Dr. Roy Baumeister is a psychology professor at Florida State University, where he focuses on the area of social psychology. In his new book, "Is There Anything Good About Men?" he discusses why men have for millennia held higher positions in society than women.
00:07:13.660Well, why they have the motivation is hard to say. My guess is there's something that's just
00:07:21.340just genetic. A lot of women, I know many fine women scientists, but they're more interested in
00:07:27.420living things. One, I was talking to her the other day, and she says she and her husband are both
00:07:31.220scientists, and they're interested in everything. But when it comes to science on inanimate objects,
00:07:36.860you know, study of things, she just loses interest. She says, she calls it the dead world and says,
00:07:41.680I leave the dead world to him. Life and living things just seem to capture women's interests more and
00:07:48.700more interested in people. I mean, we've seen in the last 30, 40 years, a huge influx of women into
00:07:55.680the upper ranks of researchers and professors and everything, but not equally in all fields. And
00:08:02.100it's not that the fields aren't receptive. It's just that women are much less interested in some.
00:08:06.780Larry Summers was president of Harvard and made some remarks about being attacked at one point,
00:08:13.820how come there's so few women physics professors at Harvard. And he said, I got into a lot of trouble
00:08:20.480for suggesting there might be ability differences. Well, the average man and the average women have
00:08:25.600about equal ability. There are more men at both extremes, both the genius and the retarded. So in
00:08:32.740him suggesting there might be more men at the super high level, that's probably true, probably for
00:08:37.860biological reasons, just as the same as there are more men and women at the super retarded, very low
00:08:44.160intelligence level. And nature just seems to gamble a little bit more with the male than with the
00:08:49.900female. But even those differences are not so huge as to a comfort. I think that the bigger difference is
00:08:57.000that women are capable of doing just fine in these fields. They're just not as interested in it.
00:09:01.740Several scholars have spent decades studying this, tracking the kids through school and so forth.
00:09:08.280And it's not that the girls sign up for math and science classes and flunk out. No, that's not true
00:09:13.060at all. If they have electives, they don't sign up. They'll take biology rather than physics if they
00:09:19.600have the choice. And so the study of things, who are the engineers, the technologists, the people who
00:09:27.200build things and so on. It's much more men than women. And that's, I think, reflects interest and
00:09:34.540desire. And I think that the point of putting it out that it's a matter of motivation, interest,
00:09:38.980desire rather than ability, that's an important and very positive message because it means there's
00:09:43.540no basis for discriminating. If we thought that, say, men were really inherently better at these
00:09:49.760things than women, then an employer might say, you get an application from a woman, say, well, maybe I
00:09:54.080don't want to hire her because she's a woman. She's probably not as good at it. But no, I'm saying
00:09:58.640at least the abilities are basically equal. The differences that show up in the world are mainly
00:10:03.960because of what people like and want to do. And so if a woman's wanting to do something, you can
00:10:09.340assume that she's probably just as qualified as the man or just as capable as the man. There's not
00:10:14.460likely to be any deficit in the ability to use their job. So let people do what they want. And
00:10:19.660we shouldn't try to, you know, force people into or out of fields that they're not interested in
00:10:25.840simply to match some arbitrary notion of social engineering.
00:10:30.540And it's interesting you brought up the Larry Summers thing. Just last week, or after I finished
00:10:35.120your book, I was reading a popular tech blog on the web called TechCrunch. And the author,
00:10:41.840Michael Arrington, he's really big in the tech world. And he gets a lot of complaints from people
00:10:47.580that they don't, that he doesn't feature enough women startups, or whenever he has these big
00:10:51.820conferences, he doesn't have enough women speakers about, you know, or when featuring women startups
00:10:57.640that are started by women. And he said, it's not that we're not trying. He says, we just can't find
00:11:02.080them. And he made the point that, you know, we look, we scour, but a lot of women just aren't
00:11:07.860interested in that. So it's hard to find women to speak or to feature them, which I thought was kind
00:11:12.960of interesting, kind of serendipitous that I read this article right after I read your book.
00:11:16.000Yes, I suspect that he's quite right about that. And in fact, I would guess that a woman startup
00:11:22.700technology company would get more attention than a man would, or would be more likely to be covered
00:11:26.860there. Because there are all these efforts to, well, let's, let's make sure to encourage women as much
00:11:33.040as they can. You know, if the interest is not there, it isn't likely to happen. It's not, it doesn't seem
00:11:39.640that it's because of barriers that are keeping women out or anything like that.
00:11:43.220We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show.
00:11:48.920So is this motivation in men and women, is it innate or is it that's something that the culture
00:11:55.460teaches? For example, you know, someone would hear this. Okay. So men and women are just as capable.
00:12:00.980Women just lack the motivation. Perhaps we should encourage women more and young girls to go into
00:12:06.740the science. So that's something that they are, you know, they'd like to do. I mean, is it, can you
00:12:11.420change that or is it just, is this something innate and what's going on there?
00:12:15.600Okay. Well, there are several different things. If it's innate, that does not mean it can't be
00:12:19.280changed. Nature usually sets some tendencies and culture can either build on them, which it usually
00:12:25.120does, ignore them and leave them as they are, or it can try to counteract them. We've, in general,
00:12:31.240in our society, I think we are trying to counteract it. So our cultural effort is to shrink
00:12:37.320the differences between men and women, whereas through most of history, it's, it is just taken
00:12:44.320it as they are and then tried to build on them. It used to be what might be somewhat in different
00:12:50.520inclinations between boys and girls became completely different life paths and neither could
00:12:55.100do what the other wanted. And now we are trying very hard to encourage and pressure and probably
00:13:01.580men to get more involved in the traditional female activities of raising children, things like
00:13:06.440that and trying to get women into science and technology and everything. But getting back
00:13:11.700to your question of whether it's innate, we don't know the answer to that. The people
00:13:16.720who have studied it seem repeatedly to come to the conclusion that it looks like it's innate.
00:13:22.780It certainly starts very early. Like I said, the people who, say the women who do go into
00:13:28.340these science classes in college, they don't usually report that, oh, they didn't want me
00:13:32.840there or they were pressuring me out. Often they report that they were received very positive
00:13:37.360encouraging treatment. It doesn't seem like they're being prevented there. Now, I don't
00:13:43.580know for sure if somehow they're getting a message early in childhood that is altering patterns
00:13:49.640of motivation. And that's hard to know and hard to rule out. But it seems the way we've
00:13:55.740been policing all the materials for children for a couple decades now, it seems very unlikely
00:14:01.760that there are strong messages discouraging girls from going into things. I can't really
00:14:08.560answer the question of whether it's innate. You know, which class you take in college and
00:14:15.460what you choose to do with your career is not determined by your genes, but genes may start
00:14:20.400you on a path and may make some things more rewarding to you. And then you seek out experiences
00:14:26.160and things will snowball along the way. So it is possible. Certainly we could pressure
00:14:32.160all men to leave science and then only allowed, only gave science jobs to women and forced women
00:14:39.120to take them while we would have more women doing science. Whether they would be happy and
00:14:43.660whether they would be as good at it and successful at it and find it as rewarding as men do, well,
00:14:50.160probably not given that people are being forced to do something. So just it's kind of up in the air,
00:14:54.960really, there's no conclusion. Many of us have daughters and we would like to see them go into science. And I think we encourage them all their lives in every way we can. And we certainly don't see them getting the message from elsewhere that they shouldn't go into science.
00:15:08.960But still they seem, in many respects, not to want to do that or eventually they find something else that seems more interesting to them.
00:15:18.960And of course, science is a big category and there are a lot of sciences that study living things and, well, the social sciences study people. And there are plenty of women in those and many having outstanding careers.
00:15:30.960But for an interest in things and in small bits of non-living reality, they don't seem in general to capture the female imagination as much as the male.
00:15:42.960All right. Well, so you argue in your book as well that there's a dark underbelly to the success or the, I guess, the enjoyment of status that men have, have had for the most part in the economic and social world.
00:15:56.960But there's also, you know, so there's this dark underbelly and that men are also seen as expendable by culture. Can you explain how culture exploits men in a negative fashion?
00:16:06.960Yes. Well, that was one of the themes, one of the things that got started me on it is, well, I think the feminist critique of society said, look up at the top and said, well, look at the president and the Congress and the CEOs of chief executives and the powerful rich people around the world.
00:16:26.960And they're more men than women. And they thought, okay, well, it must be great to be a man. Society is set up to favor men. But a social scientist has to look at both sides.
00:16:34.960If you look down at the bottom, you see mostly men, too. You see who's in prison, who's homeless, who's dead on the job, who's sent off to die in battle.
00:16:46.960Men are there, too. Latest statistic, deaths on the job in the United States, 93% men. So men are just doing many more dangerous jobs than women.
00:16:58.960And this is not unique to the United States. This is true pretty much all over the world. Societies tend to give bigger rewards and bigger punishments to males.
00:17:12.960There seem to be a lot of jobs in a culture, a lot of positions that are more high risk, high reward. And so it's a matter of would you take the risk for the higher reward?
00:17:24.960Certainly, jobs that have the possibility of getting you killed have to pay a little extra, because otherwise, who would take such a job as compared to another job?
00:17:34.960That's one of the things that contributes to difference in salaries between men and women. Men will do more of these dangerous jobs.
00:17:40.960Now, society tends to shield women from doing these risky things that will get them killed or have their lives wasted or seriously injured in other ways.
00:17:52.960Probably for rather simple biological reasons. Throughout most of history, most cultures, most societies were competing against others.
00:18:02.960And your very survival depended on being strong enough to stand up to your neighbors.
00:18:07.960And, well, the larger the group, the more successful you're going to be, losing population and having too few of you to last or to maintain a competitive advantage.
00:18:21.960That was fatal to a society. And it's true. There's no question. Look at almost all societies in the history of the world. They've encouraged their people to have more children.
00:18:33.960More children are simply seen as better. They're better for the economy. They're better for the health of the society and so forth.
00:18:42.960But the number of children you have depends on the number of women you have.
00:18:46.960And that's a simple fact of biology. Most women have at least one child and it's hard for a woman to have more than about a dozen.
00:18:54.960Whereas a single man certainly can have hundreds of children. There are reports of men having over a thousand children.
00:19:00.960So if you lose a whole bunch of your men, say you have a big war and half of your men are killed, well, the next generation can still be full size.
00:19:11.960But if you lose half your women, your next generation is going to be significantly smaller in size.
00:19:17.960So for maintaining population and this increasing population, which again has been the goal of most societies, most cultures, most religions in the history of the world, not all, but most and certainly most successful ones,
00:19:30.960you want to make sure that most of your women stay alive, are able to reach adulthood and bear children.
00:19:38.960Whereas, again, one man can go from woman to woman and have lots of different children in the same year, whereas a woman who goes from man to man still can only have about one child per year.
00:19:50.960So I think that's one reason. Another reason that society looks at men as expendable goes with the kind of social networks and groups that men create.
00:20:00.960The larger groups, people are replaceable in them. So if you look at a corporation or a military unit or an orchestra or whatever, a sports team, everyone in it gets replaced over time.
00:20:15.960But look at these small relationships in a family. You can't really replace a child's mother.
00:20:21.960You can get another woman to do some of the work, but it's really a different family if the mother dies and another woman is brought in and so on.
00:20:29.960So women are cultivated by their style of social relations to understanding themselves as valuable and precious and men more to see themselves as expendable.
00:20:42.960Turning to how society exploits men. It will, again, assign men to dangerous jobs, attract men into things with exploration where a dozen people might go exploring and half of them get killed and some come back with nothing.
00:21:02.960But one or two every so often come back and have found something really wonderful and that's something that will enrich the group.
00:21:09.960Well, then society gives those men a lot of rewards. But again, we're not looking or not attending to all the other men who lost out and maybe lost their lives in doing that.
00:21:24.960The same with fighting in battle. Somebody has to fight in battle against the enemies.
00:21:30.960These days, given the technology, certainly you don't need to be strong and husty or have the big shoulders or the few biological differences in physical powers between the strength.
00:21:43.960But still, there's a sense of wanting to protect women from that and that somehow men are more expendable.
00:21:52.960Even on the Titanic, it was interesting to notice. I mean, there was a case where a ship was going down and, well, there were thousands of people aboard.
00:22:02.960And there weren't enough seats in the lifeboats. And they gave them to the women. The men, you might have thought, well, patriarchy should count for something and the rich and successful men.
00:22:15.960But the rich and powerful men on there actually had a lower survival rate than the poorest level of women.
00:22:22.960You know, all your wealth and power didn't do any good even for saving your life. Under those circumstances, it was better to be a woman.
00:22:31.960Again, I think women and children, the society, our society, pretty much every society sees women and children as somehow more precious and more valuable than men.
00:22:42.960That's the phrase, even women and children were killed, which one still sees in the news every month or so.
00:22:51.960What that means is that, well, maybe it's bad if men are killed, but it's worse if women and children are killed because women and children are more valuable than men.
00:22:59.960Join us next time for part two of our interview with Dr. Roy Baumeister as we discuss his book, Is There Anything Good About Men?