In 1958, a Mr EWD Tennant wrote a molten letter to The Times of London. Businessmen, he warned, were “exasperated” by the number of women clogging commuter trains.
“The coaches are invaded by ladies, with the result that businessmen holding season tickets are crowded out and forced to stand in the corridors. Which is the more important – that the regular workers should be able to read their newspapers and keep abreast of world affairs and arrive fresh for their business or that the seats should be filled with women travelling to London to have their hair permed and to shop?”
The time had come, fumed Tennant, to reserve seats “for men only”.
If you think this kind of thinking died out with bowler hats, think again. In Patriarchy Inc, Melbourne University psychologist Cordelia Fine argues women still toil under the yoke of men, held back by insidious “neurosexism” – the idea that men and women have different brains. Beneath all the “inclusivity” rhetoric, says Fine, lies the belief that financial inequality between the sexes is “natural”.
Some men, of course, still openly believe in the inferiority of women, based on pseudo-scientific canards that baby boys are destined to command and baby girls to obey. Yesterday’s sexist old coot Times letter writer is today’s “tech-bro”, floating the online “manosphere” to “shitpost” against “woke” gender equality.
Fine is at her best when detailing how bias penalises working women today, and how gender-based labour divisions date not to the stone age but to the industrial revolution. She is much less fluent in her analyses of evolutionary psychology.
The author of 2010′s Delusions of Gender and 2017′s Testosterone Rex, Fine has long argued that the most important gender differences are formed by experience and society rather than evolutionary adaptations to life in the distant past. This is not to say she believes there are no innate gender differences.
“To be very clear,” she has written, “the point is not that the brain is asexual, or that we shouldn’t study sex effects in the brain … genetic and hormonal differences between the sexes can influence brain development and function at every level.”
Hovering over everything is the derided metaphor of the “blank slate” – if nothing is innate, differences between the sexes won’t be, either. Few serious researchers today believe that the mind of a newborn human – alone of all mammals – is devoid of instinct. How can evolution shape every organ of every animal on Earth except the human brain? How can men’s and women’s minds be the same if their bodies are so different?
Disappointingly, Fine never gets around to answering the direct questions we all wonder about, resorting to word soup like this: “Evolutionary psychologists regard [a theory she favours] as an implausible ‘blank slate approach’ to understanding sex differences in personality. But … the theory fits rather nicely with alternative evolutionary accounts of what’s on that slate.”
Fine often sounds partisan and vague, as if arguing obscure points in a longstanding academic battle the reader has not been privy to. As evolutionary psychology is such a major plank of the book, we could have done with a better description of it.
Some things we do know. Countless studies have found no evidence of any average difference in intelligence between men and women, and it was not Fine but the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker who wrote: “The common view that women are more empathetic towards everyone is both evolutionarily unlikely and untrue.”
It would have strengthened Fine’s case to show agreement across the conceptual canyon that famously separates her from researchers like Pinker, but she seems reluctant to give evolutionary psychologists like him too much credit.
She is also oddly uneasy about discussing gender identity, mentioning the word “transgender” just once, although reassuring readers, in a “note on language” in the front of her book, “A person’s gender identification as a woman, man or non-binary can be distinct from their sex.”
She is less reticent about her distaste for DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion) initiatives. The “feel good” jargon of DEI, she argues, cloaks its uselessness at fixing injustices like unfair wage differences.
This may be true, although in the US, Donald Trump’s administration is testing Fine’s theory. The erasure of anything considered DEI extends to banning certain words from federal websites, and eliminating federal DEI-related jobs. Which is unlikely to help income equality.
A new generation of activists, though, will surely pounce on Fine’s reminder that “soft skills” like empathy, sociability and communication are assumed to come naturally to women, making work like caregiving, preschool teaching or nursing appear “unskilled” – at least when performed by women. The straitjacket of expectation, Fine says, extends to men, too, who are treated as workers but never fathers. Relentless work hours are now not just manly, but “hypermasculine”.
Patriarchy Inc has its issues, but is most engrossing when Fine trains her blunderbuss on the everyday biases that distort our working lives.
Patriarchy Inc: What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality and Why Men Still Win at Work, by Cordelia Fine (Atlantic, $34.99), is out now.
