political regime in the 20th century were about a hundred to one.

But showing this fact of male dominance in politics is easier than explaining it. Like Aristotle, Darwin, and Goldberg, Ludwig explains it as manifesting biological differences between men and women. Men are by nature more inclined to seek dominance than are women. To sustain his claim that this arises from the evolutionary history of natural selection favoring a strong dominance drive among males, Ludwig quotes from recent studies of monkeys and apes showing the importance of dominance hierarchies in which males compete for the alpha position. He emphasizes the remarkable similarities between human politics as an arena for male rivalry for high status and the "chimpanzee politics" of male competition for dominance as described by Frans de Waal and other primatologists.

And yet Ludwig's reasoning here is too superficial. He quotes occasionally from the primatological reports, casually notes the similarities to human politics, and then moves on without providing the rigorous analysis that would be required to make his case fully persuasive. For example, he acknowledges in a footnote that bonobos seem to be "more female-dominated" than other great ape species, but he says nothing more about this.

Bonobos resemble chimpanzees so much that even experienced observers of primates have had a hard time telling the difference. And until recently, bonobos were regarded as a subspecies of chimpanzees. But now there is general agreement that bonobos are a distinct species. Not only are they distinct in their anatomy, but also in their behavior. Chimpanzees have dominance hierarchies for both males and females, but the dominant male tends to be dominant over all. By contrast, bonobo females seem to dominate over males. Apparently, the females form strong coalitional ties with one another—reinforced by sexual bonding—that allows them to keep the males subordinate. The females also use their power to tame male violence. Chimpanzee males in the wild have been observed launching lethal raids against those outside their own group in a pattern of behavior that resembles human warfare. Bonobos have not shown such behavior. Some feminists now look to the bonobos as a model of lesbian matriarchy that promotes peace based on a policy of "make love not war."

But while primatologists such as Frans de Waal and Amy Parish see the bonobos as a clear case of female dominance that might provide lessons for human beings seeking greater sexual equality, a few primatologists suggest that bonobos might not be so different from chimpanzees. The problem is that bonobos have not been as well studied as chimpanzees. In any case, the serious study of dominance hierarchies among primates has to take account of the bonobos.

Moreover, if Ludwig is right about males having a stronger propensity to dominance than females, then he should be able to show the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms that support this difference. But he offers little more than some casual references to higher levels of testosterone among males. As Lionel Tiger and others have shown, there are important differences between males and females not only in levels of testosterone but also in levels of neurotransmitters such as serotonin that are associated with male dominance behavior. This is complicated, however, because we would need to explain not only male-female differences but also temperamental differences among males such that some males are far more aggressive in their pursuit of dominance than others. If we could do this, we could explain the biological basis for what Thomas Jefferson and other political thinkers have called the "natural aristocracy"—that is, the natural tendency in all societies for a few individuals to display a driving ambition for power, fame, and glory.

One of the fundamental problems for political life is devising ways to channel that natural desire for dominance so that we can secure energetic leadership but without tyrannical exploitation. Ludwig generally depicts the pursuit of political power as a Machiavellian world in which tyrants prevail through the exercise of force and fraud. And yet he also shows that democratic leaders in established democracies act with more restraint than leaders in other kinds of regimes. Democratic leaders are less corrupt than tyrannical leaders. And by comparison with democratic leaders, tyrants are much more likely to suffer bad outcomes from their rule such as being assassinated or being deposed by a coup. As Ludwig says, tyrants face "a whopping 85 percent chance of leaving office in disgrace or in a casket." (It is with good reason that Machiavelli devoted the longest chapters in The Prince and the Discourses on Livy to conspiracies and assassination plots.)

Ludwig does not reflect on what the apparent success of democratic institutions might tell us about the political nature of human beings. Consequently, he misses a chance to show how a Darwinian theory of politics could support democratic principles. Beginning with William Jennings Bryan, American critics of Darwinism have feared that Darwinism subverts American democratic principles by supporting the idea that the rule of the stronger is an ineluctable law of nature. Although Ludwig's talk about the natural drive for dominance as shared by human beings and other primates might seem to confirm that fear, Ludwig also shows a natural resistance to exploitation that can check the power of the dominant few.

Among rhesus monkeys, the alpha males show a despotic style of dominance. The dominant individual asserts in every way his priority over subordinates. For example, the dominant individual never shares food with subordinates; and he never tolerates resistance from his subordinates. But among chimpanzees, the alpha males show a more egalitarian style of dominance. The dominant individual often acts to help and protect subordinates, and he will share his food. Subordinate individuals can form coalitions with one another to resist the unacceptable behavior of a dominant individual. Moreover, dominant chimpanzees often break up fights within the group in an apparently impartial way. Frans de Waal sees this egalitarian style of chimpanzee dominance as a move towards a society where leadership is based on the principle of primus inter pares, "first among equals."

Christopher Boehm has elaborated this idea in his book Hierarchy in the Forest. Combining evidence from primatology and anthropology, Boehm argues for a complex view of human political psychology rooted in a political nature that we share with other primates. Like other primates, human beings show a tripartite political nature: some individuals are naturally inclined to dominance, others are naturally inclined to submission, and yet the subordinates are naturally inclined to resent their exploitation by dominants. The political history of primates shows us no clear case of a primate society without any hierarchy at all. Even human foraging groups, commonly regarded by anthropologists as radically egalitarian, show some hierarchical structure, even if informal and episodic, because any human society requires central coordination from dominant leaders, even if only occasionally. But what makes foraging societies look so egalitarian is that those individuals who act as leaders are restrained by the resentful suspicions of their subordinates. Those leaders who become too arrogant or bullying are cut down to size by ridicule, gossip, ostracism, or—in the most extreme cases—assassination. Boehm can see precursors of this in chimpanzees. Some chimpanzees become dominants. Most are subordinates. But even the subordinates can occasionally express their resentment of dominants. Human foraging groups develop that resentment of dominance into an egalitarian ethos in which hierarchy is tolerated only within the limits enforced by subordinates fearful of being exploited.

With the emergence of human chiefdoms and states, the egalitarian ethos of foraging societies almost disappeared. But modern constitutional democracies like the United States revive the egalitarian ethos through the institutional structure of a centralized republican democracy. The ambitious few can satisfy their natural desire for dominance by filling the offices of government. But while the people will submit to this dominance hierarchy, they rely on the institutions of a constitutional, electoral democracy to express their resentment of exploitation by dominants. The dominants must see themselves as only the "first among equals."