Katharine Birbalsingh, one of Britain’s most famous educators, recently commented on why women are less likely than men to go into STEM. “From my own knowledge of these things, physics is not something that girls tend to fancy,” she said. “They do not want to do it. They do not like it.” Her remarks rekindled a debate that goes back to Plato and Aristotle: Are the physical differences between men and women indicative of psychological, emotional, and intellectual differences as well?
The thought of Edith Stein can help us chart a path forward in this complicated age of gender-neutral bathrooms and biological men in women’s sports. Stein, or St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, was neither an angel in the house nor a virago. She was a phenomenologist philosopher, theoretician of education, and eventually a Carmelite nun. In 1942, she was murdered at Auschwitz, becoming a Martyr of the Shoah. Today, she remains an influential source in differentiated psychology, which is the study of differences in individual and group behavior (see her Essays on Woman).
