A joke traveling through feminist circles a few years ago started with the question, Do you know why women can’t do math? The answer requires both words and a gesture. Because, the jokester would say, all their lives they’ve been taught that this [and here she would separate her thumb from her forefinger to a distance of about three inches] is six inches! The joke pokes fun at those who think sexual potency is a matter of size and at those who think women can’t do math. Among my friends, these ideas are laughable, yet in the past two years both have been propounded by highly trained scientists--and not just during the cocktail hour. They’ve been published and debated in reputable scientific journals.
In several articles, J. Phillipe Rushton, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario, raised an uproar by claiming that different races have different brain and penis sizes. As brain size decreases, he maintained, penis size increases. He concluded that races with larger brains are more intelligent but also more sexually inhibited, while those with smaller brains are not quite as bright but mate like bunny rabbits. Last year, in a new study, he repeated his ideas about brain size with an added twist--within each race, he said, women have smaller brains than men. C. Davison Ankney, a Canadian colleague of Rushton’s, joined in with a reexamination of data, taken from more than 1,200 corpses in Cleveland, that had shown no significant difference in brain size between men and women. Ankney claimed the analysis was simply faulty. Done properly, he said, size differences became apparent--and meaningful. Women’s brains were smaller.
Such ideas are bound to be incendiary in a culture divided along racial lines and in which traditional sex roles are rapidly changing. And interestingly, the views propounded by Rushton and Ankney are strikingly reminiscent of those of the nineteenth century--another period of upheaval in sexual and racial politics--when many eminent scientists believed in brain size differences between men and women and among the different races. But the current incarnation of these ideas has an intriguingly topical spin. Nineteenth-century scientists ranked people of European descent first, Asian second, and African last. Rushton swapped the position of Asians and Europeans, a move that fits nicely with a new phenomenon: the children of new Asian immigrants in North America have done extremely well in school, and students in Japan and China have fared far better than Americans on tests of mathematical achievement.
