Hausman and Gottfredson are lonely voices, because the gender gap is almost always analyzed in the following way.
Any imbalance between men and women in their occupations or earnings is direct proof of gender bias — if not in
the form of overt discrimination, then in the form of discouraging messages and hidden barriers. The possibility that
men and women might differ from each other in ways that affect what jobs they hold or how much they get paid may
never be mentioned in public, because it will set back the cause of equity in the workplace and harm the interests of
women. It is this conviction that led Friedan and Clinton, for example, to say that we will not have attained gender
equity until earnings and representation in the professions are identical for men and women. In a 1998 television
interview, Gloria Steinem and the congresswoman Bella Abzug called the very idea of sex differences “poppycock”
and “anti-American crazy thinking,” and when Abzug was asked whether gender equality meant equal numbers in
every field, she replied, “Fifty-fifty — absolutely.”62 This analysis of the gender gap has also become the official
position of universities. That the presidents of the nation's elite universities are happy to accuse their colleagues of
shameful prejudice without even considering alternative explanations (whether or not they would end up accepting
them) shows how deeply rooted the taboo is.
The problem with this analysis is that inequality of outcome cannot be used as proof of inequality of opportunity
unless the groups being compared are identical in all of their psychological traits, which is likely to be true only if we
are blank slates. But the suggestion that the gender gap may arise, even in part, from differences between the sexes
can be fightin’ words. Anyone bringing it up is certain to be accused of “wanting to keep women in their place” or
“justifying the status quo.” This makes about as much sense as saying that a scientist who studies why women live
longer than men “wants old men to die.” And far from being a ploy by self-serving men, analyses exposing the flaws
of the glass-ceiling theory have largely come from women, including Hausman, Gottfredson, Judith Kleinfeld, Karen
Lehrman, Cathy Young, and Camilla Benbow, the economists Jennifer Roback, Felice Schwartz, Diana Furchtgott-
Roth, and Christine Stolba, the legal scholar Jennifer Braceras, and, more guardedly, the economist Claudia Goldin
and the legal scholar Susan Estrich