Extreme thinking
Growing up in the feminist heyday of the 1970s, I took it as given that men and women were equal not just in principle but also in essence. Axiomatically I thought that the two sexes are born with much the same innate talents and potentials. That men and women often end up in very different professions with very different skill sets I have always put down entirely to cultural bias.
Recently, however, my faith in this view has begun to waver. My husband is alarmingly good at reading maps and diagrams of every description. While I am poring over the Thomas Guide, he discerns the route we should take in a flash -- yet I am the one with degrees in mathematics and physics. His attention to the details of machinery never ceases to amaze me. Other male friends seem mysteriously able to bond with computers, audio equipment and backhoes. I know a few women who fit this bill, but they are rare. Against my deepest instincts, I have found myself wondering whether these kinds of skills might not have an innate component more liberally distributed among the male half of the population.
In “The Essential Difference,” English psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen aims to convince us that indeed men’s and women’s brains have distinct characteristics, with the male brain more naturally attuned to “systemizing.” For Baron-Cohen, “systemizing” encompasses any activity that requires us to work out logical relationships between inputs and outputs -- that is, to make a connection between cause and effect. Here, men’s skills with map reading and mechanics result not from cultural bias but from genetically ingrained predispositions. If the male brain prefers systematic analysis, according to Baron-Cohen’s model the female brain leans toward “empathizing” -- reading and responding to other people’s emotional states.
An essentialist view of gender difference has gained ground over the last 20 years, in part as a counter to the decades in which it was anathema in some intellectual circles to suggest that male-female dissimilarities had any physiological component. Today the scales have tipped firmly in the other direction, and Baron-Cohen follows in a long line of authors who now assure us that the scientific evidence for innate difference is beyond doubt. He notes, for example, studies in which baby boys just a few days old spend more time looking at mechanical objects than do baby girls, who look longer at human faces.
Attempting to bring scientific rigor to a field that has long suffered from murky definitions, Baron-Cohen and his colleagues at Cambridge University have developed tests to measure what they term our “Systemizing Quotient” (SQ) and “Empathy Quotient” (EQ) -- after the concept of IQ, or intelligence quotient. Statistically, men perform better on the SQ test, women on the EQ. To Baron-Cohen this suggests a psychological spectrum ranging from “the female brain,” or type E, to “the male brain,” or type S. Though he assures us that people of either sex can fall into each category, we should, he says, expect to see most women conforming in greater degree to type E and most men to type S.
According to Baron-Cohen these two brain types, with their particular strengths and weaknesses, largely determine the professions each sex tends to adopt. “People with the female brain make the most wonderful counselors, primary-school teachers, nurses, carers, social workers, mediators, group facilitators, or personnel staff,” he writes. “Each of these professions requires excellent empathizing skills. People with the male brain make the most wonderful scientists, engineers, mechanics, technicians, musicians, architects, electricians, plumbers, taxonomists, catalogists, bankers, toolmakers, programmers, or even lawyers. Each of these professions requires excellent systemizing skills.”
Baron-Cohen condenses his model into a grid, with one axis representing systemizing, the other representing empathizing. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle, with at least some component of both qualities in our psychic makeup. But what about the far corners of this diagram? Is there such a thing as a pure embodiment of either type? The most intriguing aspect of Baron-Cohen’s thesis is his suggestion that “the extreme male brain,” as he calls it, represents the specific subcategory of autism.
Autism affects men in far greater numbers than it does women -- by a ratio of 10 to 1, according to some estimates. Baron-Cohen, who directs the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, is the author of two books on the subject, and the condition has clearly played a pivotal role in his thinking about gender. One of the primary qualities of autistics is an inability to grasp other people’s emotional states, a sometimes alarming lack of empathy aptly dubbed “mind blindness.” Yet if autistics struggle to make some sense of their fellow humans, they often exhibit a profound rapport with machines or numbers or train timetables. Dustin Hoffman’s idiot savant in “Rain Man” was a fictional example, but the clinical literature is filled with cases of real-life autistics who possess an extraordinary ability to calculate prime numbers or work out the days of the week hundreds of years in the future. Baron-Cohen tells us about one little boy who had memorized the license plate numbers and registration renewal dates of every car in his neighborhood. He proposes that autism results when the type S mind is hypertrophically developed and when, correspondingly, there is a near total absence of type E characteristics.
By far the most riveting chapters of “The Essential Difference” are not about men versus women but about people who suffer from a milder version of autism known as Asperger syndrome. One spectacular case is the British mathematician Richard Borcherds, winner of the Fields Medal, the math world’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Like many people with AS, Borcherds finds it nearly impossible to engage in social chitchat, but his fluency with abstract ideas stuns even his brainy Oxbridge colleagues. Borcherds has found a way to thrive with his condition, and, as Baron-Cohen notes, autism appears to be a prime factor behind his skill.
The existence of an extreme type S raises a question about the opposite end of Baron-Cohen’s spectrum. Is there also an extreme type E? Here Baron-Cohen admits he’s stumped. An “extreme female brain” has never been observed in clinical laboratories, he tells us, and speculates that this may be because extreme empathizers would find themselves easily accepted; unlike extreme maleness, extreme femaleness may not be viewed as a problem. An Olympic-class empathizer would not only be the perfect therapist but also the ideal friend, “a wonderfully caring person who can rapidly make you feel fully understood ... [someone who] actually experiences [your] emotions as vividly as if your feelings were theirs.” Unlike his analysis of autism, which is subtle and nuanced, Baron-Cohen’s discussions of empathy are almost ludicrously naive. His characterization of the pure female mind reads like nothing so much as a description from a true-romance novel.
Baron-Cohen tells us that a major motivation for writing his book was a desire to counter the social stigma associated with autism. Although some high-functioning autistics such as Borcherds have managed to carve out successful niches, most AS patients he sees are depressed and continually struggling to adjust their lives to other people’s expectations. There is no question that, with both autism and AS on the rise, we need to find ways to help and accept this unique group. It has been suggested elsewhere that people with AS are ideally suited to many technical and scientific jobs and that we should identify them early and channel their talents accordingly. Yet in the service of rehabilitating one segment of the population, Baron-Cohen has developed a model of all humans that ends up -- despite his evident intention -- reinforcing a narrow-minded conception of the female gender. Although I have become convinced, along with many women of my generation, that there is probably some genetic component to male and female mental makeup, Baron-Cohen’s grid suggests that the great majority of either sex should be pretty good at both systemizing and empathizing. By stressing the extreme ends of the spectrum, Baron-Cohen has allowed the tail to wag the dog.
