Gender Differences and Common Ground

Re “The Feminine Technique,” Commentary, March 15: Deborah Tannen is always incisive when she delineates typical gender differences of thought, speech and action. But in using Maureen Dowd’s column lamenting the lack of female Op-Ed writers as an occasion to present her gender types, Tannen skips over the fascinating particulars of Dowd’s own style.

Dowd’s columns are not exactly “agonistic.” She does not follow the “lawyer’s brief” format of sketching an opponent’s thinking and then rebutting it. Nor does she take a “quiet, sympathetic approach” like the female lawyer Tannen cites. Rather, Dowd is a matchless satirist, excelling at mimicry, caricature and devastatingly apt name-calling. These are all stereotypically “female” gifts that have been lionized by some feminist theorists as ways that women “subvert” the “dominant culture.”

Tannen herself follows one of these theorists, Julia Kristeva, in holding up Chinese philosophy as a bastion of “integration” and “balance” favorably contrasted with the agonism of the West. In the ‘70s, Kristeva characterized totalitarian Chinese society as more “feminine” -- and therefore less oppressive -- than Western democracy. Alas, societies that place a premium on consensus always impose it from the top down, stifling and often crushing dissent. It’s the agonistic West, with its competitive marketplace of ideas, that has released women’s potential, perspectives and “difference” in a way no other culture has managed.

Andrew Sprung

South Orange, N.J.

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Harvard President Larry Summers got widely ripped for suggesting that innate differences between women and men may be a factor in women’s disproportionately low representation in the scientific community. Now Tannen writes that an innate difference in the way women and men address problems may explain that and other seeming anomalies. Oddly she does not credit Summers.

I do not know or care whether there are innate differences between women and men that explain societal differences. Maybe instead of rhetoric about differences between the sexes, we could be evaluating the character traits, talents and training that yield the best results in specific contexts.

With those results, we could reevaluate and alter our paradigms of fitness and potential success. Then, the proportion of women and men in a given area would generally reflect the presence of desired traits, talent and training -- perhaps without our ever needing to separate and count the men and women.

Jack Quirk

Northridge