A Gender For Change

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Gender is a fact of life. So much so that most people take it for granted that it is natural for men and women to think and behave differently. In considering whether this is so, we must look first to our origins. Our physiology and basic instincts evolved long before any form of civilisation or technology existed. Even for most of recorded history, our ancestors lived in societies based on subsistence agriculture in which the margin between survival and starvation was often very small. In both circumstances, the division of labour between male and female in which the former goes out hunting or farming while the latter looks after the home and children is the most efficient arrangement. Firstly, the average male is physically larger and stronger than the average female. Secondly, the female will have limited mobility for large periods of time because of the demands of reproduction. She will be pregnant many times, both because of the lack of contraception and because it is necessary to have large numbers of children to ensure that some survive to adulthood. Also, children are dependent on their parents for years after birth and need a lot of close attention. Modern concepts of freedom and personal fulfilment simply did not apply. Both the male and female roles involved endless toil, and human physiology dictated the division of labour between them. The stark necessities of survival precluded any other approach. As more complex societies evolved they would build on existing social arrangements, and develop myths to retrospectively explain and justify their social customs. The development of agriculture and permanent settlements probably enabled a much higher degree of specialisation than is possible in a hunter-gatherer society, in which everyone must participate in the endless search for food. But as societies become more complex so do the tasks involved in being the breadwinner or homemaker, and the more there is for a child to learn the more it entrenches the division between women's things and men's things. What changed this was the development of modern industrialised society. In a technological society there are few jobs that are so dependent on physical strength that the average woman could not do them, and most involve tasks that either gender could do equally well. Most people earn their living doing highly specialised and often highly abstract tasks, and have their basic subsistence needs, such as the provision of food and drinking water, taken care of by other specialists. Improvements in medicine, sanitation, etc. mean that child mortality rates are very low, so it is no longer necessary to have large numbers of children in order to ensure that some survive, and modern contraceptives make it possible to control pregnancy. Even maintaining the home is not the backbreaking chore it used to be, thanks to modern technology. Therefore until very recently in history gender-based specialisation had a survival value, but in a modern technological society it is an extremely inefficient way of allocating human resources. Specialisation by individual aptitude now has the greatest survival value, both for the individual and for the society to which he or she belongs. For the individual it offers the best chance of prosperity, and hence reliable access to the material goods one needs to survive. It is also the best way to promote the economic growth and technological progress that gives a society the means to resist the encroachment of competitors and enemies. That the old gender roles survived intact until so recently can be ascribed to four factors. Firstly, they were so deeply embedded in our social structure that they simply weren't questioned. Secondly, it was only in the 20th century that the physical factors sustaining the traditional gender roles were overcome, such as the problem of contraception and the fact that much of the workforce was still engaged in hard manual labour. Thirdly, the fact that the traditional male role granted men greater freedom and status in society meant that they were understandably reluctant to give up these advantages. Fourthly, that these gender roles are a product of biology as well as social conditioning. The last point should not be controversial, except to those who find it unacceptable for ideological reasons. There are many physiological differences between males and females, including differences in typical brain structure and differences in the hormones to which the brain is exposed. It would be astonishing if this did not lead to any differences in behaviour. However, I began by arguing that early humans were forced to adopt gender-based specialisation in order to maximise their chances of survival. It follows that we will have inherited instincts that predispose each gender towards those roles, as evolution ruthlessly selects for traits that enhance the likelihood of survival. Like history, the genome is written by the winners. Yet the social changes of recent decades have proved that women can succeed in jobs and social roles that only men used to occupy, and vice versa. Therefore the most rational and just approach is to encourage young people to see all the possible roles in society as open to them, and encourage them to find the one that best matches their personality and aspirations. After a few generations of truly equal opportunities, men and women would distribute themselves through society in a pattern that broadly reflected the innate differences in aptitude and behaviour between the typical male and typical female. For example, if the typical male has better spatial perception and the typical female has better verbal skills one would expect to find more male pilots and more female novelists. If men are more inclined to risk-taking and women are better at multi-tasking, one might expect to find a majority of males among entrepreneurs and a majority of females in managerial roles. In most professions and social roles the imbalance would probably be quite small, but in some it could be quite pronounced. But a society that was confident that it was offering equality of opportunity wouldn’t care about this and wouldn’t try to change it. It would accept that these differences reflected real differences in people. A perfectly even balance of males and females in every area could only be brought about by the denial of equal opportunities, with some people being forced to do things they didn’t really want to do by social pressure or other forms of coercion. To completely eliminate all differences in behaviour between males and females would require a totalitarian regime that dictated exactly how every individual was to behave at all times. Therefore we should promote equality of opportunity, but not expect equality of outcomes. It is the best way to find out just what we truly are, and to be at ease with what we find.

		Last Updated: 1 Oct 07