Why Can't a Man Be More Like a Woman? Read online

  The early Christian church adopted the Greek philosophy that held women to be inferior to men by nature and based its laws on the Roman legal codes which gave women fewer rights than men in the home and in civic society. Women’s presumed inferior status was linked to scriptural texts which claimed that only man was created in God’s image. Just consider: ‘But I would have you know that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God’ (1 Corinthians 11:3), and ‘Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die’ (Ecclesiasticus 25:24).

  Christianity has traditionally given men the positions of authority, while few women are mentioned in the Bible by name and role, and they are seriously downgraded. ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body . . .’ (Ephesians 5:22–3); ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law’ (1 Corinthians 14:34); ‘Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee’ (Genesis 3:16).

  Later Christian theologians and authors continued with these negative views. Tertullian, born in the second century AD, described women as ‘the devil’s gateway’ in his De Cultu Feminarum and criticised their love of gaudy clothing. Fathers of the Christian Church such as St Augustine believed that only men, not women, were made in the image of God and St Jerome was another vehement misogynist who considered women to be the root of all evil and said, ‘Woman is the gate of the devil, the way of wickedness, the sting of the serpent, in a word a dangerous thing.’ These doctrines influenced Christian theology for centuries. Thomas Aquinas still maintained in the thirteenth century that women were intellectually inferior and created only to help men by conceiving children.

  Women in ancient Chinese culture had virtually no rights. According to Confucius, women did not deserve an education because they were not equal to men. It was the duty of a Chinese girl to obey the men in her family, and have her feet bound to make her more desirable for marriage, and sometimes not even be given a name but be known as ‘daughter number one’ or ‘daughter number two’. In ancient India, by contrast, women were originally valued equally to men, but this positive view gradually declined as females came to be deemed less useful or valuable than males.

  At the time of the foundation of Islam women had little or no rights. But the prophet Muhammad revolutionised this by giving women rights including property ownership, inheritance, education and divorce. The Koran is clear that men and women are equally valuable, although men have superior abilities which make it their duty to protect women. However, even in recent times women under the extreme Islamist regime of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan were forced to wear the burqa in public and forbidden to work, while girls were denied education after the age of eight.

  The origins of the movement for women’s suffrage are attributed to late eighteenth-century France, but it was not until 1839 that Mississippi became the first of the United States to pass laws allowing married women to own property separately from their husbands; other states followed. It was only in 1893 that the British colony of New Zealand became the first self-governing nation to extend the right to vote to all adult women. The first European country to introduce women’s suffrage was the Grand Principality of Finland, which elected the world’s first female members of parliament in 1907. In 1928 British women won full voting rights on the same conditions as men. But even now women worldwide have limited political power. In the parliament of the United Kingdom less than twenty-five per cent of members of both Houses of Parliament are women at the time of writing, and in the United States Congress the figure is only eighteen per cent.

  In practically all economically primitive societies men perform physically demanding work such as hunting, fishing, metalworking, weapon-making and boat building. The women normally farm, manufacture and repair clothes, and do the work at home, which, as we shall see, has led them to make important inventions in agriculture. The same division of labour has been observed all over the world. There are a few examples of societies, such as the aborigines of the Trobriand Islands, where the system of inheritance is matrilineal and women hold a very good position, but men remain in charge. Even in most modern societies, men are more likely to do physical work and travel, while women more commonly stay at home and take responsibility for domestic work and caring for children.

  A special form of discrimination is female genital mutilation, involving partial or total excision of the female genitals for non-medical reasons. It is thought to affect some 140 million women worldwide. The prevalence is particularly high in north-east Africa. The reasons vary, but a key one is ‘purification’ of the woman, and even some mothers support it. It is a form of gender-based violence.

  Is the domination of women by men dependent on the different biological features of men and women? To explain the basis of this historical and current situation, it has been often set forth as indisputable that men are socially superior because they are naturally superior. Men, many have claimed, are endowed by nature with higher physical and mental attributes. Consider Charles Darwin’s views. In The Descent of Man (1871) he wrote:

  Man is more courageous, pugnacious and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius . . . Woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition, chiefly in her greater tenderness and less selfishness; and this holds good even with savages, as shewn by a well-known passage in Mungo Park’s Travels, and by statements made by many other travellers. Woman, owing to her maternal instincts, displays these qualities towards her infants in an eminent degree; therefore it is likely that she would often extend them towards her fellow-creatures. Man is the rival of other men; he delights in competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too easily into selfishness. These latter qualities seem to be his natural and unfortunate birthright. It is generally admitted that with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilisation.

  The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman–whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music (inclusive both of composition and performance), history, science, and philosophy, with half-a-dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison. We may also infer, from the law of the deviation from averages, so well-illustrated by Mr. Galton, in his work on Hereditary Genius, that if men are capable of a decided pre-eminence over women in many subjects, the average of mental power in man must be above that of woman.

  But Darwin had no real evidence for that conclusion.

  Biological differences have often been blamed for the inequality between the sexes. Nicolas Malebranche, a French religious philosopher, argued in the seventeenth century that abstract thought was impossible for women because of the delicacy of their brain fibres. In 1875 the English biologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer, who coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’, argued that women were incapable of abstract thought and could not understand questions of justice, only issues of care. Sigmund Freud described women as inferior to men and argued that they were deficient in abstract thought, more influenced by feeling than reason. ‘Women oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own,’ he wrote in 1925. Freud also proposed that girls and women were incomplete men. His concept of penis envy was based on the notion that girls realise early that they are not as complete as boys, and want to be more like them. I
cannot take Freud seriously in spite of his great influence.

  In contrast to all the negative views about women, fiction has been much more positive. Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own claimed:

  Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her to be a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as man, some think even greater.

  It takes much research to understand and account for men and women’s current unequal outcomes in academic careers. There are fewer women in academic positions in universities, especially in maths and science. A recent survey in the United States showed that women in science, engineering and technology were much less likely to obtain tenure in full-time academic positions than men. The figures were twenty-nine per cent of women compared to fifty-eight per cent of men. In addition only twenty-three per cent of women compared to fifty per cent of men achieved the rank of full professor. Why are women so under-represented in this sphere? What role do biological and social factors play? We will return to this later.

  It is important to recognise how much the position of women in modern society has changed. Women have developed feminism, a movement based on the belief that women should have equal rights to men in all spheres of life, with widespread success. Many women hold high positions in politics as well as the commercial world; consider Angela Merkel in Germany and Hillary Clinton in the United States, and remember Margaret Thatcher. There are several awards in the United Kingdom for achievements by women in business. In the Olympic Games women have an equal role to that of men. Yet many people still consider housekeeping and raising children to be a woman’s proper sphere. The feminist Germaine Greer claims that there has been a recent rise in misogyny as women expect to share men’s lives and men find this intolerable.

  Do these widely observed differences in male and female social roles arise from biological foundations? We return to the tricky set of problems of identifying human male–female differences and then determining whether these have a social or biological cause. I will first look at the embryonic development of humans to see how the physical differences between the sexes have arisen.

  3

  Modified Women

  What would men be without women? Scarce, sir . . . mighty scarce.

  Mark Twain

  The biological differences that can be found between the bodies and brains of males and females are largely due to the way their embryos develop. After starting life in the womb as a single cell, the fertilised egg, we all begin to develop as females, the default sex. Early development of the human embryo follows a female path and is thus similar in males and females, with sexual differences appearing only at later stages when male development starts by modifying female development. Although the development of the individual as either male or female is genetically fixed at fertilisation, males develop only because, in about half the embryos, there are genes that modify female development. If these genes did not do their job properly, we would all be women. A sobering thought for us males.

  The fertilised egg divides to give rise to all the cells in the body, and the organisation of the developing embryo is determined by the behaviour of cells in different regions. Cell behaviour is largely determined by their proteins, specified in turn by genes that provide the codes for the different proteins. In humans some 23,000 genes are located on forty-six chromosomes, twenty-three from each parent. Turning different genes on and off in different places and at different times in the developing embryo determines what proteins the cells contain, and thus how the cells behave. In this way genes play a fundamental role in how we develop. Genes, via the proteins they code for, determine the shape and function not only of the body but also of the brain, so that certain behaviours are genetically determined. An obvious one is the desire to have sex.

  Whether a gene is switched on, and thus whether its protein is made, depends on the binding of certain proteins–transcription factors–to the DNA in special control regions of the gene. Only if the correct control regions are occupied by the right transcription factors can a gene be turned on. The activation of a single gene may involve many transcription factors, and they can also turn genes off so that the proteins they code for cannot be made. In addition hormones can affect the control regions by regulating the release of transcription factors or preventing them from acting. The protein produced by one gene can activate several other genes or inactivate them, and so a circuit of gene interactions is set up which determines cell behaviour and how it changes with time.

  The basic mechanisms involved in embryonic development are understood, but the role of many proteins remains to be deciphered, and this is especially true for the development of the brain. A key question is what controls the behaviour of individual cells so that highly organised patterns emerge, like those of the nerve cells in the brain. The cells arising from division of the fertilised egg become different from each other as a result of signals between each other as well as of their internal developmental programmes. Hormones released by cells in one part of the embryo can affect cells in other parts, so that they too play a key role.

  Signals from other cells often arrive at the cell membrane but most do not enter the cell, instead binding to a receptor which activates a sequence of molecular interactions within the cell leading to genes being turned on or off. This sequence can be very complex and there is a nice cartoon by Rube Goldberg, The Self-Opening Umbrella, which illustrates it. A man has a chain of interactions that causes his umbrella to go up when it rains. The rain causes a prune to expand and so light a lighter which starts a fire which boils a kettle which whistles and frightens a monkey who jumps on to a swing which cuts a cord releasing birds who, when they fly out, raise the umbrella. In the cell the sequence can be much more complex.

  After fertilisation, the egg undergoes a number of cell divisions which give rise to a layer of cells that will develop into a human body. This layer then undergoes gastrulation, a sequence of movements which sets up the basic structure of the embryo (I am quoted as saying that gastrulation, not birth, marriage or death, is the most important event in our lives). After gastrulation the nervous system begins to develop, starting with the formation of the neural tube from a sheet of cells. The anterior end of this tube gives rise to the brain, while further back it develops into the spinal cord. The nervous system is the most complex of all our organ systems, as there are many hundreds of types of neuron, differing in the billions of connections they make. Some features of its development will be described later.

  It is the female that dominates in embryonic development. She provides the cell–the egg that gives rise to the child–while the male contributes only his genes at fertilisation. She also feeds and protects the embryo during its development. Early development of the human embryo, as we have seen, follows a female path. But the development of the individual as either male or female is genetically fixed at fertilisation by the chromosomal content of the sperm that fuses with the egg. There are two chromosomes that determine the sex of an embryo, X and Y. Females have cells with two X chromosomes (XX) while males have an X and a Y (XY). It is worth noting that in women one of the two X chromosomes is randomly inactivated, as only one is required for normal function. Before fertilisation the cells that give rise to egg and sperm divide and halve the number of their chromosomes, the beginning of a process known as meiosis. The egg thus has a single X chromosome while each sperm cell carries either an X or a Y. The genetic sex of mammals like us is thus established at the moment of conception, when the sperm introduces either an X or a Y chromosome into the egg. The presence of a Y chromosome makes the embryo develop as a male; in its absence, the default development is along the female pathway. If the cells in the embryo have just a single X chromosome and no Y–Turner syndrome–the embryo develops as female, but with abnormalities. In the absence of the X chromosome, there is no development.

  The genes o
n the Y chromosome carry code for only about twenty proteins, but a most important key gene is SRY, which causes testes to develop. The testes then secrete hormones about ten weeks into gestation including testosterone, which cause the development of male tissues and suppress female development. Testosterone is high in male embryos during weeks twelve to eighteen and then again during weeks thirty-four to forty-one, when it reaches a level ten times higher than that found in female embryos. It is also high in baby boys in the first three months after birth. The development of a penis in males, instead of the clitoris of females, and the reduced size of mammary glands in males are due to the action of testosterone. Breasts and nipples are already in place in the embryo before testosterone is secreted, as it is essentially female at early stages, so they are present in both sexes but have no function in males. Thus the SRY gene has a major effect on our lives: it initiates the basic differences between men and women by turning on male hormones. In the male embryo the SRY gene is expressed in the brain, kidneys, heart and pancreas, while in adults its activity can be detected in the kidneys, heart and liver. It is very clear from our sexual development that males are essentially modified females, and that applies to both our bodies and our brains.

  Imprinting is a peculiar and special feature in development. During maturation of the sperm and egg certain genes are inactivated by a process known as imprinting. At least a hundred genes are affected; the majority of their functions remain to be worked out, although most are expressed in the brain. Their general function is to control development so as to give an advantage to whichever sex is involved in the imprinting. Thus imprinting in the egg will reduce the growth of the embryo in order to limit the negative effects excessive growth can have on the mother. By contrast male imprinting of the sperm promotes growth. It is clear that there are significant genetic differences in male and female brains due to imprinting.