New Zealand Equality Education Foundation

(incorporating the International Ex-Fetus Association)

The Feminist Politics of Science

© Peter Zohrab 2006

The popular science article Men, Women, and Ghosts in Science by Peter Lawrence has received some publicity on National Radio. He argues that men and women are born with different psychological abilities. I think it is fantastic that he says that -- not because I myself have any independent scientific knowledge on the matter, but because he is obviously daring to say something that many Feminists would like to prevent him from saying. I believe in freedom of speech, unlike the Feminazis.

However, he has obviously had to make absurd compromises in order to make his message palatable to whoever it is that he is afraid of: the editors of the Public Library of Science, his Feminist readers, his Feminist colleague(s), his wife, his daughter(s), or the barmaid at his local pub !

• By using the term Ghosts in the title, he is obviously avoiding callling a spade a spade. When you get further into the article, you come across the following: "... the feminist campaign for equality has helped build the belief that men and women, on average, have exactly the same aptitudes. It is time we exorcised this particular ghost...." So he is talking about Feminism as the enemy -- but he is too scared of Feminists to put that word in the title.
• He talks in sexist stereotypes and promotes easier tests for female job candidates than for male candidates, saying: "... we scientists ... identify the 'best' candidates for jobs and promotions by subjecting men and women to the same tests. But since these tests favour predominantly male characteristics, such as self-confidence and aggression, we choose more men and we discourage women." He provides no evidence for this sweeping, sexist generalisation about the characteristics favoured by tests. His article obviously got through the Feminist censors because he is laying the groundwork for the "gender-norming" of intelligence in a way that parallels the way that women are allowed to meet lower physical standards than men in order to get into the Police force.
• He has a section entitled: Boys and Girls Are Born Different and Remain So, but, in order to get it past the Feminist censors, he starts the section with an anti-male quotation from Michael Moore (who is just a Leftist filmmaker, as far as I know) about the supposedly low likelihood of being mugged by a woman. Of course, he wouldn't have cited a statistic about how likely you would have been to have been aborted by your father !
• He bases himself largely on Simon Baron-Cohen's 2003 book The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain. Baron-Cohen did not dare to speak about his basically non-Feminist ideas in public for several years after they were published in a specialist journal (in 1997). However, Baron-Cohen himself obviously had to be anti-male in order to get his book published, as Lawrence shows by stating: ... "Baron-Cohen presents evidence that males on average are biologically predisposed to systemise, to analyse, and to be more forgetful of others, while females on average are innately designed to empathise, to communicate, and to care for others." This is a grossly sexist analysis, in that all the morally praiseworthy attributes ("empathise", and "care for others") are allocated to females, and the only morally reprehensible attribute (" forgetful of others") is allocated to men. it would be easy to look at Baron-Cohen's data and interpret them in a way that allocated most negative attributes to females -- for example, have you heard of the word "bitchy" ? That refers to a negative aspect of women's (on average) superior ability to read emotions and use language. And what is so "empathising" or "caring for others" about aborting one's own child, so as to be free to have a certain lifestyle, and without asking the father first ?
• Moreover, Baron-Cohen's research speciality seems to be autism, which is his point of entry to the area of male-female differences. He sees autism as being an extreme form of maleness. Autism is, of course, viewed as a disorder, which is more a social than a medical definition. It is viewed as a "disorder" because society feels that autistic people are not "normal" -- and then psychologists are asked to analyse the problem. I can't think of any so-called "disorder" that might be viewed as an extreme form of femaleness. Maybe a theory about such a phenomenon which will emerge in the future, but I suspect that female domination of society is so complete that nothing that is "extremely female" could ever be diagnosed as "abnormal".

  Feminists are stupid women who have got hold of the simple ( and false) notion that men running the world meant that they were running it for the benefit of other men. Ignoring evidence to the contrary, they have been on a crusade to take control of every institution in society. Now they have conquered Science.

Last Update: 26 March 2006