Summary of Charles Murray's Human Diversity

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Sample Book Insights:

#1 The status of women has always been different from the status of men, and this has been enforced by law. The legal constraints on women in the modern West were not much short of de facto slavery until the eighteenth century.

#2 Second-wave feminism, which was based on the idea that women are not born but rather become women, was born in the 1950s. It argued that girls are treated differently than boys from infancy, and that this contributes to the differences in personality, abilities, and social behavior observed in adult women and men.

#3 The theory of differential socialization states that while there are many reasons to believe that girls and boys are treated differently, it is difficult to prove that the differences are more than superficial.

#4 Social role theory explains why sex is a social construct. It says that men and women select which hormones and other neurochemical processes they will use for appropriate roles, in the context of their gender identities and others’ expectations for role performance.