Are women superior to men? A never-ending succession of books and news stories suggests
they are. How many times have you heard that women are wiser, kinder, more efficient, and
just all around better human beings. Well let’s look at the evidence: That's coming up next
on the Factual Feminist.
It used to be fashionable to celebrate men’s alleged superiority over women. Many of the great philosophers, Aristotle, Kant,
Kant, Rousseau, Nietzsche, they deemed women intellectually inferior to men.
But today there's a new kind of reverse, female chauvinism that prevails.
It is so common that social scientists have given it a name: the women are wonderful
phenomenon, or "WAW" for short. Well here is a sample of recent WAW headlines. Let’s consider
some claims of female superiority: Take multi-tasking: I mean how many times have you heard
that women are much better at multi-tasking than men? The British writer Sir Ken Robinson in
one of the most watched TED talks of all time,
referred to a raft of research
that showed women's superiority in multitasking. But where is this research?
What we actually have is a handful of small, inconclusive, inconsistent studies. Some show
show women are better—but others show that it’s men who excel. Thomas Buser a researcher
at University of Amsterdam, took a careful look at the data and concluded that, as
far as gender differences are concerned, we just don't find either men or women excelling, it's a mix.
It turns out that neither sex is particularly good at focusing on more
than one thing at once. Well what about niceness? It's often said that women are kinder than men, and the
film critic Roger Ebert: praised women to the
skies for their kindness and generosity and hoped that
they would take over the world - we'd all be better off.
Well is he right? When it comes to generosity, kindness, and altruism, once again you find
lots of conflicting studies. But one of the most thorough and careful surveys was carried out
out by Tom Smith and his team at the
National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.
Smith and his team asked questions that included both
male and female styles of altruism. Because women tend to adopt nurturing and caring roles towards
people, more than men—while men excel at good deeds and acts of kindness involving strangers.
So in Smith’s survey, women proved to be more empathetic than men: they were more likely
to feel pity for others and to describe themselves as soft­hearted. But when it came to the
empirically critical measure of generosity—how much do you actually do for others—the results
were different. When Smith and his colleagues tallied up the results, they found that the
score was even. “Gender,” Smith concluded, “is not notably related to altruistic behaviors.”
Advantage: Neither sex. Both sexes have their graces and their own
styles of being virtuous. Neither has a monopoly on good or evil. How did we lose sight of
this obvious truth? Because we live in the age of WAW. The rules of the Women are Wonderful.
This is a game-and it's impossible for men to win, because if women do something better than men, that's just
evidence of their superiority. If men outperform women, that's proof of discrimination—retrograde
patriarchy and toxic masculinity. To violate the spirit of WAW is to invite havoc. Suggest,
as the former president of Harvard Larry Summers once did, that men may have some innate advantages
in math or spatial reasoning, and prepare to change your job. But write a book that's entitled
“Are Men Necessary?,” "The End of Men," "Man Down", or "Women are From Venus,
Men are from Hell," and the gods of the zeitgeist smile. The answer to male supremacy is not
female supremacy—the answer is equality and mutual regard and respect. Let’s try
that. Are you or anyone you know under the spell of WAW? Let me know in the comments
section, please follow me on Twitter and Facebook, and thank you for watching the Factual Feminist.