Divided Labours: An Evolutionary View of Women at Work Book

This slim volume is part of "Darwinism Today", a series of provocative short books by an international group of leading thinkers in the field of evolutionary theory and its impact on our society. The book series developed out of a programme of Darwin Seminars at the London School of Economics. Each essay stands alone as a topic and is about 14,000 words long. Topics include farming, labour, and genetics. The series is edited by Helena Cronin and Oliver Curry and aims to reach a wide readership. Here is a little book that will cause more than a few arguments and test some relationships. Kingsley Browne spells out his central thesis "that much of the glass ceiling (to proportionate representation of women in upper management) and gender gap is the product of basic biological sex differences in personality and temperament acting in the context of the modern labour market". Some 40% of managers in the US workforce are women but women only get to be 5-7% of senior managers. Browne argues that sexual equality policy should not be based on the assumption of "one human nature shared by both sexes" but rather on "a male nature and a female nature". Evolutionary biology has shown a remarkable diversity of breeding strategies amongst animals from the macho "inseminate them and leave them" (mating specialists) to the "house husband" (parenting specialists). The question arises as to which is the "natural" human strategy given our evolutionary background. Recent decades' liberality and equality have tended towards the one nature approach and have battled for this approach in social policy. Browne quotes evidence from Aristotle (Onassis): "If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning"; to more academic, anthropological and psychological claims which amount to the same thing: "A correlation between a man's power and his access to women". There follows an exploration of comparative aggressiveness, competitiveness, status seeking, risk taking, nurturing and empathising with others, between men and women. Browne supports the biological basis for the predictable gender differences and goes on to examine the role of society in addressing the problems which arise from our current dilemmas related to such perceived differences. He claims that the belief that the sexes are identical has led to a number of policies "of doubtful wisdom and effectiveness" and suggests that successful solutions can be achieved by modifying the environment "to work with human nature" rather than "by attempting the impossible task of altering human nature itself". Like it or not, Browne confronts a real problem that will not go away. --Douglas PalmerRead More