Or so the Washington Post says. In one of the most insulting, inflammatory opinion pieces about sex differences I’ve ever read, Charlotte Allen asserts that because of gender differences in spatial perception ability, car accident rates, and even literature tastes, women are dumber than men. She ends her piece by suggesting women might just well be happier if they stayed home and took care of others:

So I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home… Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are…kind of dim.

Well. Maybe romance novels aren’t the most mind-expanding book list choice, but at least we can read.

Allen is seeing an awful lot in a few minor differences between men and women. Certainly it’s true that women perform worse on average than men on spatial perception tasks (it’s actually a subject I’ve taken up myself in a past issue of the Humanist), but there is still far more variation in ability among the sexes than between. Plus, even if the differences were huge and across the board, difficulty with direction a dumber sex does not make. Moreover, Allen herself relates data that shows IQ is pretty much level between men and women anyway, so shouldn’t that pretty much clinch it? Maybe she just really hates Eat, Pray, Love.

I certainly don’t think that differences between sexes is a topic that should be taboo—the more we understand about ourselves the better off we’ll be. But to conclude that the science proves women are dim is purely asinine. Shame on Allen, and shame on the Washington Post for tacitly endorsing such drivel.