"Evolution is a fact, not a theory. It really happened, and the fossil record and the molecular biology all confirm it. And yet, in this country, the United States, which is the leading scientific country in the world, we have people who are not only ignorant of science, but who are actively hostile to it and to the scientific method. And that is a serious problem, because science is not just a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking. It's a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility."
-- Carl Sagan
The second excerpt from my forthcoming book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences
By: Steve Stewart-Williams
Published: Nov 12, 2025
The War on Sex Differences
The evolutionary explanation for sex differences is deeply satisfying in the way that the best scientific theories always are – if, that is, you’re not horrified by the idea of evolved sex differences. As mentioned already, though, some people are genuinely horrified. Many suffer from what we might call dimorphism dysphoria: They’re deeply uncomfortable with the suggestion that men and women differ above the neck, and especially with the possibility that the differences might come from nature rather than nurture.
This discomfort underlies what I call the war on sex differences. This “war” – yes, it’s an overstatement – can be seen in every nook and cranny of modern life, from parents fretting about their daughter’s love of dolls, to bans on gender stereotypes in children’s textbooks and ads on TV, to efforts to achieve a 50:50 sex ratio in every desirable profession where men outnumber women. In fact, as I’m writing these words, even the grammar checker on my word processor is getting in on the act: Whenever I use the phrase “men and women,” it warns me that I should avoid these gendered terms, and consider using “people” instead. Not a helpful suggestion when I’m writing a book about sex differences…
In certain circles, then, sex differences are about as welcome as the plague. Needless to say, not everyone feels this way; if they did, there’d be nothing for those who do feel this way to wage war on. And as mentioned in the last excerpt, some people lean in the opposite direction: Rather than playing down or denying the differences, they hype them up and moralize them. Thus, as we dig deeper into these issues, it would be useful to equip ourselves with some technical terms to help bring order to the chaos.
We’ll start with a pair of terms coined by the psychologists Rachel Hare-Mustin and Jeanne Marecek, who argued that two major biases distort the discussion of sex differences: the alpha bias and the beta bias. The alpha bias is the tendency to exaggerate sex differences; the beta bias is the tendency to minimize them. Both can be found in the culture, but it’s fair to say, I think, that in the modern Western world, the beta bias has the upper hand.
Nowhere is this truer than in my own natural habitat of academia. Many academics are wary of sex differences, and some have an intellectual allergy to them. According to an old joke, everyone knows that men and women are different… except social scientists. Plenty of research reveals the truth in the jest. One study, for example, found that social scientists are more likely than civilians to chalk up sex differences to nurture rather than nature, and that this even extends to differences between hens and roosters. As we’ll see later, even when it comes to humans, the evidence sides with the civilians, making this one area where laypeople have a firmer grasp on reality than many alleged experts – and one area where academia seems to impair people’s understanding of the world rather than improving it.
[ Continued… (paywall) ]
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Has also been called "neocreationism."
Frans de Waal: I think that in the social sciences and in philosophy, the humanities in general, there is still an attitude that I call “neocreationism.” They accept that evolution has occurred for humans. But it has stopped at our head: from the head down, we are evolved primates, but our mind is something totally different. That's an illusion. Evolution, of course, includes everything, including the brain. But they cling to that idea and, of course, it's a traditional position in the West that humans are something special.
Occupational choices remain strongly segregated by gender, for reasons not yet fully understood. In this paper, we use detailed information
Abstract
Occupational choices remain strongly segregated by gender, for reasons not yet fully understood. In this paper, we use detailed information on the cognitive requirements in 130 distinct learnable occupations in the Swiss apprenticeship system to describe the broad job content in these occupations along the things-versus-people dimension. We first show that our occupational classification along this dimension closely aligns with actual job tasks, taken from an independent data source on employers job advertisements. We then document that female apprentices tend to choose occupations that are oriented towards working with people, while male apprentices tend to favor occupations that involve working with things. In fact, our analysis suggests that this variable is by any statistical measure among the most important proximate predictors of occupational gender segregation. In a further step, we replicate this finding using individual-level data on both occupational aspirations and actual occupational choices for a sample of adolescents at the start of 8th grade and the end of 9th grade, respectively. Using these additional data, we finally show that the gender difference in occupational preferences is largely independent of a large number of individual, parental, and regional controls.
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Things versus People is one of the most robust findings in social sciences. Not only is it found cross-culturally and cross-generationally, it's also found cross-species.
The people who are bothered by this and think that an intangible, intentional design is a better explanation for sex differences than evolution, are no different than the people who think that an intangible, intentional design is a better explanation for the human eye than evolution.
It is generally recognized that there are gender-related differences in children’s toy preferences. However, the magnitude of these differen
Abstract
It is generally recognized that there are gender-related differences in children’s toy preferences. However, the magnitude of these differences has not been firmly established. Furthermore, not all studies of gender-related toy preferences find significant gender differences. These inconsistent findings could result from using different toys or methods to measure toy preferences or from studying children of different ages. Our systematic review and meta-analysis combined 113 effect sizes from 75 studies to estimate the magnitude of gender-related differences in toy preferences. We also assessed the impact of using different toys or methods to assess these differences, as well as the effect of age on gender-related toy preferences. Boys preferred boy-related toys more than girls did, and girls preferred girl-related toys more than boys did. These differences were large (d ≥ 1.60). Girls also preferred toys that researchers classified as neutral more than boys did (d = 0.29). Preferences for gender-typical over gender-atypical toys were also large and significant (d ≥ 1.20), and girls and boys showed gender-related differences of similar magnitude. When only dolls and vehicles were considered, within-sex differences were even larger and of comparable size for boys and girls. Researchers sometimes misclassified toys, perhaps contributing to an apparent gender difference in preference for neutral toys. Forced choice methods produced larger gender-related differences than other methods, and gender-related differences increased with age.
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Anyone saying that it's all just social constructions and social conditioning should be laughed at, mocked and ridiculed as if they just told you the moon is made of cheese.
It's effectively the equivalent of insisting that the Earth is flat. But they're literally insisting that evolution isn't true.
What science has proved to be, um– just recently, it's already proved in the quran 1,400 years ago when it was written.
Richard Dawkins: But that doesn't include evolution, apparently. So, what does it include?
In the sea, the two waters, they don't mix. The salty water and the drinking water, so it's, um– pure for us to drink.
Dawkins: So you think the quran is a good source of scientific information?
Yeah.
Right.
Dawkins: And you, you– you're the one who wants to be a doctor, is that– is that right? Yes.
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Dawkins: A couple of months ago, I visited a British Islamic school, one of the best in the country, and I learned that every single pupil in that school did not believe in evolution and quite clearly think that the quran is a superior source of scientific information than evidence.
And they told me, for example, that salt water and fresh water don't mix. The reason? Because it says that in the quran. Get some salt water, get some fresh water, and sure enough they– they would mix.
They still would believe the quran, because the quran takes precedence over fact, evidence.
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https://quranx.com/25.53
And it is He who has released [simultaneously] the two seas, one fresh and sweet and one salty and bitter, and He placed between them a barrier and prohibiting partition.
https://quranx.com/55.19-22
He released the two seas, meeting [side by side];
Between them is a barrier [so] neither of them transgresses.
So which of the favors of your Lord would you deny?
From both of them emerge pearl and coral.
"I ain't no monkey," says the Xian creationist.
"No, it sure is better to think you're descended from a magic spell, dirt, a rib and multiple waves of incest," people who understand evolution reply.
"Gender is a social construct," says the Starbucks barista with a Gender Studies degree.
"No, it sure is better to think sex-associated human behaviors, preferences and tendencies are the result of a millennia-long secret, global, self-sustaining brainwashing conspiracy, especially when other primates exhibit similar behaviors, preferences and tendencies to humans through evolution, requiring a magical spell to protect homo sapiens alone from this biological process," people who understand evolution reply.
Sex-associated differences in behavior, preferences and tendencies are real, for the same reason biological differences themselves are real.
Do what you like. But don't get mad when men and women choose to do what comes naturally to them.
