Politics, evolution, and gender: A heterodox firestorm and lessons learned

I'm not sure what the true controversy here is but I do believe that schools have been skewed in favor of girls for years now and we do need to take a look at how we are educating boys-it can't be the right answer to accept that boys are more prone to ADD and we need to drug them up in order to educate them. I have not read the book (The Decline of Males; Tiger, 2000) but from the title I would bet this guy has some very valid points …… Colleges should not be afraid to discuss this because as a woman and the mother of both a male and a female I think it is an important issue.

When my research team met soon after this controversial event, I brought up this comment and we decided to follow up with a study on this issue. This comment, which is surely educated-sounding and thoughtful, was written by a layperson who was, concurrently, a parent of both a boy and a girl. Maybe, we thought, the rejection of the idea of an evolutionary basis to anything related to sex or gender is particularly likely among people who are (a) academics and (b) non-parents (as it turns out, there is empirical overlap between these categories as academics are less likely than are other professionals to have kids).

We designed a study to see if the belief that evolutionary forces play a role in shaping various kinds of phenomena is related to political orientation, status as an academic, and parental status. We had a sample of academics from around the US and a matched sample of non-academics. We asked participants to rate items from different categories in terms of the degree to which they believed that "nature" (proxy for evolutionary forces) accounted for them. The categories were as follows:

• Behavioral differences between boys and girls
• Behavioral differences between men and women
• Behavioral differences between hens and roosters
• Universals in human behavior that are not related to sex or gender
• Behavioral differences between cats and dogs

Our findings were quite clear. Academics, people who identified as politically liberal, and non-parents significantly rejected the idea of evolved behavioral sex differences. This finding was true even when asked about hens and roosters. Further, scholars from the fields of Women's Studies and Sociology were particularly likely to report that hens and roosters behaved differently from one another primarily due to "nurture."

Is the academy politicized? The data from this study as well as from a more recent study from our lab suggest that the answer to this question is an unequivocal yes. This is deeply troubling not least because the point of the academy, to my mind, is to advance open inquiry in order to help us best understand the world and our place in it.