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By Root 585 0

species of mouse. The males help the females look after the babies. Male and female pine voles have similar brains. In particular, the hippocampus of the male and of the female is much the same size. When required to run through a maze, male and female pine voles prove equally good at the task. The meadow vole, Microtus pennsylvanicus, is a different story altogether. It is polygamous. Males, which must visit the scattered holes of their several wives, travel further than females every day. Male meadow voles have bigger hippocampi than females and are better at finding and remembering their way through mazes. Their brains are simply better at such spatial tasks.1

Just like meadow voles, men are better at spatial tasks than women. When asked to compare the shapes of two objects seen from different angles, and judge whether they are the same shape, or to judge whether two glasses of different shapes are equally full, or any such task that involves spatial judgement, men generally do better than women. Polygamy and spatial skills seem to go together in several species.

Equality or Identity?

Men and women have different bodies. The differences are the direct result of evolution. Women’s bodies evolved to suit the demands of bearing and rearing children, and of gathering plant food. Men’s bodies evolved to suit the demands of rising in a male hierarchy, fighting over women and of providing meat for a family.

Men and women have different minds. The differences are the direct result of evolution. Women’s minds evolved to suit the demands of bearing and rearing children and of gathering plant food. Men’s minds evolved to suit the demands of rising in a male hierarchy, fighting over women and of providing meat for a family.

The first paragraph is banal; the second inflammatory. The proposition that men and women have evolved different minds is anathema to every social scientist and politically correct individual. Yet I believe it to be true, for two reasons. First, the logic is impeccable. As the last two chapters have demonstrated, over long stretches of evolutionary time men and women have faced different evolutionary pressures, so the ones who succeeded will have been those whose brains produced behaviours well suited to those pressures. Second, the evidence is overwhelming. Gingerly, reluctantly, but with increasing conviction, physiologists and psychologists have begun to probe the differences between male and female brains. Often they have done so determined to find none. Yet again and again they come back with good evidence that there are such differences. Not everything is different; most things, in fact, are identical between the sexes. Much of the folklore about differences is merely convenient sexism. And there are enormous overlaps. Although it is a fair generalization to say that men are taller than women, none the less the tallest woman in a large group of people is usually taller than the shortest man. In the same way, even if the average woman is better at some mental task than the average man, there are many women who are worse at the task than the best man, or vice versa. But the evidence for the average male brain differing in certain ways from the average female brain is now all but undeniable.

Evolved differences are by definition ‘genetic’, and any suggestion that men and women have genetically different minds horrifies the modern conscience for it seems to justify prejudice. How can we strive to build an equal society when men are given ‘scientific’ support for their sexism? Give men an inch of inequality and they will claim a mile of bias – the Victorians believed men and women were so different that women should not even have the vote; in the eighteenth century some men thought women incapable of reason.

These concerns are fair. But just because people have exaggerated sexual differences in the past does not mean they cannot exist. There is no a priori reason for assuming that men and women have identical minds and no amount of wishing it were so will make it so if it is not so. Difference is not