Religion & Law

Miranda McGowan at U. San. Diego Law School just posted an interesting article:  "Engendered Diffferences."  Here's the abstract:

This article presents evidence that men and women have very similar cognitive abilities, personality traits, and interests; immutable sex differences on these fronts do not limit an individual's potential. Ironically, however, this conclusion suggests that achieving substantive sex equality is harder than we have before imagined. We have created difference and inequality despite our sameness, partly because of our irresistible cognitive urge to categorize people on the basis of sex and the systematic errors in judgments that result from that categorization. The research presented in this article provides the basis for correcting these false stories that prop up social structures that lead men and women to have such dissimilar lives, and women to have worse ones. One important implication of this research is that the antidiscrimination principle applies to sex categories with greater force and has greater scope than is commonly thought. Public and private discrimination on the basis of sex is wrong because, for types of things the law cares about (such as work or childrearing), men and women have the same capabilities and interests. Sex equality, however, will require far more than a greater commitment to antidiscrimination. Both men and women will have to make different choices about the kinds of work to pursue and how to divide up the work of caring for children and home between them. They will not do so without significant incentives from the government, and sex neutral policies will fail to change these ingrained patterns.

I'm looking forward to reading it, because it sounds as though her ultimate conclusion includes an argument for significant government support and deliberate attention to the cost of childraising.  I'm interested to see how she arrives there from her premises.  But something that strikes me from the abstract is that she suggests that the types of things the law cares about are "work or childrearing", and in those two areas, men and women have the same capabilities and interests.  She doesn't mention "childbearing", which is clearly one area in which men and women do not have the same capabilities.  (Yet, anyway.  Who knows where the brave new world of embryonic stem cell research might take us?)