T
HAT HUMAN BEINGS MAKE MUSIC IS ASTONISHING. The animals from which we evolved don’t make music, and it’s hard even to imagine how the idea of making music ever got started. I can’t begin to count the hours I’ve spent listening to music, practicing and playing instruments, shopping for music, and the rest. I played in several small- time bands, and as anyone who has done so knows, whatever degree of success you have in that endeavor (and mine was fairly limited), you become a connoisseur of professional music, able to notice and appreciate things others miss and full of strong opinions about who is brilliant and who is wildly overrated by the musically unsophisticated public. And like many people who play instruments, I quickly became impatient with the layman’s attitude that music is all about words and lyrics. If I ask people why they like some particular music, and they respond by saying some- thing about the lyrics, they have lost all credibility as far as I’m concerned. Go read some book of poems if you want words.One thing that has puzzled me over the years of focusing on the musical part of music is the gender difference. It is most obvious in jazz, which is in some respects the most advanced form of improvisational, instrumental music. When I was young and poor, I spent hours thumbing through the discount bins of albums, and I learned quite early that if the artist featured on the album was a woman, it almost inevitably meant she was a singer. A man on the cover might mean anything—guitar, sax, trumpet, piano. Some men sing too. Men do it all. But I’d say well over 90% of female jazz albums are by female singers. And even on those albums, most of the music
44 Is There Anything Good About Men?
was played by men, who worked their instruments in the background while the woman sang.
It’s not that women can’t play musical instruments. If you look at classical music, there are plenty of women who play, including at the top levels of ability. At the entry levels, such as the music schools where my daughter takes lessons, one sees more girls than boys, and they show just as much talent if not more. Nationwide, more girls than boys take music lessons. Women can and do play all manner of musical instruments superbly. They just don’t play jazz.
What sets jazz apart is of course the creative challenge of improvising. The person who is playing has to make up what to play, moment by moment.
Is the defi cit really in creativity? After or alongside improvising, the other most creative job in music is composing. Here again, men predominate. Women play music far more than they compose or improvise it. Creativity really seems to be where the difference lies.
One possible explanation is that women aren’t creative. For a time, the pattern of female absence in composition and improvisation led me to think it was a lack of creative ability among women. But the data from my own fi eld have pushed me away from that view. When psychologists give tests of creativity, the males and females score about the same. Women have apparently just as much basic, general creative aptitude as men.
Why, then, don’t women do more creative things in music? Here is where the Imaginary Feminist might be tempted to introduce the standard arguments about oppression and socialization. Women aren’t encouraged to be creative, or something like that. Pop feminism has taught us all to think along those lines. This is the formula we saw in Chapter 1: if a difference can’t be explained on the basis of males having more innate ability, then it must be that men have oppressed and stifl ed women.
Maybe jazz music and the world of composition is a macho culture that won’t allow females to participate. But this seems implausible. I have known many jazz musicians, and they aren’t remotely macho. On the contrary, they tend to be quiet, nerdy introverts. They’ll play with any- body who can keep up. Most bands I knew, including all the ones I was in, were desperate for a decent bass player in particular and would have taken anyone, even a foul-smelling gorilla who helped itself to others’ food and peed on the fl oor, if it would have been willing and able to play the music.
Can’t or Won’t? 45
The prejudice or oppression argument is hard to sustain. Jazz broke racial boundaries long before the mainstream society had even made up its mind as to whether integration was a good idea. When a talented female instrumentalist has shown up, such as the late Emily Remler, she was very popular and never lacked for musical partners.
I do think there is an explanation. But it’s not where we have looked yet. This chapter is going to suggest looking for gender differences in a very different place.
The No-Difference Position
Chapter 2 introduced the tradeoff theory of gender differences as a radical theory of gender equality. To get started on this chapter’s argument, let’s pause for a moment to look at the non-radical theory of gender equality, which is that men and women are basically the same. In this view, the differences are trivial and have been overstated.
Psychology has shifted its prevailing views about gender several times. Up till the 1960s or so, the experts did not devote much thought to gender differences, refl ecting a dominant view that these were not all that extensive or important. When men and women did exhibit different behaviors or opinions in one study or another, researchers quietly noted it, but nobody paid a great deal of attention.
Things heated up in the late 1960s and especially in the early 1970s, as the women’s movement and other changes called more attention to women. A landmark in the fi eld was the publication in 1974 of Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin’s book The Psychology of Sex Differences. Those two scholars had combed through volumes of studies and collected the many fi ndings of gender differences that had been reported, often without much comment, in study after study. The effect was something like having somebody go out searching for a few coins underneath the seats at a movie theatre and return with thousands of dollars’ worth.
Rather abruptly, gender differences became a major interest in the scientifi c community, and expert opinion came around to think that men and women were quite seriously different. This shift coincided oddly with the rising feminist assertion that men and women were basically the same and differences refl ected only prejudices and socialization. The tentative compromise was to believe that men and women were brought up to be
46 Is There Anything Good About Men?
different, and so that became the predominant way of interpreting observed differences. For example, “boys are socialized to be aggressive” and “girls are taught to attend to other people’s feelings.” Fathers, and especially mothers, who were just starting to get off the Freudian hook that had held them responsible for all their grown children’s neuroses and other short- comings, were now blamed for having raised their children to develop personalities in line with outmoded and oppressive gender stereotypes.
Not long after that, statisticians got a new toy. With their usual fl air for catchy titles, they called it estimated effect sizes. Let me explain it in plain terms. Up until this point, the way social scientists had studied behavior was by testing all their data to see whether there was any real difference or not. Yes or no: that was the extent of what the main statistical analyses gave you. In terms of studying gender, this older approach simply said that, based on your data, you either can or cannot conclude that there is some actual difference between men and women out in the world as a whole. The research question was simply, are men and women different, or not?
The new analysis allowed them to ask, how big is that difference? The tables turned rather abruptly when the new tool was applied to gender differences. Yes, as Maccoby and Jacklin had documented, there are many gender differences to be found, because men and women are different in a vast number of ways. But most of these differences turned out to be quite small. Often gender accounted for only 3% to 5% of the variation in behavior. It was rare for a difference to reach 10%.
Elizabeth Aries put this succinctly in her 1995 book that was a sweeping reappraisal of gender differences based on the size of the effects. She noted the popularity of works by authors such as Deborah Tannen and John Gray, who treated men and women as opposites—indeed, in the case of Gray’s works, as from different planets (men from Mars, women from Venus). “Why have we constructed polarized conceptions of men and women when the similarities between them outweigh the differences?” Aries asked.
The new view, therefore, is that men and women are different in many respects—but most of these differences are so small as to be scarcely worth talking about. Even in important, sensitive domains like mathematical aptitude, effect sizes changed the discussion. It was true that across the USA, the results from many thousands of SAT tests showed that boys on average have a higher aptitude for math than girls—but the difference was
Can’t or Won’t? 47
only about 3%. That’s hardly enough to justify a company saying they would prefer to hire a man rather than a woman for a numbers-crunching job, or even enough reason to advise your daughter to take biology instead of physics.
In recent years, some experts have taken these small differences to argue strongly against the whole enterprise of studying gender differences. Janet Shibley Hyde, for example, a respected and infl uential researcher, saw the effect size data as vindicating the feminist ideals of her youth that denounced and denied the idea that women were different from men. In particular, when mental abilities are studied—anything from moral reasoning to mathematical problem solving—men and women look far more similar than different.
As always, there are cautionary arguments. Men and women in today’s America may be more similar than at most other times in history or in other places. Our society has been trying for decades to erase gender differences by offering boys and girls the same schooling, the same upbring- ing, and the same opportunities, and by extending this egalitarian treat- ment to adult men and women also. Most cultures in world history have probably done the opposite, which is to steer men and women into different life paths and thereby increase the differences between them. Usually culture builds on nature, and so most likely males and females come out of the womb slightly different and then, by virtue of their experi- ences in social life, become more different over the years. Modern American culture is a rare exception that seeks to make men and women more similar to each other. Hence the small size of American gender differences may be atypical.
But I think most of those analyses have focused on abilities. Hence let me introduce another radical idea. Those analyses are focusing on the wrong things.
Can versus Want
How well someone performs a task depends on two things about the person (plus some external factors such as luck). One is the person’s ability. The other is how hard the person tries. The latter, effort, is largely a refl ection of the broad category of motivation. In plain language, motivation means wanting.
48 Is There Anything Good About Men?
Thus, in a nutshell, performance depends on two things, ability and motivation. Ability is what you can do. Motivation is what you want to do. All the ability in the world won’t lead to success in, say, basket-weaving or race-car driving, if you aren’t interested in engaging in that sphere of endeavor.
In sports, for example, both ability and motivation matter. During practice, the coaches focus mainly on increasing ability. That’s what “practice” means, after all: working to increase your skills. During the game itself, however, there is not much opportunity to increase ability, and so the coach’s speeches then usually focus on motivation, that is, on getting the players to want to win and to try harder.
Motivation in fact goes well beyond task performance. It encompasses everything that people want and like. Economists, for example, talk end- lessly about people’s preferences, but “preferences” is just another word for motivation. It’s doing what you like to do or want to do, or buying what you want to have.
Motivation is somewhat neglected in psychology these days, for compli- cated reasons that have little to do with its importance. The fi eld of gender differences is likewise more attuned to abilities than motivation. It carries on hot debates about whether men or women are better at something.
Somehow, the question of whether men or women differ in what they like to do is not debated as often or as intensely.
Where the Real Differences Are
Chapter 2 proposed that gender differences were likely tradeoffs.
The focus was on abilities: why nature might make one gender better than the other at doing something. To be good at one thing might detract from being good at something else.
This is after all the way gender differences have been debated: Who’s better at what?
It is in some ways an unfortunate debate. People are very sensitive. Saying one gender is better at something has a strong value judgment. Saying it as a general principle also gives rise to policy implications, most of which are troubling if not offensive to various parties. If girls aren’t as good at math as boys, then they maybe should steer clear. Employers might prefer to hire men and might even be justifi ed in doing so. And so forth.
Can’t or Won’t? 49
Moreover, as we saw there are now strong views based on data that the gender differences in abilities, though real enough, are pretty small.
So before we go too far down the path of analyzing gender differences as traded off abilities, let’s look elsewhere.
Where might that be? As we have just seen, performance depends on not just ability but also on motivation. So perhaps if men and women don’t differ much in ability, they will differ more in motivation.
There are several advantages to focusing on motivation when we talk about differences between men and women. For one thing, it’s less poi- sonous to discuss. If men and women do different things, it’s more a refl ec- tion of what they like and want to do, than of what they are capable of. Policy implications are also muted. If you thought women were less com- petent than men at something, you might be justifi ed in not wanting to hire one. But if the differences arise because most women don’t like to do something, then the one who’s applying for your job is obviously different, and you don’t need to worry.
Hey Larry
It’s worth revisiting the Lawrence Summers scandal with motivation in mind. The outrage that greeted his remarks is one sign of how sensitive people are about ability. The remark that caused so much trouble was the one about ability: He suggested that there were more men than women with the high innate ability needed to do physics at the level of a Harvard professor.
He also said a little about motivation. Specifi cally, he suggested that fewer women than men were willing to put in the long hours and make the other sacrifi ces required for success in a highly demanding, highly competitive fi eld. As far as I can make out, this comment didn’t attract much attention except a bit of grumbling about how tough it is for women to do that kind of work without adequate daycare or partners who share the housework.
I didn’t see anybody talk about the basic idea of motivation to do math and science. And this is most likely where the biggest part of the problem is. (I use the word “problem” tentatively, because I’m not really convinced that the shortage of female physics professors at Harvard qualifi es as a real problem. What, exactly, is the downside of having equations solved and neutrinos tracked by more men than women?)
50 Is There Anything Good About Men?
Almost everything said against Dr. Summers, and what little was said in his defense, as well as what was said subsequently by people attempting fresh and balanced approaches to the issue of women in science, focused on the question of whether women have less native ability than men to study science. Always ability. The whole argument about Summers and what he should be permitted to say and think was about ability.
What if the lack of women in top science jobs isn’t a result of differ- ences in ability after all? Could it be motivation?
Maybe women can do math and science perfectly well. Maybe they just don’t like to.
After all, most men don’t like math either. Only a small minority of people fi nd it satisfying to work with numbers and equations and such things. Think about the people you know who do like that stuff. Most of them are guys.
A few years ago, researcher Patricia Hausman, speaking to a meeting of the National Academy of Engineering, expressed a politically incorrect conclusion about why women don’t make their careers in the natural sciences. It’s neither because of a lack of ability nor because prejudice and oppression stop them. Her summation was apt: “They don’t want to.”