228 Catherine Wilson
clude women’s greater emotionality and empathy, women’s greater predisposition
to form intimate social relationships and lesser tolerance for physical pain, men’s
greater liability to anger, and more robust sex drive [Baumeister, 2000]. “Men are
more likely to compete with one another for status using violence or occupational
achievement”, Stephen Pinker observes, “women more likely to use derogation and
other forms of verbal aggression.... Women are more attentive to their infants’
everyday cries... And men and women differ in their patterns of sexual jealousy,
their mate preferences, and their incentives to philander” [Pinker, 2002, 345]. The
two norms theory, as characterized by its critic Julia Annas [Annas, 1993], posits
two different appropriate modes of life and customary occupations for, and two
sets of standards by which to judge moral virtue, for men and women.
The existence of two different modes of life for the two sexes is noted by E.O.
Wilson. “History records not a single culture in which women have controlled
the political and economic lives of men... Men have traditionally assumed the
positions of chieftains, shamans, judges and warriors. Their modern technocratic
counterparts rule the industrial states and head the corporations and churches”
[Wilson, 1978, 128]. David Barash observes “There is no society, historically, or
in recent times, in which women have not borne the primary responsibility for
child care.... In all societies, men do men things and women are left holding the
babies ....” [Barash,1979, 108]. Though the data set employed by these writers
is mainly historical, the explanation is not: both Wilson and Barash suggest that
men’s political and cultural pre-eminence supervenes on basic emotional and atti-
tudinal differences between the sexes, differences that reflect in turn their different
reproductive strategies.
These differences are hypothesized to stem from the much larger investment
women — like most mammals — make in direct child care, and in the shorter
interval in which they can reproduce. Since male and female intelligence, creativ-
ity, task-persistence, and so on are not very different when measured objectively
[Maccoby and Jacklin, 1975], the suggestion that men’s and women’s reproduc-
tive strategies offer a scientifically better and deeper explanation of women’s lower
degree of participation in influential, status-conferring activities than rival hy-
potheses citing arbitrary discrimination, malice, or cognitive or physical deficits
has considerable plausibility. Pinker sums up the notion of differential parental
investment and its relation to psychology as follows:
Many of the psychological differences between the sexes are exactly
what an evolutionary biologist who knew only their physical differ-
ences would predict. Throughout the animal kingdom, when the fe-
male has to invest more calories and risk in each offspring (in the case
of mammals through pregnancy and nursing) she also invests more in
nurturing the offspring after birth, since it is more costly for a female
to replace a child than for a male to replace one. The difference in
investment is accompanied by a greater competition among males over
opportunities to mate, since mating with many partners is more likely
to multiply the offspring of a male than the number of offspring of a