Musings and Amusings

One of my favourite writers Kay S. Hymowitz suggests that the conflict between parenting and career is hardwired in the female brain.

In the struggle for equality between the sexes, it keeps coming down to motherhood, doesn’t it?

If there’s one part of evolutionary thinking that spells bad news for the feminist worldview, it is parental-investment theory, an idea originally proposed by Harvard professor Robert Trivers. Trivers was attempting to clarify Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, which went something like this: females of most species are more particular about their mates than males are. That means males must compete for female attention; hence the colourful tails of peacocks and the lovely songs of many male birds.

But why should females be pickier than males? It is also mostly females who feed and guard the kids. In fact, females do nearly everything that increases the survival, and eventual reproductive success, of their offspring. Trivers concluded that females, as he put it, “invest” more than males—and that includes being cautious about their sexual partners, the fathers of their offspring.

In fact, as neuroscientists and geneticists piece together the human brain’s evolution, it’s becoming clear that, if it’s natural for a woman to go crazy over her babies, it’s also natural for a woman to run the State Department. The same human female brain that’s primed with oxytocin is, like the male brain, a fantastically complex machine, capable of reasoning, innovative problem solving, and manoeuvring through hugely varied social environments.

And so in the twentieth century, the big-brained female—Femina sapiens, ready to use her brain in new ways, coincidentally at a time when the intellectually gratifying jobs of an advanced economy were becoming more plentiful. Men invented the antibiotic and the washing machine; today, women in economics departments calculate the benefits of these discoveries for their sex. Better yet, they themselves can make future discoveries in labs and R&D departments.

If human society can sometimes reconfigure biology—by curing polio and increasing athletic stamina, for example—could it reconfigure sexual selection so that fathers and mothers made equal investments in their young children? We don’t have much evidence for thinking so. Until the mid-1990s, Swedish parents got nine months of leave after the birth of a child. By 2004, only 20 percent of fathers were taking the two months. By contrast, a large majority of mothers made full use of their leave. Iceland launched a similar effort to equalize parental investment; fathers there are doing more, but nowhere near as much as mothers.

How do we make it easier for working women who want more time to invest in their young children to work part time, or to return to their jobs after an extended leave? What is the proper role of government in all this?