We Learned About Sex Differences. Then We Lost Our Minds.

From iron law to denial and back again. Is knowledge about sex differences an info hazard?

Image by Samuel Regan-Asante

As a Blank Slate-pilled biology enthusiast who cut her teeth in the Soviet-era coded high school biology Olympics in Romania, I found myself adrift in the corporate feminist literature of my early 2000s undergrad education. The curriculum was a parade of case studies featuring Carly Fiorina breaking glass ceilings, researchers fretting about "stereotype threat," and endless celebrations of Nordic corporate diversity initiatives. The underlying message was clear: any differences between the sexes were purely social constructs, artificial barriers to be demolished.

Then, I discovered the blogosphere's views on evolutionary psychology and sex differences. Yes, it came bundled with what we now call "the manosphere." Still, the research itself was compelling—finally, a framework that didn't require intellectual contortions to explain observable patterns in human behavior. The mainstream's allergic reaction to this research was telling: the blank slate doctrine had become the lubricant keeping the engines of politics and culture humming. Don’t poke the golden goose.

I approached this literature with genuine curiosity and hope. Understanding sex differences, I thought, would deepen my knowledge of human nature and improve my interactions with the opposite sex. What could go wrong with more knowledge?

Everything, as it turns out.

The timing was explosive. Against the backdrop of corporate feminism's eternal question - "Where are the women?" - a new kind of class consciousness was emerging. If equality was the natural state, then women were obviously being kept down. The feminism of this era took on what sociologist Alice Evans describes as "exclusionary tribalism." The improvement of women's condition had to come at the expense of the oppressor class. The more expensive, the better. This was the beginning of the “future is female.”

"Stereotypes are socially constructed" became the mantra of a class that had spent the majority of human history in both practical and legal dependency. It seemed true enough. After all, weren't women now doing everything from flying fighter jets to running Fortune 500 companies? But from this starting point of "stereotypes are social constructs," an equal and opposite reaction was building: "stereotypes are true, actually, and here's the evolutionary psychology to prove it."

The reality is that stereotypes reflect both social construction and observable patterns. Recent meta-analyses by Jussim and colleagues (2016) show they're true in the statistical sense that they capture group averages. They're constructed in the sense that you can't make more than probabilistic inferences about individuals. "Men are taller than women" is true on average, but useless for predicting whether any specific man will be taller than any specific woman. The popular “Women don’t understand averages” meme, where men discuss the validity of stereotypes and women comment about an outlier, is on its face about the gendered comprehension of statistics. In reality, the yes, predictable response is about the fear that statistics will be used as a hammer to level the distribution back to an era where the stereotype was enshrined in law. The war between stereotype enjoyers and deniers isn't about statistics - it's about power.

Just as Tajfel's classic experiments showed children tribalize when assigned to arbitrary teams, the "stereotypes are true" movement became a rallying cry for tribal alignment. The internet's algorithmic amplification did the rest, pushing people toward increasingly extreme positions. Every confirmatory rage anecdote generates a mirror on the opposite side, endless reflections all the way to hell. The result? Young people marinate in content that confirms their worst fears about the opposite sex. Men's forums fill with evolutionary psychology-flavored arguments that women are "natural slaves artificially raised to the rank of master." Women's spaces overflow with evidence that all men are potential predators, citing research on sexual coercion strategies. Tech has reduced the opportunities for young people to have real-life interactions with the opposite sex, leading to vast swathes of teenagers aligning their perceptions with wizened divorcees with courses to sell or visual rage slop with millions upon millions of views.

We're now experiencing the consequences of this tribalization at scale. Political scientists Norrander and Wilcox document how political sorting by sex has reached new extremes - women skewing liberal, men conservative - creating a feedback loop of mutual incomprehension. Young people enter the dating world armed with stereotypes masquerading as scientific laws, their cynicism justified by endless anecdotes about the worst outliers of the opposite sex.

The genuine insights about sex differences - like Baron-Cohen's work on gender differences in empathy and systemizing - get lost in the tribal warfare. On average, women have better theory of mind, and the evolutionary incentives for that are clear: from raising emotionally immature children to navigating the capricious monopoly on violence in the world of men to managing potentially ruinous social interactions with other women. But the rage slop economy manages to reduce our capacity for empathy in both sexes. The opposite sex is inexplicable or inexplicably cruel. They are defective, psychopathic, and irrational.

The tragic irony? The science of sex differences could have increased understanding between the sexes. Instead, it's become an information hazard - technically true at the population level but toxic when internalized as a guide to individual interactions. We've learned about averages but lost the ability to see individuals. In our quest to understand the opposite sex, we've made them more foreign than ever.

The way forward isn't to deny the reality of sex differences, nor to embrace them as immutable destiny. It's to hold two thoughts simultaneously: patterns exist at the population level, but individuals exist in glorious variation. Perhaps that's the ultimate lesson from our two-decade experiment with popularized evolutionary psychology: knowledge of group differences, without the wisdom to handle it, becomes a barrier rather than a bridge to understanding. We gained facts but lost nuance. We learned about averages but forgot about individuals. In trying to understand human nature through the lens of sex differences, we've paradoxically made it harder to understand the humans right in front of us.