Prof. Goldberg Comments on Carol Tavris'
Mismeasure of Woman
Prof. Steven Goldberg (Dept. of Sociology, CCNY/CUNY) writes:
The following two points are the only points made by Ms. Tavris relevant to Patriarchy:
Tavris P.42: ",,,the male 'superiority' in math is an example of a 'fact' that is not powerful at all, because it does not help us predict how an individual boy or girl, man or woman, will do."To see how little sense this makes, simply replace "math" with "height" (or "weight" or "physical strength"). No one thinks that, when we say that "men are taller than women", this means we can predict in better than probabilistic terms the height of a specific man or woman. Everyone understands the statistical, rather than absolute, nature of facts about males and females and that, for example, some women are taller than some men. Likewise, no one doubts that a woman who is six-feet tall or a good mathematician is really six-feet tall or a good mathematician; everyone realizes that such women are merely more exceptional for their sex than equivalent men are for theirs.
Recognizing the probabilistic nature of statistical facts does not accomplish Ms. Tavris' purpose of rendering unimportant the fact she attempts to render unimportant. The small difference in the mean heights of men and women (about eight percent) is sufficient to lead everyone to correctly believe that "men are taller than women". The concomitant fact, expected with even small mean differences between normal curves, that nearly all of the tallest people are men and that this will be relevant to one selecting players for a basketball team, is also both important and obvious to anyone who does not wish to deny the obvious.
All of this is as true for the difference in mathematical aptitude as for the difference in height. Even Ms. Tavris acknowledges the overwhelming percentages of males at the upper end when she writes that "...if the small percentage of males who are math prodigies is removed from this sample, the distribution of scores for males and females is identical": 1. Why would one do this? Even if it were true, it would be like not counting men over 5' 10" and concluding that women are as tall as men. 2. More important: Ms. Tavris' statement is utterly untrue. If you remove the boys with scores above 600 on the SAT-math (the group that will produce an overwhelmingly disproportionate percentage of the best mathematicians), you are still left with males whose scores are significantly higher than are those of females; this is true even if you exclude only the highest- scoring boys and include all of the girls. One would have to remove many of the boys in the upper half of the boys group that Ms. Tavris includes to erase the sex difference.
Ms. Tavris continually makes the common mistake (p. 50) of treating studies that find no sex difference in a specific tendency, aptitude, etc. as somehow refuting the study that does find such a sex difference. The latter study may be incorrect, but if it is, it can be shown to be incorrect only by a study that uses the same methodology and comes to opposite conclusions. Let us say that we want to know whether men are taller than women. You use a ruler divided by inches for your study and I use a yardstick that measures only to the nearest yard. You find that men are taller and I find that there is no sexual difference in height. My results do not cancel yours; you used a sufficiently sensitive methodology, while I did not. (Note incidentally, that nothing discussed above has anything to do with the cause of the sex difference in mathematical aptitude. All of the abov is true even if the cause of the difference is entirely environmental. The above facts are necessary for the determination of cause, but the above facts are not sufficient for the determination of cause.)
Tavris p.77: Quotes Sarah Pomeroy: "(It) is as foolish to postulate masculine dominance in prehistory as to postulate female dominance."This makes about as much sense as saying, " (It) is as foolish to postulate one-headed people in prehistory as to postulate two-headed people."
Clearly, it is more likely that that which is universal now was true of human groups earlier than was its "opposite".
The thousands of societies and social groups on which we have evidence represent an astonishing variation, a variation that environmentalists invoke with alacrity when it makes their point of human malleability. Environmentalists ignore the other edge of this two-edged sword; the very variation forces us to ask why that which does not vary (i.e., the universality of male dominance) manifests itself amid all the other variation. Common sense demands that--in the absence of countervailing evidence--we assume that earlier societies exhibited the universality found in all societies on which we have evidence (societies ranging from the stone-age group of a few hundred to the modern society of hundreds of millions). This would be true even if we did not have an enormous amount of direct neuro- endocrinological evidence relevant to dominance behavior. And we do.
It is always the case that there will be some cutting edge questions that are still in dispute. It is these, and there eventual answers, that represent the advance of scientific knowledge. Those who do not like the way the evidence is going invariably attempt to exploit this aspect of the scientific process by focusing on the points presently in dispute. Thus, those who dislike the fact that neurophysiology is relevant to dominance behavior--a reality that cross-cultural evidence alone would force us to postulate--claim that we can say nothing about male-female differences in dominance behavior unless we have direct evidence of the physiological mechanism responsible. When it is pointed out that there is an enormous amount of hormonal evidence to this effect, they focus--as does Ms. Tavris--on differences in views about the precise way in which the hormones affect structures of the brain. When this question is answered, they will no doubt demand explanation down to the quantum level and even then they will refuse to acknowledge that neurophysiological differences between men and women might have something to do with the fact that there is no exception to the reality for which they wish there was an exception. And one suspects that, even at that point, they will invoke the only kind of "exceptions" they can invoke, those putatively claimed to have "possibly" existed at a time for which we have no evidence.