In this fight for a full chance to compete, woman may do one (or all) of three things. She may merely ignore the theory and go on “working and living,” trusting that as environmental barriers fall one after the other, this final question, too, will lose its meaning. She can point out in support of this attitude that the past does contain its female geniuses, however few; and certainly if all the barriers that have been set up against woman’s entry into the larger world have not entirely stifled female genius, we may at least look forward hopefully to a kinder future. Something of this attitude, of this demand for free experimentation, must make part of every woman’s armor against the implications of this theory. But taken alone, it becomes more merely defensive than the status of the theory deserves. For it is really the theory that must defend itself. It must not only bring forward more affirmative evidence, but it must also meet the contrary findings of such investigation as has been made. It must, again, prove its title to _the cause_ of the scarcity of female geniuses when so many other more eradicable causes may be at its bottom. The actual evidence that has been gathered on this question is still uncertain and fragmentary. While it does not yet establish anything definitely, it points to rather surprising conclusions. In all cases investigated the discovered differences in variability have been very slight, and if they balance either way tend to prove a greater variability among women. Neither sex need have a monopoly of either imbeciles or geniuses, but women may yet be found to be slightly more favored with both! The first painstaking investigation in this field was made by Dr. Karl Pearson who published his interesting results as one essay in his _Chances of Death and Other Studies in Evolution_ in 1897. Under the heading “Variation in Man and Woman” (Vol. I, pp. 256-377), written as a polemical attack upon Havelock Ellis’s stand in this theory, he set forth results of measurements upon men and women in seventeen anatomical characteristics. He obtained his data from statistics already collected, from measurements of living men and women, and from post-mortem and archeological examinations. Female variability (coefficients of variation) proved greater in eleven of these seventeen characteristics, male in six. He concluded among other things that “there is ... no evidence of greater male variability, but rather of a slightly greater female variability. Accordingly the principle that man is more variable than woman must be put on one side as a pseudo-scientific superstition until it has been demonstrated in a more scientific manner than has hitherto been attempted.”