Roy F. Baumeister's talk "Is There Anything Good About Men?" (given to the American Psychological Association on August 17th, according to John Tierney of the NYT) begins by asking gender warriors to go home. The full transcript is probably more than most people are willing to read, weighing in at over 9,000 words, but I highly recommend actually taking the time. His answer to the rhetorical question is yes, by the way, but not any better than women. He takes what he calls a "tradeoff approach": "each advantage may be linked to a disadvantage."

Baumeister repeatedly comments that he's not saying anything about should, and fairly little about how. "I have no conclusions to present about what’s good or bad or how the world should change," he said. Baumeister suggests that most reported sex differences in performance are probably linked more to motivation than ability.

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rdi pointed this out over the weekend, and I'd been keeping an eye out for more from Baumeister, since he's the single most cited author on this blog. I didn't notice the pattern until I'd already cited three of his reviews, and I probably respect what he has to say more than any other psychologist publishing on gender today. The tradeoff approach -- that each disadvantage is in place to pay for a biologically necessary advantage -- is something that's been bouncing around in my own head for a while, and I thought he framed it fairly reasonably.

I don't know if I agree with Baumeister's assertion that "gender warriors" are the purveyors of the "value judgments" that are "warping the play of ideas." Maybe it's my own status as someone caught in the crossfire, but I sort of thought the point of the war was keeping value judgments out of it.

[edit: I'm looking for a citation of Baumeister's assertion that women make up more than 50% of human ancestry. He cites "recent research using DNA analysis" -- but I can't find what study he's talking about.

edit2:It looks like the relevant piece is Wilder, Mobasher, and Hammer, 2004: Genetic evidence for unequal effective population sizes of human females and males. Molecular Biology and Evolution]