Statistics, psychology, and sex

There is a senior editor at The American Prospect called Garance Franke-Ruta. Everything I have ever read by her has been pretty dumb. It would, however, be unfair to generalize and suppose that everything she writes is dumb, since I mostly read her musings on TAPPED, the blog of the Prospect's editors, when they are linked to from The Daily Howler. But today I looked at it on my own, and the first piece, entitled "Women and the Values Debate", by Franke-Ruta, expressed an argument that trades in a fallacy I find particularly infuriating, partly because it is tremendously commonplace. Here is what she wrote.

[E]ven though women are more broadly socially liberal than men, their liberalism is a form of tolerance, not libertinism. Overall, women are much more behaviorally conservative than men -- they have fewer sex partners, start having sex later, are less likely to do drugs, commit crimes, etc. -- and their greater tolerance is an outgrowth of an ethos of personal restraint that respects and is sympathetic toward the autonomy of others, not necessarily out of a progressive political mindset. Men, meanwhile, are much more judgemental of others, even while being personally adventurous themselves (which is how you wind up with creatures like Bill O'Reilly of falafel fame).

Did you spot the slide from factual claims of a sociological, statistical kind to unqualified, universally quantified claims about the psychologies of individual women (and men)? Indeed, Franke-Ruta does not even claim that the psychological claims are justified in virtue of the statistical facts, but simply conjoins them, suggesting they are as well-established (I am just assuming that the statistical claims about behavior are well-established).

Of course, in order to retain the flavor of the statistical data with which she works, it is necessary that Franke-Ruta depict a woman's inherent conservatism and her tolerance based in her "ethos of personal restraint" as tendencies, which may be of varying strength (though, of course, present in every woman). How else to explain the fact that not all women behave identically? Indeed, we can even see the interplay of these two forces, in constant battle over a woman's soul, as determining her voting patterns (which is what we are interested in this for to begin with, of course). She writes:

Maybe it just takes until they have kids for women's greater conservatism on values questions to overide their greater tolerance and swing them over to the GOP side. But their greater conservatism is there from the get go.

Thus the amateur psychological theory of the difference between the sexes is saved from refutation. Liberally-minded women are not a counterexample to the theory, they simply haven't had kids yet! Or if they have, well, I suppose probably there are some women in whom their inherent conservatism fails to ever overcome their general tolerance. You know, it's all a question of probability; we are not speaking in absolutes.