Stewart-Williams: Both Left and Right Misread Sex Differences
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- Steve Stewart-Williams, a professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham Malaysia, argues in his new book that traditionalists exaggerate sex differences while progressives minimize them, calling for a more scientifically rigorous public conversation
- Stewart-Williams visualizes sex differences as overlapping bell curves — pronounced for height, sexual orientation, and upper body strength, but modest for maths ability and conscientiousness, with the average man taller than the average woman but considerable overlap
- A paper Stewart-Williams wrote arguing women's under-representation in STEM is partly due to inherited cognitive differences prompted a 'minor online controversy' and a complaint to his university's DEI administrators, which found the complainants had misrepresented the paper
- Stewart-Williams identifies 'gamma bias' (minimizing differences that favor men) and 'delta bias' (aversion to traditional sex differences) in how research is evaluated, but the reviewer notes he omits the reverse bias — that beliefs in female inferiority have shaped human history and inherited institutions
- Stewart-Williams deploys evidence that sex differences persist cross-culturally, appear early in childhood, become more pronounced at puberty, resist socialization, and are influenced by prenatal hormones, offering an evolutionary account rooted in differential reproductive incentives
- The reviewer challenges Stewart-Williams' framing of domestic violence as male aggression rather than patriarchy, pointing out that violence rates are markedly higher in more patriarchal communities where such behavior is tolerated — suggesting culture and socialisation matter too
Why it matters: The book feeds directly into live policy debates about STEM representation, leadership pipelines, and domestic violence interventions. Stewart-Williams argues innate sex differences are underweighted in public discourse, but the reviewer's counterpoints — that domestic violence is higher in patriarchal societies and that men dominate literature despite weaker verbal scores — suggest evolutionary explanations alone risk misdiagnosing problems whose solutions depend on understanding culture and institutional history.
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