CHAPTER 9
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‘Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes.’
–
Jim Carrey
WHEN I WAS a teenager my sister Helen encouraged me to join Amnesty International. When my membership card arrived, my mother confiscated it, fearful that I would be somehow led astray by a radical organisation. This made my sister laugh, annoying my mother even more. We joined forces on that one. Amnesty was just one organisation that Helen was, and continues to be, involved in. She is my hero because she has spent her life working with vulnerable people, the people who most of society wants nothing to do with, helping them in all kinds of ways. Being a social worker means she was always a radical lefty type who ate a lot of mung beans and stank out my mother’s kitchen with exotic smells, my mother being of that generation of Irish people who insisted on potatoes with everything.
Helen went to the Philippines in the 1970s to work as a teacher – unusually for a young woman at the time – of young Filipino girls in seriously deprived areas. Liberation through education. Women’s rights, especially in Ireland, has always been her key issue. In 1971, at the age of 15, she was on the ‘Contraceptive Train’ that brought condoms from Northern Ireland to the south (where they were illegal until 1985). After the Philippines, she went to London to study social work at Middlesex Polytechnic. (Unlike me, her privileged male sibling who could go to university, she was a Polly Wally – as we called polytechnic students – although it’s now called Middlesex University). She lived in a flat on the 13th floor of a tower block in London’s East End. She turned it into a refuge for Irish women who had gone to London for an abortion (which was illegal in Ireland until 2018). She has always fought for decency, for what is right and, most of all, for women.
THIS 1953 ADVERT DISPLAYS A MAJOR TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCE: THE BOTTLE CAN BE OPENED EASILY ‘WITHOUT A HUSBAND!’
Men versus women: this distinction is fundamental to us humans, and the differences between us are the cause of much of the joys and troubles in our lives. At one time it seemed so simple. Based on observation and measurement, men had one X and one Y chromosome, and women had two X chromosomes. A man was physically stronger and had a deeper voice, a penis and testicles, more body hair and fewer curves. A woman was physically less strong and had a higher voice, breasts, ovaries, a uterus and a vagina, had periods and could have babies. Because of prejudice and ignorance, there was also a time when men were deemed to be more logical and intelligent, more likely to be leaders, much better drivers and better at maths. Women, on the other hand, were deemed the weaker sex, who needed doors to be opened for them, weren’t worldly enough to have their own bank account and couldn’t possibly drink a pint of beer. (My sister always drank pints, much to my father’s annoyance.)
MALE AND FEMALE MANDRILLS ARE WHAT ZOOLOGISTS CALL THE ‘MOST SEXUALLY DIMORPHIC’ OF MAMMALS. THE MALE WEARS A LOT OF MAKE-UP.
Nowadays, all this has changed, changed utterly, with all the terrible beauties that have been born. Gender has become fluid – a person’s sex may be male or female or, in rare cases, intersex1 based on their biology, but their gender might be different from their sex. Equally, it turns out that with each study done, the differences between men and women, apart from the physical ones, become less and less clear. Or even switch entirely. What is the truth of the matter? Are men really from Mars and women from Venus? Apart from the physical ones, which are easy to describe, what are the scientifically proven differences between men and women and what do these differences mean for society? The questions are fraught. The studies that have been done often exemplify the biases scientists bring to their analyses. ‘What?’ I hear you say. ‘Scientists can be biased?’ I’m afraid they can. But, as with all of the issues in this book, we just need to (wo)man up and do our best to reach conclusions based on the science. As with all science, we need to ask what the most reliable data tells us. There are differences, but not the ones you think. One memorable study that turned out to be biased, although not related to the differences between men and women, concerned menstruation. I bet you believe that women’s periods synchronise when they spend time together? Well, this has been proven not to be the case.2 Get ready for more surprises.
In the animal kingdom, things are more straightforward. Some species show marked differences between the sexes. One of the best examples of this is the mandrill monkey, which is the most sexually dimorphic mammalian species. The males wear a lot of make-up on their faces and behinds. (Well, it’s not quite make-up, as the vivid colours are natural.) There is also a major difference in size between male and female mandrills. Males are three times heavier than females, bringing the risk of the male flattening the female during sex. Mandrills are a bit like pheasants: the male pheasant has exotically coloured feathers, a large flamboyant tail and a long appendage around its eyes called a wattle, while the female is small and dull. But mandrills and pheasants are nothing when compared to the delightfully named triplewart seadevil. These creatures live 2000 metres underwater. Females are 300 cm long, while males only reach 1 cm in size – I suppose it makes sharing a bed easier with no competition for the duvet. Examining our primate cousins also reveals differences between the sexes, although these lessen as we get to the species that are closest to us. As they reach sexual maturity, male orangutans begin to develop enlarged cheek flaps that are meant to exhibit their dominance. When there is more than one male within a family, the more dominant male will exhibit more exaggerated cheek flaps. Who would have thought dominance would come down to jowly cheeks? But when we get to chimpanzees and bonobos (our closest relatives) the males and females physically differ in the same way that we differ: slight differences in size and muscle strength and clearly differentiated sexual organs.
THE ANIMAL THAT, IN MY OPINION, HAS THE BEST NAME: THE TRIPLEWART SEADEVIL. FEMALES ARE 300 CM LONG, WHEREAS THE MALE (WHICH IS PARASITIC TO THE FEMALE – A NOT UNCOMMON TRAIT IN MANY SPECIES, INCLUDING HUMANS) ONLY REACHES 1 CM. THIS GREATLY LOWERS THE RISK OF COMPETITION FOR THE DUVET.
So what are the differences between men and women, apart from physical ones that are plain to see, that scientists agree on? A good way to examine traits in humans is to use a bell curve (because it’s shaped like a bell), also known as a normal distribution. If we measure the height of lots of men and women and then plot a graph of height versus the frequency of each height (meaning how common each specific height is) in the population, you get a curve. A small number of people will be small and a small number will be tall, and the rest will fall in the middle. When we measure height in women and men, we see different curves for each sex.3 This tells us that men on average are taller than women, although there will be a lot of women who are taller than a lot of men. If we look at the bell curves for aggression, again we see that on average men are more aggressive than women.4 This might be due to the hormone testosterone, which is also why men have more muscle mass than women. But as with all the traits we are discussing here, there will be overlap: some women are more aggressive than some men.
Where else do we see clear differences? One fascinating area is differing susceptibilities to diseases.5,6,7 Ninety per cent of cases of primary biliary cirrhosis (an autoimmune disease of the liver) are in women, while primary sclerosing cholangitis (an inflammatory disease of the bile ducts) is much more common in men. Many autoimmune diseases are more common in women (e.g. Sjogren’s syndrome, multiple sclerosis, scleroderma and lupus). The bone-wasting disease osteoporosis is four times more common in women. COVID-19 is equally common in men and women, but men fare worse, with 70% of those who die being men. And as of April 2020, men have died at 1.4 times the rate of women.8 Women are ten times more likely than men to develop eating disorders, such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia, and are twice as likely to suffer from depression. Men, on the other hand, are four times more likely than women to have autism and 1.4 times more likely to suffer from schizophrenia. They are also twice as likely to die by suicide. The difference is especially marked in Ireland, where four out of five suicides in 2018 were male.9
Why these differences in disease susceptibility exist is mostly unknown. Osteoporosis is an exception since it is known that the hormones oestrogen and progesterone keep bones strong and the level of these hormones falls after the menopause, which is when osteoporosis happens. For other diseases, though, the question of differing disease susceptibility in women has, rather scandalously, largely been ignored by medical researchers, although that is starting to change. As is the case with osteoporosis, scientists suspect it’s to do with differing levels of hormones, but that has yet to be clearly proven, especially when we look for precise mechanisms. A recent study examined sex differences in the expression (meaning how much a gene is turned on) of 12,000 genes in 12 different tissues from human, monkey, mouse, rat and dog; it’s a bit like determining the volume level on these genes and how far the knob for each gene is turned up. Crucially, differences were found between males and females,10 who seem to use the same genes in different ways. The differences explained 12 per cent of the variant in height between male and female (where males on average are 13 centimetres taller than females). Hundreds of genes associated with height had different levels of expression between males and females. The work is causing much excitement in medical circles, as further analysis might reveal why men and women differ in susceptibility to different diseases. If the volume control on genes that might explain these differences could be turned down, it might lead to new treatments.
Even though more women suffer from diseases, they still live longer on average than men. In Ireland life expectancy for women currently stands at 84 years, while for men it’s 80.4 years.11 Again, the reasons for this difference are not fully understood.12 Longevity in women might seem like an advantage, but women also have higher rates overall of physical illness, more disability days, more doctor visits and more hospital stays.13 Several reasons for longevity differences have been proposed. Men tend to have more fat surrounding their organs (called visceral fat – see Chapter 4), whereas women have more fat under their skin. This is determined in part by oestrogen, and it matters because fat surrounding organs predicts heart disease – a major cause of death in men. Lifestyle differences may also be important, with men being heavier smokers than women for much of the twentieth century, although that difference has lessened and it may be one reason why sex differences in mortality are likely to narrow in the future.14 It will be intriguing to see whether life expectancy between men and women becomes more equal in the future.
Once we move away from the physical and medical areas, and towards the mental, things get a lot murkier. Often the differences reported are small – possibly too small to be significant – yet much is made of them. We will proceed with caution.
The current consensus is that men and women perform equally well on IQ tests.15 In one major study, males and females were found to be highly similar when it came to skills such as reading comprehension, mathematics, communication skills and motor skills (such as manual dexterity). From a review of 46 studies, 78 per cent of sex differences in these kinds of skills were small or close to zero and overall, bigger differences are evident between men (and between women) than between men and women.16 This is important, since any differences in these kinds of traits may not be explained based on sex differences alone.
Across 4,000 separate studies (which gives you an idea of how exhaustive and exhausting these kinds of studies are), the gap in achievement at maths was largely zero, putting to bed once and for all the anecdotal and discriminatory notion that there is a sex difference in mathematical skills.17 Then there was the daddy – or mammy – of all studies comparing men and women, which bravely addressed personality differences.18 Thirty-one thousand personality tests were analysed (again, a lot in these kinds of studies) and the researchers examined personality traits such as warmth, emotional stability, assertiveness, gregariousness, dutifulness, friendliness, distrust, imagination, openness to change, introversion, orderliness and emotionality. They were trying to address whether these traits were comparable between men and women. And guess what? They found that women scored higher on anxiety and warmth, while men scored higher on dutifulness and assertiveness. The other traits showed more minor differences. The robustness of the study can be seen in the observation that 95 per cent of the time, the personality profile of a randomly picked male will be more male-typical than that of a randomly picked female. Knowing the personality profile of an individual makes it possible to correctly guess his or her sex about 85 per cent of the time, which is pretty powerful. Of course, the precise reason why women show more warmth but are inclined to have higher levels of anxiety while men are more dutiful and assertive remains unknown, and again is likely to be down to a combination of upbringing and a hardwired difference, although the relative proportions of these are difficult to figure out.
One area where women supposedly shine is empathy, which is defined as the ability to read other peoples’ thoughts and feelings. Surely, I hear you say (what with all your baggage and preconceived notions), women will outperform men in that area? Some studies do show that, but if the test is not labelled as an empathy test, any difference goes away, suggesting that it is the tester who shows bias:19 if they know empathy is being tested, they will grade women higher than men. And remember, these tests often come down to filling in questionnaires, which can suffer from being subjective.
Another problem with these kinds of studies is how we define warmth or empathy; yet several studies have concluded that women have more emotional intelligence than men.20 This is defined as the capacity to express one’s emotions and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathically. The assumption is that women are better in this capacity than men. Women have been shown to respond differently to someone who is upset or emotional; they are more likely to become upset themselves when they see someone else upset and these feelings will persist.21 A part of the brain called the insula is involved in this response. Men, on the other hand, will sense the feelings for a moment and then tune out of the emotion. This tuning out might lead to other parts of the male brain being activated, which are more to do with problem-solving, although this hasn’t been proven. Men tuning out emotionally is a common complaint of women. Both responses actually have advantages. If it’s a heterosexual couple, perhaps it’s advantageous if one can protect themselves from distress and try and find a solution that’s urgently needed. The other provides support and nurture to the person who is distressed. Males and females could, of course, perform either role, but arguably the view is the female is inclined to be the supportive one.
But when psychologists look at leaders in companies, key traits transcend sex. Successful leaders of both sexes show empathy that will persist and then become problem-solving – a mix of both traits.22 Is this because the women in leadership roles have learnt to become more like men, or did they have these traits from the start, which led to them being promoted to leadership roles? We don’t know. Scientists have made a similar observation in chimps. When a chimp is distressed female chimps are more inclined than males to give solace to the troubled chimp, perhaps by stroking to calm it. However, the alpha male in the chimp troupe gives solace more often than any female.23 Leaders, be they male or female, need to be empathetic.
ANGELA MERKEL BECAME CHANCELLOR OF GERMANY IN 2005.
The issue of women and leadership in the workplace is an increasingly important one. Until recently (with notable exceptions such as Angela Merkel, Margaret Thatcher, Jacinda Ardern and Indira Gandhi) most leadership positions have been held by men. The increased prevalence of male bosses over female bosses appears to continue unabated. Men are more likely overall to be made the boss, possibly because of assertive personalities. In 2018 only 24 Fortune 500 companies were led by women, even though women have the same level of professional qualifications as men.24 So why are women not being made leaders?
One reason might be expectations. In a study in 2015, 60 per cent of male employees expected their employers to play an active role in their career progression, whereas only 49 per cent of women had this expectation.25 Men are more assertive when it comes to promotion, with women being more hesitant about speaking up about their career ambitions. Another reason might be their male managers behaving badly. In a recent study, more than half of women in middle and frontline management roles have had a manager take credit for their work. This might enhance the manager’s chances of promotion, which is then denied to the woman who actually did the work. Another study has shown that men tend to be more career-centric, wanting to maximise their financial return from work.26 Women might view work more holistically, approaching their careers in a more self-reflective way, valuing meaning, purpose and connections with co-workers,27 although again this needs to be examined scientifically.
These traits, though, might actually mean that women make better leaders. In a recent survey, a number of traits were emphasised by women in leadership roles28 – again, this is anecdotal and more evidence is needed. Yet women leaders feel that they are more inclined to nurture team members, which helps the team develop their own skills. Women might also focus more on teamwork overall and are less egotistical, which is seen as a good thing as ego can sometimes get in the way of a good decision. Women are also more inclined to be able to balance multiple challenges both in work and in their personal lives (which might include managing the household and ageing parents, tasks that still more commonly fall to women). They may not be innately better at multitasking, rather it’s that they have to do it more often and become good at it. They bring that skill to their role as a leader. In spite of all these skills, one study has shown that when asked about preference for a male or female boss, an interesting result emerged:29 women prefer a male boss 39 per cent of the time. It was even lower for males: only 26 per cent of men said they would prefer a female boss. When it comes to leadership, gender stereotypes might still prevail, at least for men, who perhaps see themselves as being emasculated by a female boss. Yet again, we are longing to see a bell curve here. There will be a mix of abilities in both males and females and perhaps the curve for the female boss will be more to the right than the curve for the male boss.
The kinds of analyses that lead to conclusions on emotional and personality differences between men and women usually involve the filling in of some kind of questionnaire. They also involve people in the surveys identifying as male or female, which may not be consistent with their gender. Surveys can, of course, be useful, but another, probably more robust way to determine difference is to examine male and female brains. A lot of nonsense has been published in this area. In 2005 there was a study of the brains of 21 men and 27 women (the small numbers immediately make us suspicious).30 A major difference was purported to be found between their brains – and the media went into a frenzy. It was claimed that men had 6.5 times as much grey matter, whereas women had ten times as much white matter in their brains. Grey matter consists of neuronal cell bodies. White matter, on the other hand, has a lot of what are called myelinated axons. These are vast differences, and the media crowed about how this explains why men are better at maths (which might involve the grey matter) while women are better at multitasking (which might involve the white matter). In truth, it hasn’t been proven that proficiency at maths or multitasking is due to grey or white matter. As was recently concluded in the world’s leading science journal, Nature, ‘The history of sex-difference research is rife with innumeracy, misinterpretation, publication bias, weak statistical power, inadequate controls and worse.’31
Psychologist Gina Rippon has likened the field to ‘whack-a-mole’. A study is published claiming a difference between men and women. This is used to taunt political correctness until other researchers reveal a flaw in the study. The mole is whacked, but then another one pops up. The examination of the brains of men and women is full of such mole-whacking, and, in spite of many efforts, no convincing physical difference between the male and female brain has been found. If you give a neuroanatomist a brain and ask him or her to say what sex it is, they won’t be able to. Although, having said that, there is a region in a part of the brain called the medial preoptic area, known as the sexually dimorphic area, which is larger in males than in females in at least nine different species, including in humans.32 Its size fluctuates in both sexes, though with an overall shrinking in both sexes as we age. Its size has been linked to libido and sexual orientation, although this link remains controversial. In addition, a study in 201733 of 2,750 women and 2,466 men found that women have thicker cortices (the convoluted surface layer of grey matter in the brain) than men, while men have slightly higher brain volumes. Again, however, differences between men were greater in these features than between men and women, which agrees with studies showing greater variation in IQ scores between men than between men and women. Overall, it was concluded that you would be hard-pressed to say whether a brain had come from a man or a woman.
Female brains are smaller, but this is in proportion to overall body size. In the nineteenth century, when this was noticed, it was known as the ‘missing five ounces’. Perhaps it was in those five ounces that we would find the holy grail of the difference between men and women – but they were only missing because the overall size of a woman’s body is smaller. There was also a now-infamous study in 2014, which claimed that the connections in a woman’s brain were between the brain’s hemispheres, whereas the connections in the male brain were more within the one hemisphere.34 Yet most connections weren’t even mapped, and there was no control for puberty-related maturation or, yet again, overall brain size. How the study was accepted for publication remains a mystery. Clearly, the neuroscientists who accepted the paper need their heads examined …
Given that few physical differences between the male and female brain can be convincingly shown, the current view is that a gendered world will produce a gendered brain. The differences in personality and emotional intelligence are now believed to be primarily due to society as opposed to being innate. Most psychologists now agree that any differences are a result of the pink-versus-blue culture that the brains of babies and children are soaked in from the moment a parent knows the sex of the foetus. How do we know this culture exists? A study of 124 primetime television programmes in the US showed that women have mainly interpersonal roles – romance, family and friends – whereas men have work-related roles.35 A study of 5,618 children’s books revealed that males are represented twice as often as females in book titles and 1.6 times as often as central characters.36 These kinds of influences, and many more like them, might go a long way towards explaining why women and men turn out the way they do. But we mustn’t forget the study mentioned earlier, in which differences were observed in the ‘volume control’ of male and female genes. There may be no physical difference (say in connections between parts of the brain) or differences in actual genes, but there may be differences in the level of expression of the same genes between men and women. This might be controlled by sex chromosomes or environment. More work on that aspect in the brain could indeed reveal the basis for differences in psychological traits. We can eagerly anticipate further studies in this area.
The differences between men and women, whatever their basis might be, become significant when we consider two things: education and the workplace. First, let’s look at education. The sharp end of the male-versus-female debate is performance in school. Study after study has confirmed that boys perform worse than girls in school, with those coming from low-in-come backgrounds doing especially badly.37 So here we have a clear verifiable difference. Why is this, and what can we do about it?
In developed countries, boys are on average much worse at reading and less likely to go to university. They are still slightly better at maths in school, but the gap is shrinking and in some countries (Scandinavia and China) it’s gone.38 Ireland is the same – girls outperform boys at Junior Cert and Leaving Cert in most subjects (but still not maths).39 Growing numbers of adult men still live with their parents: in the UK a third of men aged between 20 and 34 do so, whereas for women it’s a fifth. Jobs dominated by poorly educated men (such as manual labour or driving) are the most likely to become automated. Discontented, less-educated men vote for right-wing populists like Donald Trump, so if we don’t do something about this education gap we will reap the whirlwind of divisive politics that is often damaging for us and planet Earth. Surprising as it may seem, boys’ grades were once deliberately upgraded (for example, in the eleven-plus exam in the UK).40 In Japan, universities have admitted to discriminating against female applicants by manipulating exam scores. Girls were also more likely to be ignored by teachers or not given access to important subjects. Ever since this kind of sexism diminished, girls began outperforming boys.41
Where men once went to college in proportions far higher than women – 58 per cent to 42 per cent in the 1970s – the ratio has now almost exactly reversed.42 The reason is that more women apply to college. There’s evidence of boys losing motivation from the age of eight. The vocabulary gap at age 11 is wide. The literacy gap peaks at 16. In the programme for international student assessment (PISA) scoring system used by the OECD, the lowest-performing pupils are male. So why is all this happening? Are girls just better than boys in school?
Girls mature earlier – by as much as two years; their brains have quantifiably more grey matter (the thinking part of the brain) at a younger age. It’s possible that they could be given more attention by teachers and so learn more. Co-educational schools are seen as more female-friendly, with most classrooms now female-led. Ninety-seven per cent of early childhood educators are female. Female teachers dominate at primary and secondary level where they outnumber males two to one. Female educators are, however, under-represented in universities, but only at the professorial level.
Ironically, the gender gap in educational attainment (for example in exam performance) is worse in the most gender-equal of countries. It’s not fully clear why this is. The big challenge now is how to make classrooms boy-friendly without disadvantaging girls. One answer might be a return to single-sex schools; yet girls in single-sex schools have higher levels of exam stress compared to boys.43 In addition, girls in single-sex schools tended to be more negative about their experience of school than boys. There is more pressure to perform socially for girls in single-sex schools. Girls do better academically in single-sex schools, but the pressure can be too intense for many and so they ultimately end up underperforming in all spheres. The psychologist Oliver James has recently identified high-performing 15-year-old girls as the unhappiest group of people in England or Ireland.44
On average, and all things being apparently equal, girls generally outperform boys in the classroom, although comparing bell-shaped curves would be useful to quantify the magnitude of the difference. A study carried out by Professor Emer Smyth of the ESRI found little consensus on whether sex segregation leads to better or worse academic outcomes.45 Once boys reach the age of 18, the gap narrows, partly because weaker male students have left education but also because boys’ brains catch up with those of girls. The main reason for the difference in performance between boys and girls in education might be the level of maturity at different ages. So perhaps boys should start school a year or two later?
What else might be done? How boys up to age 16 are being educated is being examined to make it more boy-friendly. Boys might like more structure and rules (although that needs to be proven) and badly behaving boys need support, not punishment. Lessons in vocabulary help boys more, and boys should be encouraged to read whatever they want. All of this helps. As does training teachers about their own gender bias. Teachers are being encouraged to value risk-taking behaviours in boys instead of suppressing them. We also need to encourage more men to enter teaching: Germany is leading the way with an active recruitment programme.46 Generally, though, the problem has received little attention as elite boys always do well and men overall still get paid more and are promoted more in the workplace. But as women catch up and as this particular gender gap continues to grow, there will be a crisis: lots of poorly educated men in low-paying jobs, leading to a worsening of a whole range of societal problems, including ending up in jail, as we saw in Chapter 8.
When it comes to occupations, big differences are evident between what men and women do. Men are more likely to work with things, while women are more likely to work with people. Again, this could be a result of the pink-versus-blue brainwashing during childhood. Why are there so many more male engineers than female? Parental and societal influences are likely to play a role, and one study has shown that women are often discouraged from working with computers. Since the 1980s the proportion of female graduates in science and medicine has gone up, while the number of female computer scientists has gone down.47 When it comes to medicine, interesting patterns emerge:48 just under half of all doctors across developed countries are female. In Japan and Korea only 20 per cent of doctors are female, while in Latvia it’s 70 per cent. In Ireland 41 per cent of all doctors are female, with 42 per cent of GPs being female and 39 per cent of consultants. Another hot topic in the workplace that has yet to be fully resolved is the gender pay gap. Studies carried out by the European Commission reveal that women earn 16 per cent less than men per hour for the same job:49 this is illegal under the Employment Equality Act. The situation is worse for lower-paid jobs such as cleaners or street vendors, where the gap can be as high as 39 per cent. Yet the signs are hopeful. Analysis of the gender pay gap by age reveals that for women under 40, the gap narrows to 2.6 per cent. But in Hollywood, for those of you who are movie stars, the situation is especially grim for women. A recent study has shown that female actors earn substantially less than male actors with similar experience. A study examined 1,344 films featuring 267 stars and on average the pay for women was $1.1 million less per movie, for no good reason other than the movie bosses could get away with it.50
In spite of all this, a girl in a western country can expect to be able to do whatever she wants in terms of career, and indeed any other activity. This represents tremendous progress compared to the lot of girls until relatively recently. Yet issues remain around, for example, childcare and the sharing of the domestic load. How will we know when equality is truly here? Christmas is a case in point. Studies have shown that women in the UK still do the heavy lifting when it comes to Christmas: sending Christmas cards, buying presents, doing the shopping and cooking the Christmas dinner.51 When these tasks are shared 50:50, we’ll be closer to equality. As the famous statistician Hans Rosling has noted, the advent of the washing machine did more for women’s liberation than any other single thing. Another sign of equality will be the number of women owning toolboxes, which remains an almost exclusively male domain, although not in my house where my wife owns the toolbox. This shouldn’t be the case, given the lack of difference in competency when it comes to fixing things (I’m not including myself in that). Once all women have toolboxes, we will know that they are finally free.
We also have to continue to correct misapprehensions. The psychologist who led the analysis of the 46 studies on sex differences (which didn’t reveal any major differences between the sexes) mentioned earlier in this chapter has said that if we assume women are more empathic and emotional than men, and that men are more assertive, this can lead to biases in the workplace, which hold women back from promotion. It can also dissuade couples from trying to resolve conflict. Importantly, if there are differences, these should be treated more like deficiencies that can be helped. Society can change.
One fascinating study in India showed that the introduction of cable TV led to a significant decrease in reported acceptability of domestic violence against women and an increase in female autonomy.52 This was because many female characters in popular soap operas have more education, marry later, have smaller families, work outside the home and hold positions of authority. Cable TV has also been linked to mothers having a decreased preference for giving birth to a son over a daughter in a culture that has commonly favoured sons.
And what about in Europe? French toymakers recently signed a pact to rid games and toys of gender stereotypes.53 A charter was signed between toymakers and the French government, which aims for ‘balanced representation of genders in toys’. The French junior economy minister, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, has said that many toys project an ‘insidious’ message that discourages girls from becoming engineers or computer coders. She has blamed toymakers of making toys for girls that are mainly about domestic life, whereas those for boys are more about construction, space travel and science. (The staff at France’s major research centre, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), is 38 per cent female, yet only 10 per cent of these women are coders.) Gender neutrality in toys might change these sorts of percentages.
MANY DIFFERENT TYPES OF BARBIES ARE NOW AVAILABLE – EVEN SCIENCE BARBIE.
A recent study on gender stereotyping in Ireland has also revealed something interesting. When 5–7-year-olds were asked to draw an engineer, 96 per cent of the boys drew a male engineer, while just over 50 per cent of girls drew a female engineer.54 The study was carried out by students Cormac Harris and Alan O’Sullivan, and the project was deemed overall winner at the highly competitive 2020 Young Scientists Exhibition. The work also listed resources that primary-school teachers can use to combat gender stereo-typing among young children.
MEDB, QUEEN OF CONNACHT IN THE ULSTER CYCLE OF IRISH MYTHOLOGY. SHE HAD SEVERAL HUSBANDS AND WAS DESCRIBED AS STRONG-WILLED, AMBITIOUS AND CUNNING – THE ARCHETYPAL WARRIOR QUEEN.
Another long-running study analysed what schoolchildren draw when they are asked to depict a scientist. Over five decades, 20,860 drawings by students between the ages of five and eight were analysed (yep, that’s a lot of drawings). One has to wonder where all these drawings were kept. In the 1960s and 1970s, fewer than 1 per cent of the pictures depicted scientists as female; by 2016, that percentage was 34. It was even higher, at 50 per cent, if the participant was female. This parallels the increase in actual numbers of female scientists in the US, which between 1960 and 2013 rose from 28 per cent to 49 per cent in biology, 8 per cent to 35 per cent in chemistry and 3 per cent to 11 per cent in physics.55 Things are definitely getting better in the science world, even, to some extent, in physics.
Perhaps the Irish might serve as a model for the future of male/female equality. The Irish for ‘men’ is fir, and ‘women’ is mná. An English friend of mine thought it strange that in a pub I took him to the toilet labelled ‘F’ was for males and the one labelled ‘M’ was for females. He found this out when he walked in on a woman – and was told where to go. He wondered if this reverse nomenclature was an example of perverse Irish humour.
Celtic women were distinct in the ancient world, having many rights that other societies didn’t have. I suspect my sister is the reincarnation of a powerful Celtic woman. Ancient Celtic women served as both warriors and rulers. Cuchulainn, Ireland’s greatest mythological warrior, was trained by Scáthach, a female warrior from Scotland. Scáthach and her sister Aoife both led armies in battle. Aoife was also Cuchulainn’s lover (he obviously met her through her sister, not an uncommon event in Ireland to this very day). Women often joined men in battle, using psychological techniques including loud screeching and wild dancing to scare the enemy. This behaviour can still be seen in nightclubs in Dublin, where Irish women continue to terrify Irish men. Boudicca and Cartimandua were both famous leaders of the Celts in Britain, as was Queen Medb in Ireland. Women were not systematically excluded from any role in ancient Ireland. They could become druids or diplomats and conduct business without their husband’s consent. Marriage was viewed as a partnership. Each brought an equal dowry and women could own property independently of their husbands. Divorce was a simple matter as marriage was viewed as a contract. There is even evidence of polyandry – women having more than one lover or husband.56
The Irish throughout history have had a particular opinion on the relationship between men and women, as many proverbs show. How about this one: ‘A woman is a woman when her man is a man.’ So maybe the Ancient Irish got it right. The bottom line: when it comes to men and women, it’s our collaboration, complementarity and independence that counts.