The argument of my book; there are two parts. I talk about why there are sex differences and why we have good evidence of that, about aggression, nurturing, and sex. And I also talk about what I think we should do given the fact that these differences exist. How we should think about our culture differently and change our policies. And I don’t think that the first part of that is all that controversial among people who do research in this area. I know it is in many circles and universities. One reason why I say that is someone called Janet Hyde, who is a strong feminist whose work is used in most Women’s Studies Departments, she wrote a big review essay of all the evidence we had called the Similarities Hypothesis and argued that men and women are pretty much alike. But what I talk about and what I am going to talk about today for example, sex and nurturing, she didn’t disagree at all. She said the differences about the interest in casual sex are large and they were close to very large in her categories and the interest in the differences in, she called it tender-mindedness rather than nurturing, are also large, close to very large. So the differences come, I think, with what we make of these differences and I think we will make great progress if we can just agree that there really are fundamental differences and then figure out what we should do about that.

I begin my book with a horrifying story, which by itself I think suggests that there has got to be fundamental differences, which are not controlled by nurture. It’s a case of identical twins going for circumcision back in the mid-60s. One of them comes out without his penis and the question is what do we do with that guy. There was some expert at John Hopkins, supposed expert who says, well he hasn’t formed his genital identity yet, let’s chop off his testicles and put a little slit there and shoot him full of estrogen and testosterone blocking drugs and he won’t know the difference. We’ll raise him as a little girl. And for over a decade, this doctor misreported what was happening. Said it was going well and articles said little Brenda was remarkably neat and dainty. Well it turned out to all be a lie. A journalist and other skeptical researchers found him. Brenda was now called David. Living in Canada. Living as a male. The adopted father of three kids. And it turned out that all along, he’d always felt he was a male. At fourteen years of age, he told his parents, I’m a boy and at fifteen they told him the truth. They tried to give him surgeries and turn him back into a boy as best they could.

Anyway, if you look at the story of his life, when he was first given a jump rope, he whipped people with it. He wanted to shave like his daddy. He wanted to urinate standing up. The first time he was put in a dress, he ripped it off. The teachers in his elementary school said that he had the most pressing, aggressive need to dominate that they had ever seen in a little girl. Now John Hopkins, after this story came out, went back and looked at other of this Doctor Money’s patients. These had been kids who’d been born without penises and he recommended the same thing and they tried to turn them into girls and they found that everyone of these twenty-five liked rough and tumble play when they were little boys like boys tend to do and girls don’t. These were ages five to fourteen when they then went back to see how they were doing. And fourteen of the twenty-five had already declared to their parents that they were boys. Being raised as girls, having pumps full of all this estrogen – that doesn’t happen very often. I mean, occasionally someone says I want to become a boy, but for people to be absolutely convinced they’re boys when they’ve been raised from infancy as a girl is pretty unusual. It suggests that there’s something happening before people are even born that gives them a sense of who they are. What their sex is and most scholars think it’s testosterone in the womb that does this. A sad story, the guy ended up, after I published the book committing suicide. It suggests we get these things wrong and you really can do a lot of harm.

Now there is other evidence we have that sex differences run deep. One is other hormonal studies suggesting that the more testosterone you are exposed to in utero, the more likely you are to be aggressive and competitive and assertive. And testosterone also dampens nurturing behavior. Aside from these hormonal studies all around the world, societies think if you ask them who is more aggressive in your society, men or women, they always say men and who’s more nurturing, they always say women. The majority. Vast majorities. Also, these differences appear very early in life. Before boys and girls really understand the gender stereotypes, boys are doing rough and tumble play and girls are more interested in dolls. It’s not until about the age of three that people realize what most boys do and what most girls do. They have a sense, but before that age, they know what they like to do and they are what the gender stereotypes suggest. Boys like to play with balls more before two, girls like to dance more before two. And another important difference is that at twelve months of age, girls respond more empathetically to the distress of others through more sad looks, sympathetic vocalizations, and comforting behavior.

But today, I don’t want to just focus on the argument of my book. I want to engage people who are most unhappy with my book. And they are usually women. And they are usually educated women. Not all of them by any means. Most women I hear from love the book, but the ones who don’t like the book or hate the book, are usually educated women who are convinced that this book and any serious attention to sex differences will have disastrous implications for women’s well-being. So I want to address them because I think just the opposite. I think that giving more attention to sex differences would improve the lives of men, but it would improve the lives of women more.

Now I call my opposites, the women who are opposed to focusing on sex differences androgynous feminists. There’s an equity kind of feminist who believes in equal rights before the law, as I do, and equal pay for equal work and so on. But the androgynous feminists, I think they dominate the National Organization for Women and the Women’s Studies Departments, and most of the Humanities, in large parts, the Social Sciences. I think they think that aside from the obvious anatomical differences, that there are no fundamental differences between men and women. And those that seem to exist are the result of society, how we bring up boys and girls, rather than a result of nature.

I want to focus today on sex and nurturing of children. I think that the androgynous feminist position goes something like this – the double standard of sluts and stunts has for two long restricted women’s exploration of their sexuality. Women’s sexual liberation is an important part of women’s liberation more generally and young women should condition their consent to sex on pleasure and desire. As one influential book puts it, “Have sex for the sheer pleasure of it.”

On children, androgynous feminists say that women have to bear them, but men are just as good at bringing them up and that in a just world, men and women should be equally responsible for childcare and for work outside the home. Androgynous feminists are adamant about this because they think that only an equal division of all labor will enable women to have equal power and money with their husbands or with men. Now my critique of this outlook begins with the assumption about what most women care most deeply about so I am going to focus on most women. As I’ve mentioned, there are different kinds of women. I explore this at length in my book. Ones who are more career-oriented, who are more assertive and aggressive, who are less interested in babies and dolls when they are young. On average, they have been exposed to more testosterone. They are different for most women. I want to focus on most women and what I think they care most about and I think it’s emotionally close relationships.

In his book, The Essential Difference, Simon Baron-Cohen notes that one-day old baby girls look at a picture of a human face longer than one-day old baby boys do. And similarly, one-day old, if you play a recording of another baby crying, both baby boys and baby girls will cry, but baby girls cry longer. Now Cohen uses this in a lot of other evidence to argue that women have a more empathizing brain than men do. And that females of all ages seem to care more about other’s well-being than males do. Now boys have a passion for things and they tend to be very tunnel directed. If you raised boys, you probably know they change these things. It can be dinosaurs and then it’s baseball statistics and soccer or computers. It doesn’t have much to do with their parents so they don’t know where they get it from. All they want to think about for a year or two is those things. And boys tend to get together with other boys who share their interest in those activities that they’re interested in. Girls get together, not so much for the activities as for sharing confidences and long self-revealing conversations. Putting arms around each other. Girls and women most of all want connection. And when they go through puberty, estrogen makes women more social. They spend more time with other people. Testosterone makes men less social. They spend more time alone.

If you look at male prisons and female prisons, it’s quite dramatic. Male prisons are all about domination and aggression. Female prisons, in large proportions of them, set up artificial families. These women miss connections so much that they say you be the uncle, you be the aunt, you be the kid, I’m the father, you are the mother. And they have pseudo-families in the prisons.

Another sign I think of women’s deep need for connection is if you look at unmarried, childless women. This group you might think, these are the ones who are the careers. And they are really different and one of the reasons they maybe didn’t get married is that they didn’t want a family to interfere with their careers. But if you ask them, what is the most important thing for your happiness, of unmarried, childless women, five times as more say something to do with connection. Thirty-one percent say my relationship with my mother is most important to my happiness. Twenty-two percent say relationship with my friends. Eleven percent say my career is most important to my happiness.

Okay, with this background then, let’s turn to sex. When girls go through puberty, the combination of hormones and their longstanding desire for strong, intimate relationships often leads them to be boy-crazy. As young teenagers they often spend hours reading romantic fiction or playing board games about dating and boys. But girls are more interested in relationships that may lead to sex whereas boys are more interested in the sex. And in and out of marriage, women usually say they engage in sex to share emotions and love. Men give reasons that are much more narrowly physical – need, sexual gratification, sexual release – these are the reasons they say they engage in sex. And men are much more interested in sex with a variety of partners.

Now what happens? Sociologist Elijah Anderson describes an inner-city culture where the young girls have a dream, a dream of loving, providing mates, while their often older partners are playing a game in which sexual conquest are the prize. Female researchers describe in the most unlikely places, in British street games or in African tribes, the same kind of phenomenon. Of young teen girls looking for a providing, protecting older guy. And one of these female authors says that, “It appears that there is a period of mating optimism among young adult women, which may be a regular feature of female psychology.” Now it seems to me that Women’s Studies Programs and Women’s Centers should alert young women to the fact that young men are frequently more interested in sex than in the relationships. I don’t think they do because they want to say that everybody is the same and women should be the same with their sexuality that men are, but they are not the same. The surveys report that seventy-one percent of teenage girls report being in love with their last sexual partner and forty-five percent of boys do and teen girls are much more likely to regret their previous sexual experiences than boys are and much more likely to say they wish they waited longer to have sex. Several studies have also noted the precipitous rise in depression rates among young teenage females. And the depression is often preceded by the breakup of a sexual relationship that the girl at least saw as romantic.

Now the real world of middle school girls can be a nightmare. Most of you know Montgomery County, it’s in Maryland, suburb of Washington, a high income county. This is from a school there. At this middle school, and I am at told this is not unique by any means these days, at this school, thirteen year old girls get casual, routine invitations to have sex all day long. Most of the boys ask. The typical query is, “When are you going to give me head?” A Washington Post article reports that some of the requests go beyond words. The reporter asked one girl to keep a little diary and the worse of what she entered was she was kneeling to get books from her locker and a boy came up and sticks his crotch in her face and says, “Oh yeah, you’re best!” Now what do you say to a boy who does this? I don’t think you can say much if you assume boys and girls are the same about sex. If you have an androgynous understanding of sex. If you say to this boy, well how would you feel if she did this to you, what is he going to say? “Great! Do you think you could get her to?” It’s not the same at all. Girls find it degrading and threatening in some way. Boys don’t. They just think it’s good fun. It’s just another kind of horseplay. Why make a big deal about it? We are not going to get anywhere in changing it unless we say boys and girls are different about this sort of thing. Girls are more vulnerable in sexual matters.

Okay. Now let’s go to college. John Townsend is an anthropologist who surveyed several hundred students about sexual relationships, romantic relationships and then picked out the fifty most active, twenty-five girls, twenty-five boys who had the most sexual partners and focused in on them. And he asked the following question –whether they agreed with this or disagreed. “Even if I think I don’t want to be emotionally involved with a person, if I have sex with him or her a few times, I begin to feel vulnerable and would least like to know that he or she cares for me.” Fifty percent of the males disagreed with this statement. Four percent of the females did. So fifty percent of the men don’t care if their sexual partners care about them. Now he then gives a full description of the five most sexually active females. Every one of them is competitive, aggressive, wants careers, has always loved to play boy sports and so on. Has absolutely no principle or religious objection to casual sex. Every one of the five has found though, despite their liberated attitudes that their emotions get in the way of casual sex and after a couple years of it, they decide it just doesn’t work for me. That it’s just an individual thing. They are not interested in sleeping with men who are uninterested in relationships.

Next I want to talk about cohabitation which is what women have to look forward to after college these days and just one of many studies reveals that women tend to see living together as a step towards marriage, while men regard it as a sexual opportunity without the ties of long-term commitment. Surveys indicate that since the sexual revolution, women have begun to think worse of men. I’ll just give you one example. This is pretty dramatic because it’s a guy who wrote a book after interviewing two thousand women and two thousand men about romantic and sexual relationships. A reporter asked him what’s the big difference you found. One word – rage. Lots of women feel rage towards men. Men don’t feel any rage toward women. If you look at any big bookstore, you’ll find rows of books aimed at women with titles like How to Heal the Heart by Haiti and The Women’s Book of Revenge, which among other things says destroy his stuff. It seems to me that if we stop telling women that men and women have no significant differences between them in libido and taste for sexual variety, women will be better able to protect themselves. We will get less female depression and less rage towards men.

Now marriage has a special appeal to women because women both get men who are willing to commit and a greater opportunity for strong relationships with babies as well as husbands. And women want babies and many who want them are not getting them. About eighteen percent of forty-year old women have no children and this about double from the 1960s, a recent Gallop Poll found that seventy percent of them wish they had had children. Of those undergoing infertility treatments, fifty percent of women, but only fifteen percent of men say it’s the most upsetting experience of their lives. A Harvard Medical School Study found that women undergoing infertility treatment had levels of depression comparable to patients with AIDS and cancer.

Now it seems to me androgynous feminists are unconcerned. Many highly educated women overestimate their chances of getting pregnant after age forty. They see examples of it and don’t realize how unlikely it is. As a result, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine wanted to place public service ads in shopping malls that could have helped correct this misinformation. The ads were designed to enable women make reproductive choices based on the facts and particularly wanted to tell people how to avoid infertility. The opposition of the National Organization of Women aborted the whole program. The ad that particularly angered NOW contained the following message: Advancing age decreases your ability to have children. NOW said that ad and the other ads were scare tactics. They further argued that the ads sent a negative message to women who might want to delay or skip childbearing in favor of their career pursuits.
Androgynous feminism is no more help to women who get the children they want. Women have lots of the nurturing hormone Oxytocin and little of the nurturing –suppressing hormone, testosterone. They truly like to spend lots of time with their children. If you look in families where mothers and fathers as a matter of principle, try to take equal care of the kids, and interview the fathers and the mothers, they both say there are emotional differences. The mothers are emotionally more connected to the kids. They feel separation from the kids to be more disagreeable, anxiety-provoking.
To strike the emphasis on androgynous roles in Sweden, if you look at fathers going back to work after taking leave and mothers going back to work after taking leave, the mothers feel much worse about it than the fathers do.

Another sign of differences in this nurturing instinct for small children. Men usually do the fun stuff with kids. This is a great complaint at large. That they want to play with them and they want to read a book sometimes, but what about all the other stuff that you have to do when you have a kid? They don’t like to do that much. So you might think therefore that if you asked mothers and fathers how much they liked parenting, the fathers would say they liked it more because they are doing only the fun stuff and women are doing the fun and no-so fun. That’s not what we get. Mothers say they like parenting more than fathers say they like parenting. After they have kids, most women would prefer not to work or to work only part-time. They are typically less willing than men to spend their whole days away from their children. They want to see the first steps, hear the first words. They feel guilty and anxious if they spend ten hour days away from their children. And this is true even if the kids are older, middle school and high school.

I will just summarize quickly several studies of this. One study of sex differences and psychological stress among married couples notes that for wives, but not husbands, it is especially stressful to be married and employed with minor children. A second study of mothers finds that those who work have more stress than those who don’t. A third study also of mothers finds that those who work are far more conflicted about working than homemakers are about staying at home. And working moms, and these are the author’s words, “pervasive, internal struggle” was as common with those with teenagers as those with those with preschoolers. Even those with fully supportive husbands who completely supported their wives’ careers often were highly conflicted. A fourth study shows that working moms with minors at home have levels of Cortisol, indicating high stress – more of that than do other women without kids doing the same jobs. This result again is obtained independent of how much support they get from their husband or other social support.
Now I have lots of moving stories, anecdotes in the book and cartoons. I try not to make it too dry. But the anecdotes I pick are examples where you might not expect these phenomenon to appear in these kinds of women. I will give you just one of them here. Madeleine Kunin was a two-term governor of Vermont while she had young children. And she writes an autobiography after finishing her last term, in which she says the following, “At least once a day I would feel a stab in my chest thinking I should be at one place while I was at another. There was no cure for the anxiety. All I could do was not to let it overwhelm me. Not to let it pull me down, but to carry it as gracefully as I could.”

One answer to the torment that so many mothers feel would be high quality part-time jobs. Women these days often complain about why aren’t there better part-time jobs. Career paths are too rigid. But we shouldn’t forget that in 1989, almost a whole generation ago, a major figure, Felice Schwartz, proposed an answer to this problem. She wrote in the Harvard Business Review and she said we should have two different tracks in business. She was head of Catalyst, an organization whose only purpose is to advance the interests of women in business. She said we should have two tracks – a career track and a career and family track. Women on the career and family track wouldn’t have to put in as long hours, but they could stay connected to their company, connected to their work and they’d settle in the median term for middle management, but they’d be happier with this mix than they are now. And it raised outrage in letters to the editor.

One of the most greatest flurries ever from women who said this would be a disaster for women. And that’s an organization for women and the National Women’s Political Caucus and several other groups had a jointly offered letter where they said this would be a disaster. This would be a disaster even if you make it gender neutral. Even if you said men could go in the career and family track too if they want. But still they said, women will be the ones who take it, everybody knows that and therefore it would come to be a mommy track and it would cut off women’s employment opportunities. They went on to say that if any business sets up a career and family track, we will sue you. And they also said why did not Felice Schwartz, talk about why men didn’t do half the childcare instead of coming up with this ridiculous proposal.

Now androgynous feminists want women to be as likely to rise above the glass ceiling as men are. That’s the reason they hit the umbraes at these things. Whether it’s how to make people pregnant or how to have a family and career track. And they realize that if you go in these directions, women are not going to be as likely, proportionally, to rise above the glass ceiling. To get the real powerful jobs in society. But my own research, even in a very androgynous group, the national survey of women assistant professors with kids under two who are trying to get tenure and their opinions about androgyny and who should do everything are very liberated. Men and women should do everything equally and so on. But when we asked who does each of these twenty-five tasks more often in your family, the female professors on average said they do every one of them more and the male professors said they do every one of them less. Even buying the groceries for the kids. Anything you can think of, the women are doing more. But also interesting, we also asked how much do you like doing each of these twenty-five tasks. The women liked doing twenty-four of the twenty-five more than the men. A pretty liberated group. Androgynous feminists, most of them with Ph.D.’s who want to get tenure. Are pressed to get tenure and if you ask them do you like doing these tasks, even changing diapers, more of them said they liked it than disliked it. Not the men. So it seems to me that if we ever came up with a world in which men and women did everything equally, at home and at work, neither one of them would be as happy as the other ones could be. Women who work thirty-seven hours a week full-time on average. Full-time worker, you know is anything over thirty-five. Women work thirty-seven hours a week and men work forty-three on average. If you ask who’s more unhappy about the long hours, it’s women. It’s because they want, they would prefer, part-time work. And largely because they want to spend more time with their families.

It seems to me that our culture and our policy would become more female friendly if we realized these are deep seeded sex differences. And not only that, but there are different ways to think about power. Power in throwing your weight around and being the best at writing wills and therefore making a lot of money. But it’s also, these were the words of another author that I really think are great, she said, “A lot of women think of power in a different way. They think of power as creating relationships, binding families, and building societies.” Now if one of the sexes is better at that, think about it – creating relationships, binding families, and building societies - that’s a kind of power. It’s a kind of power that seems to be quite admirable and we should give it more respect. Thank you.