If you’ve read enough of those Mars vs Venus books (I haven’t touched any), or those why-women-can’t-read-maps-and-men-fart-out-loud books, but you’re still interested in gender differences, this book may be for you.
The Essential Difference: Male and Female Brains and the Truth About Autism
by Simon Baron-Cohen
Baron-Cohen has 2 simple premises in this book: (1) males tend to be better at what he calls “systemizing” - building and understanding systems, and females tend to be better at “empathizing”; and (2) autism is just an extreme form of the male type of brain.
This book (and maybe this post) is bound to generate a lot of controversy, because of the first premise, that males tend to be better than females at “systemizing” - which means that guys tend to be better at science, engineering, computers, figuring out how a machine works, etc. The feminist in me would have protested too, if I didn’t read carefully enough.
It’s really no different from saying that men tend to be taller than women, something which reasonable feminists readily accept. This of course doesn’t mean that all men are taller than all women, it also doesn’t necessarily mean that the tallest man in the world is definitely taller than the tallest woman (although chances are that he is taller, and in reality it happens to be so).
So this also doesn’t mean that all men are better than women at engineering. Or that the best physicist is definitely a man (but there’s a good chance that he is).
But, women tend to be better at empathizing, at reading and understanding the emotions of another human being.
Which leads to the other premise - that autism is an extreme form of the male brain. People with autism have difficulty relating to others, and most of them don’t realise that a smile or a frown indicates anything. Males do tend to be more insensitive (just ask any wife with a hubby watching soccer on TV), and bring that insensitivity to the extreme, and you’ll get autism. According to the book.
Most of the book is really about building the case for the 2 premises, and presenting the (pretty convincing) evidence. It also has a number of pretty fun tests to determine how male or female your brain is - my favourite is probably the “reading the mind in the eyes” test, where you’re supposed to determine a person’s expression just from a picture of their eyes and eyebrows. I did better than a lot of my female friends (hah!).
The book will be an important one (if it isn’t already), and it’s quite readable for a somewhat-academic book. A must-read only if you’re seriously into gender differences. Otherwise, if you’re just interested in the tests, check out BBC’s Sex I.D. site, where a number of tests are based on this book.
Turns out that I have an androgynous mind, according to the tests. Which might be a good thing.
There’s another version of those tests at:
http://www.eqsq.com/eqsqtest.php
Along with links to a number of Baron Cohen’s papers and so on.
I think the most important thing to make clear about his ideas is that he is divorcing the stereotypes (men are better at this, women at that)and trying to make clear that they are averages. He talks about the “male brain” type and female, but it might be better to call them Type A and Type B. Type A is better at a series of things (systemizing, spatial awareness etc) and B at others (emotional communication, empathy). As it happens, only 17% of men have Type B, and 17% of women Type A.
So the averages will indeed come out like the stereotypes, that “women can’t read maps” and “men can’t understand other’s feelings”. But I think he’s made a great liberal step forward. We cannot (which is an advance on should not) depend upon those stereotypes when evaluating an individual. For an individual can be anywhere on the A-B spectrum and so we must treat and evaluate any individual as exactly what they are: an individual.
On the autism, extreme male brain thing, you’re exactly right.
Comment by Tim Worstall — February 2, 2007 @ 3:24 am
yeah i agree “type A” or “type B” is much better and more neutral than using “male” or “female brain”.
and thanx for the resource.
Comment by tinkertailor — February 3, 2007 @ 1:38 am