Customer Reviews

Divided Labours: An Evolutionary View of Women at Work (Darwinism Today series)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Many social scientists now admit that 20th century emphasis on nurture to the exclusion of nature was overdrawn. With the success in the mapping of the Human Genome and the emergence of evolutionary biology from the shadow of the so-called hard sciences the pendulum now seems to be moving back. How do we keep our balance on these shifting and ideologically charged sands?

Peter Singer in A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation (also reviewed by me) suggests some principles that a new Darwinian Left adopt. One is not to deny the existence of a human nature nor assume that it is "infinitely malleable". Another is not to assume "that all inequalities are due to discrimination, prejudice, oppression or social conditioning". It is in the spirit of attempting to apply these principles that I believe Divided Labours should be read.

The author is a law professor and his book reads like a legal brief. That said the writing is very clear and seemingly fair as far as it goes. He is particularly careful in specifying the limitations of what can be inferred from some of his evolutionary facts. He also provides some good examples of the kind of population thinking necessary for understanding many of these kinds of issues. He mentions that at the height of five-feet-ten the ratio of males to females is 30:1. A six-foot, only two inches taller, it is 2000:1. Understanding the implications of these kinds of facts is crucial and I wish he had included a chapter emphasizing the importance and differences of population thinking versus concentrating on the individual.

So what is the books brief? For me it is to attempt to shift what he calls "a gross asymmetry in burdens of proof" (page 62) in the area of woman and work where the "proponents of social construction" have had an advantage over biological explanations in public policy debates. Merely to show a group difference in result is not to show that it has not resulted from free individual choice and that a theoretician can know what the proper or just ratio ought to be, let alone assume 50:50. Thus he marshals his evidence concerning gender differences and notes their possible impact on the different choices individuals might make and plays the ball back into his opponents court. Nowhere does he imply that individual women ought to be denied the right or opportunity to make the same choices as men.

There are however some problems with this book. I too (along with another Amazon reviewer) was troubled by the age of some of the references as well as the fact that the author was a law professor and not a scientist. I do know that many of his references were considered authoritative in their time but I can't say whether they reflect the latest evolutionary thinking. However the tone of the author and the reputation of the editors, the press and other authors in the series would cause me to give him the benefit of the doubt over the facts he reports. That leads to a second and more serious concern, though possibly not the author's responsibility.

Lying outside of his brief is non-biological evidence that might weaken his case. As my wife pointed out, what about the fact that women who try to adopt so-called male strategies are often called "bitches" and otherwise impeded in accomplishing their goals. Simply because many woman freely make traditional choices doesn't mean that the number of women in a particular category isn't decreased unfairly by coercion and other sexist attitudes. It is left as a question whether that kind of male (and even female) response may also have evolutionary roots.

Finally he notes an inconsistency in what he calls "feminist" arguments that bear on Singer's principle about the kind of institutions a Darwinian left ought to create. Feminists "reject the male obsession with status, competition, and acquisition of resources, " [rightly in this reviewers opinion] "but they measure women's position in society solely along this male dimension. Then they conclude that women are disadvantaged without incorporating into their measurement the attributes that woman value"(page 61-62). At least as regards the glass ceiling in the corporate world this is an important point. When Lenin pointed out that a capitalist would willingly sell the rope that would be used to hang him, it doesn't seem to me a great advance in Human Rights if the capitalist is now a woman especially when I'm going to be on the receiving end of the rope. I would rather use my time and effort in the creation of new institutions with different values that would have a better chance of overcoming our shared biological inheritance.

I am very much in support of evolutionary psychology and the need to understand our biological predispositions but it is also a sad fact that that when it is presented so simplistically as this it loses much of its potential to really enable full understanding of immensely complex issues. There are so many unanswered questions here and so many omissions that it would take a book to deal with them all and I can only hope people who are impressed, or otherwise, by the simplicity of Kingsley Browne's argument actually read more widely and especially read books by female evolutionary psychologists that will provide greater balance and insight.

As Browne says himself, masculine traits cause men to be self-deluded with regard to their own competences and he must be included in this. He also does not seem to be aware of the naturalistic fallacy nor the fact that traits that were once adaptive can become maladaptive and sometimes fatal to a species.

Two quick points:
If women are risk-averse why do they seek to place the lives of themselves and their children in the hands of men who take the biggest risks?
If women do not want to relocate why do they seek men who will relocate and therefore end up forced to relocate anyway?

Most evolutionary theory makes an assumption that human females selected male traits. Unlikely. Humans inherited the mating system where females leave the group to breed (only females therefore ever 'relocated' and males stayed in their birth groups with their kin). Humans are unique in that fathers and brothers had authority over daughters and sisters. A man wanting a wife needed to be attractive to her male relatives, not the woman herself. This puts a very different slant on who is selecting male traits in our evolution, and still in much of the world today. This mating system plus sexual dimorphism, strong male kin bonding, masculine traits etc put females in an impossible position as far as having a voice or an input was (and still often is) concerned - only perhaps through their sons could women exert influence which again meant they were forced to put forward male (their son's) self-interest.

As far as the labour market goes, how might that have evolved in a sytem where women themselves were 'market goods' - breeders bought, exchanged or kidnapped for the group. Any wealth a woman produced would go to her husband. Only men had purchasing power so it would be this purchasing power that laid the foundations for what goods and services would become worth eg weapons that men value are worth a lot. Men are obviously willing to pay far more for what matters to them eg tickets to a football game, than what women provide or care about eg childcare or nursing which traditionally came free once the women were bought or acquired as wives - like milk comes free once the cow has been bought. A labour market based on what men value is hardly going to value women and female traits without a fight.

When Browne says that on the kibbutz men ended up doing the high-status farming and women the teaching and nursing it begs the question of why farming has more status than nursing and teaching. If we understand the relative status of the sexes in our evolution, that women themselves were traded goods and worked for free, that only men held wealth and had purchasing power and how men therefore determined the market value of goods and services and naturally rewarded themselves for what was valued and attractive to them as men, then it is hardly surprising that women are still struggling to acquire the resources, value and status they are actually worth.

This is harder thinking then Browne would have us do with the simplistic 'man the hunter' excuse for everything. It goes further to explain why women are less satisfied with their supposed 'nature' than men are with theirs and why women are often dissatisfied with masculinity when women are (falsely) presumed to have selected male traits. It also helps to explain why it is so hard for men to see a perspective other than their own and specifically that of women when their own perspective was never challenged until recently and remains so hard to challenge.

Finally, when more and more women are not having children because the costs of motherhood are too high those costs will eventually have to be addressed. It's all very well working with our nature but when human females have had less freedom to act naturally than the females of any other species we need to first rediscover what the nature of human females not owned and controlled by men actually is. The massive demands of human offspring forced women into accepting a position more constrained than females of any other species experience. Just as men have not evolved true instincts for life-long monogamy or for fathering on the same level as mothering, so women have not evolved true instincts for resource dependency on a man and all the problems it entails.

Kingsley Browne has written a more recent and expanded version of this book which perhaps should be read though I doubt if he has thought any more deeply about what happened to human females as we evolved. There is far far more than I have been able to raise here and if anyone thinks this is just getting too complicated then at least have the decency not to merely swallow interesting but simplistic justifications for the way things are and the supposed 'nature' of women. If it was our nature then we would no more want to change things than a cat would want to bark. Any sense today of women not feeling disadvantaged or inferior is thanks to changes forced by feminists. Evolutionary psychology, when it involves some realistic thinking and not merely male self-delusions, has much to offer us all, including feminists. Don't make the mistake of thinking that what men like Browne profess to be biological facts leave nothing more to be said. It's just the beginning.

Over the past three decades, western societies have been spectacularly successful in eliminating many forms of discrimination against women. In some important areas of the workplace, however, women as a group have not enjoyed a high level of success. For example, there are relatively few female firefighters, female fighter jet pilots, and, more importantly, relatively few female top executives. In Divided Labours, Kingsley Browne suggests that the under-representation of women in certain risky professions is consistent with evolutionary theory and should not be assumed without serious proof to be the result of social or individual discrimination. Professor Browne is an excellent writer and provocative thinker. Over the past decade, he has written extensively on law and biology issues and has presented his research at many academic conferences in the United States and abroad. This book presents that research in understandable terms to a larger audience.

I note with some astonishment that an anonymous reviewer on this website has characterized Professor Browne as a marginal academic who has written little and who does not separate his science from his politics. These claims are worse then nonsense - they constitute libel, pure and simple. The topic on which Browne writes is a sensitive one. Some people seem to believe, falsely in my opinion, that an evolutionary explanation of temperamental differences between men and women will lead to a letdown in the political drive to eliminate discrimination against women in the workplace. The anonymous reviewer may be libeling Browne in the hope of discrediting the scientific theories presented in Browne's book. This individual is spitting into the wind.

I enjoyed this original and highly readable work enormously. Through its reliance on facts and logic, it makes a compelling case against the victim mentality of radical feminism. The author shows females to be as capable as males of making the choices most consistent with their interests and values--and that these often (though not always) differ between the sexes for reasons best explained by the science of evolutionary psychology.

I share the concern echoed by other reviewers regarding the bizarre comment submitted by a "reader from Northeast USA." Any reasonable person who has read one of Kingsley Browne's many papers or heard him speak at conferences on evolutionary law will realize that his only agenda is to call the facts and their policy implications as he sees them. This is a scholarly agenda--unlike anonymous ad hominem attacks, a classic tactic of those whose agenda is truly political in nature.

I would really recommend reading books on evolution by people who know how to apply the theory, and that would be scientists. Mr. Browne is a law professor who clearly opposes certain discrimination laws and thus has his own motives and bias in the subject. I doubt his credibility in understanding and applying evolutionary theory, especially since these days many people assume they are experts in the subject without having the proper credentials.

If you're interested in a different point of view on this subject, this books offers much to think about. Today, it's very difficult to find readily available information on this subject that is not politically correct. So, if you'd like to see what might be on the other side of the "Glass Ceiling," I'd read this very short book. The best argument I can make for reading this book is to read the ad hominem arguments made by the other reviewers; that's what made me buy it and I'm glad I did. Don't you just hate being told NOT to read something?

The Darwinism Today series, put together by Helena Cronin and Oliver Curry, is a collection of very short books on evolutionary psychology. The series advertisements promise books by "leading figures" presenting "the latest Darwinian thinking." That's a somewhat misleading description of the series in general, but with regard to Divided Labours it's plainly deceptive. There is nothing leading about Kingsley Browne or late about his transparently political "thinking."

Browne is at best a marginal figure, certainly among evolutionary psychologists (most of whom I'm sure have never heard of him) but even among evolutionary legal scholars. As far as I know, he has written all of 2 law review articles in the past 2 decades, neither of which has attracted much attention (properly -- they're both so long and desperately political that they fall flat). The editors of Darwinism Today must have really owed Browne some kind of life debt to have allowed Browne to be included in a series with the likes of Daly and Wilson.

So, nothing leading about Browne. Also, nothing late about this work -- not to mention, very little that is right or interesting. Browne wants badly to argue that evolutionary research shows that efforts to increase sex equity in the workplace are doomed to failure. He first made this argument in print in the early 1980s, when sociobiology had such a narrow, static view of sex differences that it might have seemed plausible.

The problem for Browne is that evolutionary psychology has matured in the time since and can no longer support such simple-minded conclusions. So Browne has to resort to misrepresentation to make his political argument. He claims that differences of degree between men and women as groups constitute fundamental sex differences (despite the fact that there is more variability among men and among women than between men and women on the kinds of temperamental traits Browne discusses). He strongly implies at times (despite his explicit claims to the contrary at others) that his argument that ABSOLUTE sex equality will never be reached in the highest-level positions and in average male/female incomes means that governments can't or shouldn't try to narrow the gaps.

The bottom line on Browne's book is that it is a mixture of scientific distortions and bad arguments by a marginal law professor. But the book is worse than bad, it's dangerous. Dangerous because it promises to perpetuate the mistaken view that contemporary evolutionary psychology is at odds with feminist politics. In the end, Divided Labours is best left on the shelf or, if read, read only as one of a million cautionary tales of how temptingly easy it is to distort good science in the service of politics. The only remarkable fact is that respectable editors and publishers are still falling for these same old tricks.