Carole Hooven, Ph.D.

I was alone traveling by myself as a young woman, totally ignorant of what I was getting into in Egypt.

I was harassed endlessly.

Some of that was my fault for not understanding the culture well enough and what I was getting into.

So this combination of being immersed in not only different societies that treated sex and sex roles very differently, but also different ecologies.

I spent some time in Africa and Kenya and Tanzania and got really interested in all of the animal behavior and why we are different from other animals, etc.,

So I had a whole other career before graduate school, and I ended up leaving that career and applying to Harvard to try to do a graduate degree where I could do more to understand the evolutionary basis of human behavior.

I ended up

getting rejected.

And I just persisted and then was offered this job out in Uganda studying chimps for what was supposed to be a year.

And that is what really triggered my interest in sex differences and testosterone.

Because

We, I think to a certain extent, are indoctrinated to believe that most human sex differences are cultural.

Or if you think that they're not, it's better you don't say that out loud to too many people or in the wrong place.

So when I spent time with the chimps, I was really blown away by the ways that the sex differences in the chimps paralleled human sex differences.

Of course, not exactly the same, but the very basic things that you just described, even just in terms of energy and aggression, are present in the chimps in terms of being higher in the males and lower in the females.

And I'm getting goosebumps because...

The reasons for that are so profound and far-reaching and start with sperm and egg.

And that's what sex really is about, is not just the ability to produce sperm or eggs, but kind of the way that the organism is designed and the reproductive phenotype, including body and behavior.

And then that, in humans...

plays out in these really complex ways in terms of social systems.