The 2017 Million Women March on Washington approaches, along with about 30 sister marches around the country, including in New York City. It’s been forty-seven years since I marched down 5th Ave. for the Women’s Movement. Why did I go when my goal for that trip to Manhattan was to find a job? Entering an employment agency, I insisted on sitting at the men’s table rather than with the women who were required to take a typing test. When my persistence was met with a threat to call the police to eject me, I made my way to 5th Ave. and joined the March.
That threat is unlikely in today’s world, but biases against women that lurked under the surface for decades have recently come out into the open. In an Op Ed a few days ago, Walter Williams posed old prejudices as new facts. In his article, Liberals Struggle Against Reality, Williams decries liberals’ push for gender-neutral toys as positioning a social construct to be challenged and changed, rather than the reality of biology and DNA. Williams claims that there is increasing scientific evidence that gender preferences are biologically, rather than socially, determined, and fault Liberals for trying to go against nature. He cites no specific scientific study, perhaps because most studies that support his theory have been conducted on monkeys, not humans.
He first focuses on the controversy over gender-neutral toys. Williams insists that biology determines the choice of toys and, therefore, should determine how boys and girls are socialized. He ignores the scientific studies that show how labeling toys as ‘For Girls’ or ‘For Boys’ causes immediate rejection called the ‘Hot Potato’ effect. Bucking that stereotyping, I allowed my own toddler to populate her bed with dolls, a stuffed whale, and a Rubik’s Cube. She loved them all, but years later she confessed that the dolls blackmailed her by becoming evil Chuckies. Social pressures expressed with childlike honesty!
Williams theories of gender and genetics go well beyond toys. He asserts that equality of humans, including the sexes, is the exception world wide, not the norm. As proof that DNA dictates inequality, Williams points out that of the top thirty violinists of the 20th century, twenty are Jewish. As a Jew and a violin player, I can honestly say that if it was a genetic construct that gave rise to so many Jewish violinists, I would have a whole lot better at it. That Jews favored the violin in earlier generations was more a function of the instrument being portable, handy in case you were run out of town, and, therefore, conducive to being passed down through generations.
As annoying as it is to see Jewishness and violin playing in Williams’ arguments, his concluding assertion that genetically, men have higher IQs than women, is downright outrageous. He rails agains liberals who decry the tests are biased by comparing IQs to height measurements which are indisputable. With this false analogy, he concludes that you can no more alter IQs than you can change feet and inches.
Recent scientific studies show that male and female IQ scores are roughly equal until the age of fifteen, when, women appear to become less intelligent. However, women’s IQ test scores show an increase in recent decades, as traditional views concerning women’s education have changed. The progress made on decreasing the pressure on women to dumb it down, has resulted in some evidence that women’s IQ scores are surpassing the median scores of men. That same evidence shows, however, that the pay scale for women, has not increased in proportion to the increase shown on these IQ tests. Why is that?
Most women of my generation with high IQs and/or talents in the traditional male STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) weren’t encouraged to pursue those gifts aggressively. As a woman with an IQ greater than Albert Einstein, who grew up in a traditional household in the fifties, I can attest to the societal pressures to shut up and go play with my dolls. I will be forever grateful that my parents, while traditional, were also college-educated and encouraged me, quietly, in academic directions often reserved for my male counterparts. My success came at a price and I often joke about being surprised that my brothers didn’t murder me in my sleep. Yet, the joke had a serious underbelly that resonated with my genius girl friends. They fought the uphill battle against invisibility, inequality of pay and rank, and disrespect for “bitchy” women.
Will this generation end up fighting these battles anew? Knowing full well the psychological, social, and emotional impact of the DNA-based inferior intelligence argument, my objections must be loud and long. That such objections are labeled by Williams as an arrogant attempt to alter reality must not go unchallenged. I will be there as local women marches on January 21 and once again stand up to be counted. Women, and men, must visibly unite against this back-sliding into an oppressive, demeaning view that passes itself off as Truth.
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