‘I thought I was writing a book about developmental psychology. I never considered a book about the gender wars,” Susan Pinker says.
The sigh she offers at the close of that statement is understandable, because the publication of The Sexual Paradox: Extreme Men, Gifted Women and the Real Gender Gap, her first book, has placed her squarely in the middle of the continuing cultural fray about why there aren't more women in the chief executive officer's chair.
Weaving it together with personal reflections on her life as a psychologist and mother, she sets out a carefully researched scientific discussion of how the brains of men and women are differently hardwired and influenced by their soup of hormones. The conclusion? Most men are hardwired to compete for supremacy in the workplace. Women are not. Most want a balanced life of work, family, friends and community because their biology has evolved that way.
Her exasperation, unprovoked, hints at the controversy she has encountered.
“I will say that it irritates me when people think that my message is that women should go home and stay in the kitchen, and that biology says they have to. That is a complete misunderstanding,” she says, acknowledging that many people have had that reaction.
“When you view it as a polemic, then that might be the response, because biology has been used in the past to hold women down.”
She is careful to point out that she does not speak for all women. She is talking about general tendencies. “Science tells us nothing about the individual,” she notes.
For as many Hillary Clintons there are in the world, gunning for the highest office, there are others like Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who made the surprising announcement on Friday that she is stepping down from her job after only one term to spend more time with her family.
Still, Dr. Pinker's book points out a difficult and, for some women, painful reality. The feminist movement that encouraged women to be like men may have been necessary, she says – “we needed that view in the beginning when we entered the work force” – but it was uninformed about what makes women different, which, ultimately, has compelled many to opt out of top jobs even though they pursued education that qualified them to take them. “The expectation that we will be clones of men is holding us back,” she states.
She also found that the focus on working like a man made many women feel that they wasted some of their best years and, in some cases, forced them to put off motherhood until it was too late. Would she say that a generation of women sacrificed their lives as a result of that feminist ideology?
“I think that unintentionally that was one effect,” she allows. “And I think there is an awful lot of psychic pain that was the result, where women felt that their feelings were not valid, that something was wrong with them if they didn't follow the male model.”
The book confirms what many, including Dr. Pinker, have observed anecdotally.
Young boys often struggle in school, yet many go on to high-powered careers. Consider, for example, Richard Branson, the billionaire entrepre- neur who didn't complete high school.
In fact, what prompted Dr. Pinker to write the book was seeing, in the span of one week, three newspaper profiles of a successful young man who had been a patient of hers, suffering from a variety of behavioural and learning problems, when he was 7.
“He had become a designer of some renown, and I thought, ‘There is something going on here. I wouldn't have predicted that outcome. There has to be some biological thread.'”
