"...adopt a mindset of variation and population thinking."
"...a mathematical average is not a norm".
- Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain
Recently a Google engineer was fired for writing a very long memo about gender differences and its implications for company diversity policy. There was an uproar and he got fired.
I agree with the memo's author that gender differences exist and biology plays some part in these differences. That's pretty much the consensus among those who actually research the subject. As neuroscientist Debra Soh wrote in The Globe and Mail: “Despite how it’s been portrayed, the memo was fair and factually accurate.” Evolutionary Psychologist Geoffrey Miller wrote in Quillette, “For what it’s worth, I think that almost all of the Google memo’s empirical claims are scientifically accurate.” This is not fringe science. It's the stuff of college textbooks.*
That biology influences personality isn't saying personality is fixed or that biology has a bigger effect than other types of influence. Predispositions can be minimized, neutralized or reversed. Personal experience, socialization, and workplace culture are incredibly important. No one is denying that.
Setting aside the question of biology, it's not exactly controversial to say that, on average, the personalities of men and women differ in some respects. In other words, the group averages in some traits are different in men and women. That group averages differ says nothing about the level of the trait in question. It could be that both groups (men and women) have relatively low levels of a trait (or high or middling). It does say the average for one group is higher or lower than that of the other group. The difference may be statistically significant but still small.
Consider trait x. Trait x is measured on a scale of 0-100. Across thousands of men and women tested for trait x, the average trait level for men is 45 and for women 55. One could then say that, on average, men and women are different on trait x. But each group's average trait level is a statistical abstraction and does not describe any individual man or woman. In this example, it's possible not a single man scored 45, or a single woman scored 55, on the trait x measure. It's also possible for the majority of men to score above 45 and the majority of women under 55 on the measure. This is population thinking.
Although population-level distributions (to use the memo author's phrase) tell us nothing about individuals, they do provide useful information. For instance, certain groups may have special health risk factors, such as increased risk of early-onset diabetes. Even with the increased risk, most members of this group are not expected to develop diabetes. Even so, medical providers should closely monitor their glucose levels, just in case.
Next: More on Gender Differences
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* That something is the "stuff of textbooks" does not mean it's "settled science" (a phrase I detest), just that it's respectable enough, sufficiently supported by the evidence to date, to be included in an overview of a discipline.
Reference:
Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain Boston, MA Houghton Mifflin Harcourt