Roy Baumeister on Gender Differences and Culture

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2011

⏱️ 77 minutes

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Summary

Roy Baumeister of Florida State University and the author of Is There Anything Good About Men talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the differences between men and women in cultural and economic areas. Baumeister argues that men aren't superior to women nor are women superior to men. Rather there are some things men are better at while women excel at a different set of tasks and that these tradeoffs are a product of evolution and cultural pressure. He argues that evolutionary pressure has created different distributions of talent for men and women in a wide variety of areas. He argues that other differences in outcomes are not due to innate ability differences but rather come from different tastes or preferences.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you. Today is October 26, 2011, and my guest is Roy Balmeister, the
0:43.8	Francis Epps professor of social psychology at Florida State University. Roy, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:50.2	I'm glad to be here. Our topic for today is your book. With the title, is there anything good about
0:56.5	men? We're hoping that's a rhetorical question, we men. It's an incredibly thought-provoking book
1:03.7	on the differences between men and women, how culture shapes both sexes. I want to start with
1:09.8	the psychology literature that you open up with, and the perspective that social scientists have had
1:16.2	towards men and women and their differences or similarities. You talk early in the book about,
1:21.1	there's been a radical and sudden change about relative superiority of men and women. Talk about
1:28.2	what happened there. Well, I think for a long time there was an assumption that men were the proper
1:36.2	human beings and women were sort of an inferior copy, and the question was, could women be almost
1:41.4	as good as men and so on? There was a brief period of arguing, there were no differences that they
1:47.4	were equal, but since about 1980, almost all the literature on gender differences either
1:54.8	says women are better or some say that there's still no differences, but it's become sort of taboo
2:01.8	to see men as superior in any way. Now, I look at things that the world is more built on trade-offs
2:07.6	and any lasting difference. It's likely to be because of a trade-off, so being better at one
2:13.0	thing is likely to be connected to being not as good at something else, so neither it doesn't
2:18.4	really seem plausible that nature would have made gender one, one gender all around better than
2:22.5	the other. More likely it will preserve the differences if one is better for one thing and one
	...

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