Fighting the Good Fight Over Sex Differences
My second appearance on the Good Fight podcast with Yascha Mounk
I recently rejoined political scientist Yascha Mounk on the Good Fight podcast to discuss my new book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences. We had a wide-ranging conversation about what the science says about the differences between men and women, and why the topic remains so controversial.
Here are some of the many topics we covered:
The three main types of sex differences: Mars-and-Venus differences, Mars-and-Venus-plus-exceptions, and statistical or “fuzzy” differences
Four biases that distort the science of sex differences: the alpha bias, beta bias, gamma bias, and delta bias
The dangers of exaggerating sex differences - and of minimizing them
Why gay men tend to have more casual sex than straight men, while lesbians tend to have less than straight women
Why humans are neither strictly monogamous nor highly polygynous, but somewhere in between
The evolutionary roots of male aggression - and how civilization works to suppress it
What drives sex differences in STEM fields
The gender-equality paradox: why sex differences are often larger, rather than smaller, in wealthier, more egalitarian societies
How even small differences at the mean can give rise to large differences at the extremes - what I call the tail-of-the-distribution effect
Greater male variability in cognitive abilities: fact or fiction?
The episode is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find it on Yascha’s Substack or the Persuasion Substack, along with a transcript of the conversation.
If you want to dig deeper into these issues, you can pick up a copy of A Billion Years of Sex Differences here.
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Steve Stewart-Williams