I found myself chuckling approvingly over an article by Alice Robb in the New Republic titled, “Not Every Gender Gap Needs to Be Closed.”
Robb points to blog posts lamenting that most city bicycle riders and marijuana smokers are men. How can we close the “bike gap” and the “pot gap?” these writers ask. Don’t worry about it, is Robb’s reply. And worry even less about the fact that most video gamers are male, she goes on, arguing (I would be inclined to agree) that video games are a waste of time.
This is a refreshing contrast from the message in an email from someone named Ann Friedman: “I don’t think you can argue that women are naturally less interested in cycling or video games or weed than men are — our choices are shaped by the culture and society we live in. That society is pretty sexist!”
Of course you can argue that men, on average, are more interested than women, on average, in these activities. Robb goes on to provide a specific example. Women are far more likely than men to participate in indoor bicycling. She quotes journalist Jessica Grose as saying — accurately I am sure — that no one is particularly concerned about this gender imbalance and that Grose herself has “zero interest in bicycle commuting in NYC. It’s f—ing cold in the winter and I would get run over in a hot minute.”
Robb doesn’t make the obvious follow-up point. Women, psychologists agree, tend to be more risk-averse than men. Evolutionary explanations are obvious. Riding a bicycle in New York, as Grose appreciates, is a lot riskier than riding a bicycle in an indoor cycling facility. “It’s possible,” Robb writes, in a bow (curtsy?) to feminist theory, “that in a totally gender-equal society, every activity — from gardening and crocheting to taxi-driving and construction work — would have an equal number of male and female practitioners.”
No, it’s not. There are salient differences between men and women, on average, as the natural result of the evolutionary process, and those differences are reflected in different behavior and different career choices, again on average. We want a society where people can make the choices they want, but we fool ourselves if we think that in such a society men’s and women’s choices would be statistically indistinguishable.
Feminists who insist that such choices are only the result of societal pressure often conclude otherwise after their attempts to get their little boys to play with dolls or their little girls to play with trucks prove futile. Yes, there are some males and females who do not follow typical gender patterns, and there are a very small number who choose to change gender.
Alice Robb stops short of making this general argument—would the New Republic print it?—but she goes some creditable distance in that direction. Good for her.
