The Essence

It has been said that women are from Venus, and men are from Mars. The differences between men and women are often chalked up to their natural tendencies as separate sexes or exaggerated biological differences. Common beliefs are that women are more compassionate, social, and softer beings, while men are tacticians who value strength and power. Whether those stereotypical tendencies are actually sound does not factor into the equation when people have used these stereotypes to exclude women from positions of power and opportunities to improve their ability to elevate themselves. Many of these stereotypes and misguided scientific “findings” have been discounted; however, the public continues to believe in them and use them as corroboration for sexist laws and practices.

The capabilities of females in education and professional achievement were constantly questioned during the vast history of modern civilization. Gina Rippon, the author of The Gendered Brain, states, “For centuries, women’s brains have been weighed and measured and found wanting. The inferior nature of women’s brains was used as the rationale for frequently proffered advice that the fairer sex should focus on their reproductive gifts and leave education, power, politics, science and any other business of the world to men” (13). Scientists in the 19th century would measure and weigh brains to find that women’s brains were slightly smaller. They used this new scientific discovery to argue that women were, in fact, significantly inferior to men both physically and mentally. Access to equal education has also continuously been a fight that females have had to endure and overcome since the beginning of time. Perhaps there was a reason women were denied access to education for so long and across many cultures. If almost all Western civilizations agreed upon the inferiority of female intelligence, there must be some truth to it, right? That is what some argue to this day. Alternatively, perhaps the lack of education hindered women from performing at the same level as men. This paper aims to clarify whether the differences we see today in men's and women’s performances in academia stem from mainly biological or societal factors.

When women were accepted and allowed at universities, society was not thrilled. There were protests from a physiologist, Edward H. Clarke, that women should not be admitted to Harvard on the premise that “energy required to learn subjects like algebra would flow from other bodily systems, harming their ovaries” (Gershon). Although this may be a funny anecdote from the distant past, people during that time took these types of claims very seriously and used this notion as ammunition to keep women out of education and higher achieving positions. Not only did it affect the way that men viewed women’s capabilities, these degrading claims bled into how women might have seen themselves. These ideologies are carried into today, where the claim that men are better at STEM-related fields is very popular in our current society.