Women’s Brains

Stephen Gould’s main idea in this essay is to demonstrate that the misunderstanding of women are intelligently inferior to men and points out the invalid information in Paul Broca’s work. Paul Broca’s work states that women are intelligently inferior to men because of craniometry, the measurement of the skull. Gould list different references from different people to prove that Broca’s statement from his work is wrong, women are not intelligently inferior to men, they are the same.

Gould uses specific numbers, data to prove his point that Broca’s work is not accurate. Gould first demonstrates Broca’s point that “for 292 male brains, he calculated an average weight of 1325 grams; 140 female brains averaged, 1144 grams for a difference of 181 grams, or 14 percent of the male weight”.  And then Gould talks about how this “difference of 181 grams” is corrected under the influences of height and age, which reduces “181 grams by more than a third, to 113 grams”. Finally, Gould mentions the impact of body build and muscular mass on the size of the skulls and uses more numbers   “the corrected 113-gram difference is surely too large; the true figure is probably close to zero” and demonstrates that women are not inferior, and they may be better than men. These specific numbers make his argument more reliable. It would be hard for the readers to picture what it actually looks like if the numbers are not there. The numbers help the readers to realize how Gould’s arguments on height, weight, body build etc. that actually have impacts on skull size.

I do agree with Gould’s point that women are not intelligently inferior to men. There are many intelligent women in society and they all contributed to this world in different aspects. I believe that women and men are equally intelligent. For example, in my calculus class, there are two top students that always get the highest scores. They are both females. There are boys in my class also but their scores are not as high. If Broca’s statement is true, the top students in my class should be boys, instead of girls.