The Volokh Conspiracy
The Volokh Conspiracy is a blog nominally aimed at legal scholars: that is, when it isn’t discussing just about anything that its authors want to, it’s about the law and the academic and theoretical applications of it. Thankfully, they don’t limit themselves to such questions, as this series of posts (try here and here) is most interesting. They’re talking about our own favourite subject, the differences between men and women. More, they’re talking about the psychological differences and in this specific case, the differences that make men or women better suited for combat roles.
Now, yes, they do discuss the physiological differences which mean that almost all women won’t be suitable for front-line infantry service (as most men aren’t) but a large part of the effort is expended in pointing out that men and women differ psychologically, and that thus only one of the sexes should be considered for certain roles.
The thing that I find interesting about the psychological side of the argument is that they rely upon the averages of men and women: women are assumed to be empathic, men to be systemizing. Now these assumptions are true, on average, as we know.
Empathy also has negative effects, as it not only engenders a reluctance to kill but is also associated with greater guilt for having killed.
OK, that’s not something that you want in a combat soldier. And this next also makes sense:
Because of the overlap between the sexes, arguably combat personnel should be selected on the basis of these traits rather than using sex as a proxy. However, unlike strength, which can be easily and cheaply screened for, future courage under fire cannot be readily measured. A consistent theme in the combat-behavior literature is that one never knows who is going to be an effective soldier until the shooting starts, and the identity of the good fighters often turns out to be a surprise.
Because individualized predictions of combat performance are not a practical way to select personnel, at least on a wholesale basis, proxies such as sex are more necessary when it comes to predicting whether one has what it takes psychologically to be effective in combat than they are for strength.
Ah, but, you see, we do in fact have simple and reasonable tests for empathy. Our own EQSQ personality tests. There’s nothing wrong with the logic being used: that there are certain attributes we want in combat soldiers, that these are hard to measure, so we should go with proxy measurements which are about as good as we’re going to get.
Except, of course, when we have measuring methods, newly devised, which make that difficult measurement easy (or perhaps easier is more correct).
December 17th, 2007 at 4:08 am
My natural impulse is to say that all people, male and female, can become more empathetic and be more reluctant to, say, kill people. Even in war. As one who knows she’d never want to have a gun pointed at her or to hold a gun pointed at others, or to have her children do either, I’d be happy for no more war.
While I believe both males and females can be raised to be empathetic, others disagree. Sort of. In “Men or Women: Which is the more generous sex?†Christina Sommers argues that they are equally generous, but in different ways. The article can be found here: http://www.incharacter.org/article.php?article=70. After evaluating research about who is more generous, she concludes that while women are more involved with, say, charitable donation campaigns and in more outwardly empathizing traits), males reveal their altruism in more “masculine†ways – including helping a stranded driver fix a flat.
Sommers says: “While there is nothing wrong with encouraging males to be more empathetic…ambitious programs for resocializing children to more like the opposite sex are ill advised and, in any case, of unproven effect. The truth…is that both sexes have their graces and their own styles of being virtuous.â€
December 31st, 2007 at 9:25 pm
I like that Sommers quote a lot. Sums up a large part of my attitude to the whole thing. I realise that “separate but equal” has some horribly racist overtones in the US as a result of the Jim Crow laws, but “different but equal” pretty much sums up my view of the sex wars.
As to war what is often misunderstood is that it’s only a small minority of men who can handle it. Of conscripts in WWII for example, one finding was that only 10% of them ever fired an aimed shot. The ability to kill another is something that is really quite rare.