Customer Reviews

The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women and the Real Gender Gap

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I came across this book one rainy afternoon at my local bookstore, and ended up reading it for the next two hours. Essentially an overview of why men and women seek very different career paths, "The Sexual Paradox" sheds light on some recent trends that others are quite honestly afraid to discuss.

We all know that women often abandon corporate careers in greater numbers than men. In addition, it's not outlandish to say that women do this in order to spend more time with their spouses and/or children, and are willing to let go of the handsome salaries they've worked so very hard to attain.

While that might sound sexist to some, it's a reality across the United States, if not the world in general. If anything, one might think that women have an advantage in certain careers like law -- because they certainly have higher scores in areas such as reading comprehension and writing. Despite this, our society makes demands upon women that many are simply unwilling to meet.

In essence, we need to become more accommodating to the diversity of the workforce, primarily in gender. Issues such as flex-time, maternity leave and perhaps even telecommuting could be used to make such jobs and workplaces more attractive to women, and also lessen the burden of men. The more diverse our companies, the better. Men and women both have EQUAL amounts to offer our society.

As a 22-year-old man majoring in public relations (a decidedly "female" field) I was intrigued by Pinker's overview in education. Clearly, to work in my field one needs highly developed reading and writing skills -- there's just no way around it. As the result of teaching methods that are simply outdated and ineffective, many boys do not develop these skills as well as their female peers...

And I for one would like to see something change.

In sum, Pinker does society a great service by breaking taboo and suggesting that perhaps men and women are biologically different, but that doesn't mean that either gender is any better (or worse) than the other. Perhaps in time we can begin to address these issues with honesty, and work to create a world where both sets of individuals are given equal chance to succeed -- preferably in an environment that doesn't favor one ideology over the other.

Susan Pinker has done an excellent job of marshaling the academic and medical evidence related to educational and career performance by women and men. The thesis of "The Sexual Paradox" is simple: biology profoundly influences destiny, in the workplace as well as elsewhere, and workforce policy should be cognizant of these differences.

The data collected by Pinker suggests that women (as a group) tend to be steadier performers in life and in the workplace, to hew slightly more to population medians, and to be more profoundly influenced by the needs of family and community. Men (as a group) are slightly more likely to deviate from the averages at work or in life, either for good (as star performers) or for ill (evidencing, for example, more violent or criminal behaviors), and are likely to be more influenced than are women by competitive outcomes, such as salary or status. The result, according to Pinker, is that women (as a group) are, on balance, less likely than male peers to reach the top of the career pyramid, and are more likely to value jobs that stress interpersonal connections, doing good in society, and permitting the worker to achieve a balance between home and professional responsibilities. Males, on the other hand, are more likely to be highly competitive and motivated by the prospect of maximizing earnings and status, thus propelling the most gifted up the career ladder.

Pinker bolsters her thesis with cases from her career as a developmental psychologist and interviews with male and female subjects. These cases and interviews tend to be with gifted women who have successfully entered the workforce and successful male professionals who evidence some of the traits associated with testosterone-related deviation from averages, such as Asperger's syndrome and ADHD. Her findings suggest that many gifted women voluntarily reduce their career commitments to spend additional time with family or achieve work-life balance, while the "extreme" males tend to find and pursue avidly careers that are compatible with their underlying disorders. (Examples: Males with Asperger's often seek careers in information technology or systems analysis. Males with ADHD frequently become entrepreneurs who use their need for novelty to fuel new product ideas.)

Don't stamp Pinker, though, as a proponent of the view "biology is destiny, so women shouldn't be at work." Pinker champions women entering the workforce, and suggests that business policies be revised to accommodate female workforce participation with increased use of flex-time, job-sharing, or job tracks that recognize that many women wish to take time off to fulfill family responsibilities. Her prescriptions are sensible and deserve strong consideration.

As well, Pinker stresses that her book speaks to large populations-- she recognizes that individual women and men can deviate substantially from generalized gender profiles.

Is "The Sexual Paradox" airtight? I'd say not-- the only aspect of gender discrimination that is discussed meaningfully is that of female managers blocking the advancement of female colleagues in order to protect their own turf. This is an important topic that warrants examination, but I doubt that it is the sum total of the obstacles that many women have found at work. As well, Pinker's case studies of women focus substantially on gifted women with husbands, advanced degrees and high salaries who have reduced their work commitments to enhance work-family balance. It would be interesting to see if successful women who are single parents or who do not have advanced degrees or extremely high salaries also reduce their work commitments on behalf of attaining work-life balance. Finally, it would be helpful if Pinker examined some gifted women who had not been successful at work, to see if factors other than voluntary reduction in work commitments to satisfy family requirements affected women's career trajectories.

Despite these reservations, "The Sexual Paradox" is an excellent book that highlights the biological underpinnings of job preferences and workforce tenure. Pinker has written a persuasive, well-researched and entertaining book that is an eminently worthwhile read.

This thoroughly researched, fascinating book looks at many of the assumptions North Americans hold about gender differences and reveals some startling facts. Pinker systematically sets out to prove that women are quite different than men biologically and are actually FAVORED (not oppressed) by many cultural institutions, most notably schools and universities. As an educator and a young professional woman, I found Pinker's thesis closely matches my own experiences.

By challenging the idea that women must measure themselves the same way they measure men, this book helps readers embrace a new and more relevant brand of feminism. The style is fairly academic, but each chapter contains a number of interesting and cutting-edge studies that should help you get through the slower bits.

This is an extraordinary book, engagingly written, well argued, and well documented with a mass of research, especially from neuroscience. Pinker argues for an understanding of the gender gap in work, life choices, and pay between men and women that takes account of the real biological differences between the sexes. It is a mistake in her view to expect or aim for a 50-50 representation of the sexes in fields like IT, engineering, science, or corporate law or, for that matter social work and teaching.

She focuses on highly successful women who thrived in school and had every encouragement from teachers, parents, professors, and mentors and yet chose more balanced, socially and personally meaningful lives than the high-paying, high prestige careers on which they first embarked. They asserted their own wishes and needs in the face of strong social pressure and strong incentives to follow a male pattern of career success. Pinker also interviews men at the extreme end of the male brain pattern, that is, those with Asperger's, lacking in social skills, incapable of empathy or intimate friendship, who found niches where their intense focus was an advantage and their social deficits could be accommodated.

This seemed at first a puzzling strategy. Why study only successful women who have choices that most women do not? The point, though, is that when women do have a choice, they do not choose (on average) to devote themselves to their careers at the expense of family, to high pay and competitive jobs at the expense of social purpose and meaning. The gender gap is smallest where women have few choices, in countries where they are pushed into careers because of perceived needs of the economy (Zimbabwe, India) and greatest where women are most protected by labor laws and have most choices--such as Finland, the Netherlands, or Germany.

It makes sense, then, to study women's actual preferences--what they choose when they have a choice. In this sense, Pinker's book supports the argument of Neil Gilbert's A Mother's Work: How Feminism, the Market, and Policy Shape Family Life, which points out how "family-friendly" policies reinforce the economic pressures of the market and the social pressures of feminism to subordinate family to work, and women to the male model. Both authors argue for giving more weight to what women actually want rather than what others think they should want. Attempts to reduce career and (consequently pay) differences to gender discrimination belittle or invalidate the choices women who have choices make about their own lives. No wonder Pinker's book has been greeted with relief and enthusiasm by many women throughout the world.

What about men? Pinker notes in her Epilogue that half the book is about men, but few men reviewed it and the discussion the book elicited worldwide was all about women. Pinker's discussion points to the tendency of men to extremes of success and failure, their fragility, their falling behind girls and women at every educational level, their increased risk of premature birth (and death), disability, school failure, violence, and suicide. As she says, the real gender gap and the nature of the sexes and relations between them cannot be reduced to a war between the sexes and to formal and informal discrimination. Men are not "all the same."

Discrimination and socialization limited the opportunities and life choices for girls and women, and still do in many countries. The paradox, however, is that the more these factors are reduced or eliminated, the bigger the gender gap becomes, in personality as well as pay. In her epilogue, Pinker quotes with approval NYT's science correspondent's summary of a 2008 study of the personalities of 40,000 men and women on six continents: "A husband and stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge."

As a professor socialized in the 1960s and 1970s to believe that all gender differences were results of socialization and discrimination, that there were no "essential" differences other than anatomical, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. That old view was never tenable, but it persists, often unspoken but also unchallenged, in academia, to the detriment of many lives and of good policy.

Addendum 11-18-2010: Insofar as the book (and my review) relied on a mass of neuroscience studies, its line of argument has now to take account of a serious challenge from psychologist Cordelia Fine, the title of whose book, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference speaks for itself. That book has some problems of its own--see the review by Denyse O'Leary at MercatorNet ([...]) but it is a useful corrective to the useful corrective of Pinker's book.

Pinker provides some fascinating studies that contradict a lot of what I learned as a Sociology major in college; that sex based differences in job preferences and other behavior is probably 80% due to biology and 20% to socialization. When I was in college, it was pretty much taught that all behavioral differences except for reproduction were the result of socialization.

Susan Pinker presents the latest studies from neuroscience that give us a sane middle ground for recognizing there there ARE real biologically based behavioral differences between men and women, without advocating that we go back to the overly rigid gender roles of the 1950s.

I'm very sympathetic to the idea that men's and women's brains are biologically different, but Pinker relies far too much on purely anecdotal and journalistic evidence to have persuaded me that I'm right. The more academic evidence she adduces is too often similarly weak in its reliance on self-reporting and surveys -- surely an argument for biological not cultural difference depends, ultimately, on biological evidence, and there's just not enough here. But the more fundamental flaw with the book is that Pinker just assumes that there's a difference between men's and women's experiences, without establishing that there even is a difference. In a chapter about successful women leaving high-paying jobs because they don't want work to consume their lives, for example, she admits that when women work as much as men they become ... just as unhappy as men!

This book is written well and the author has put in the due effort to try to make the case that women, because of biological differences, may not be interested in the rat race after all. But I think the author fails to consider the effect of the American culture on the way Americans, both men and women, think about women. This is a huge blind spot and if the author were to consider the cultural influences I believe she would have arrived at a different conclusion - i.e. women opt out not because they are wired differently, but because our society has a dim view of their abilities. This may surprise those Americans who have never experienced cultures other than their own. Unless one steps out of this culture one may never know that there is such a blind spot. We have been fed the Kool-Aid that an American woman suffers no discrimination and that she is on the best place on Earth for a women. God forbid she could have been in Saudi Arabia or in Ethiopia where we all know how women are treated...Right?. But do we really know?

I have been in this country for over a decade and what I have found is that even though we have the right laws on the books and these laws do have teeth, what is missing is the right view about a woman. So even though we may not break any laws, the overwhelming message that a woman gets in this society is that her primary function in life is to titillate men, anything else that she does is abnormal. So even when women do achieve success here, they seem to feel guilty about it and go overboard to prove to this society that they have the `balls'. Why do you think a Hillary Clinton or a Carly Fiorina has to strut around in a pant suit even when they fought and won as equals in a man's world? Have any of you watched the shows on TV? Even in shows with supposedly dominant female roles, the roles are played by women who are curvy and sexy and whose primary function is to titillate, whether they play a lawyer or a doctor or a CEO is secondary. If the primary function to titillate is not served, then of course the ratings go down the toilet and there goes the show. Can any of you imagine a show like `Friends' running for as long as it did without the sexy women in it? Would you have still enjoyed the show if the roles were played by women who looked more like a normal women - women who looked like your neighbor or your sister or your daughter or your mother? I discontinued cable when my daughter was 5 and she started watching the shows dished out on Disney. Have you seen shows like the `Cheetah Girls' or the `Hannah Montana show'? What kind of message do you think these shows send to impressionable 5 years olds? - that the primary function of a girl is to look good and titillate?, get the best looking boy before someone else does?. Knowing the kind of overt and subliminal messages that a female is exposed to in this country, it no longer surprises me when I read about barely teen girls to older women being obsessed with augmenting their breasts, or plumping their lips or botoxing their faces to capture the perfect deer-in-the-headlight expression. It is so hard to live like a real women here. Women shun success here not because of their biology but because of the way expectations are set for them by the American culture.

Even third world countries have a better view of their women. Really it is true. Take a country like India. Sure there are a lot of cases where women are abused. But the country has a lot of poor people. Most of the abuse cases are driven by poverty and most of the exploited are the women who are poor. But if you look at the middle class in India (a number equal to the entire population of the US), you will find a much healthier view of women. Women are viewed as strong and nurturing and equal in capacity to men. When you look and read about the women who wield power there you will find women who are not only as ambitious and as power-grabbing as men, but you will find women who are perfectly comfortable with their femininity and who do not feel like impostors and who do not feel they have to apologize for their success. Please go and read up on the lives of Indira Gandhi or Jayalalitha or Mayawati or Sonia Gandhi (to cite a few) and you will see my point.

The author certainly has a lot of talent and coherently presents her argument. However she is blindsided by the culture here. I hope she uses her intellect and talent to write a book on the pernicious influence of our culture on women, perhaps compare it with other cultures.

I loved this book! Pinker presents fascinating information in a way that is very engaging and keeps you wanting to read more. As a professional working woman and mother of two sons, I discovered aspects of myself and the men in my life on every page. Pinker's book has opened my mind to a new way of looking at gender, the choices we make and how we feel about them every day. I'm sending copies to all the women I love!

Excellent book on gender stereotyping and issues. Pinker asks whether we really want to use men as the base for our evaluations. The book is long and crammed with information. It is a very worthwhile read though. Both men and women will find the book interesting and useful

This is one of those books touting much research and assembling it in arguments that don't really hold up. Generalizations from the studies she cites so abundantly don't necessarily support the argument she presents and are woven into wooly conclusions very different from the intent of the study cited. Some arguments are apologist for boy's earlier problematic behavior that the author later uses as very qualities she argues make women different from these boys, now grown into men. The author looks at boys so much from a nature point of view, she misses how much nurture is at play in the behavior of boys, especially in contrast to girls. Until the author adds an honest look at how boys are raised differently, treated differently from day one, there can be no informed discussion of how differences both innate and encouraged play out in the workforce 25 or more years in the future. I applaud the author's taking up of the question, but it's only half of the answer.