an assertion held at the time was that there was greater variability among men while women were less variable. hollingworth referred to this variability hypothesis as "armchair dogma" which she characterized as the "literature of opinion". this differs, she maintained, from the "literature of fact" which has been carefully obtained through controlled scientific data because it is merely statements made by scientific men not based on experimental evidence. hollingworth states in her article, "variability as related to sex differences in achievement: a critique", "undoubtedly one of the most difficult and fundamental problems that today confront thinking women is how to secure for themselves the chance to vary from the mode of their sex, and at the same time to procreate, in a social order that has been built up on the assumption that there are little or no variations in tastes, interests, and abilities within the female sex. it is a problem that has never confronted me." in order to further her research on the "inherently more variable male hypothesis", dr. hollingworth performed another experiment in which she used infants because they have not yet been influenced by the environmental conditions that could account for variability differences in adults. these environmental conditions would provide the adult male with many more opportunities to be more variable than females. men had a wide range of professions from which to choose that would improve the talents they possessed. women, on the other hand, had been confined to only one profession, housekeeping, which did not provide them the chance to prove their intelligence. thus, their natural variability would be impaired. dr. hollingworth and helen montague collected data on 1,000 consecutively born males and 1,000 consecutively born females in the new york infirmary for women and children. they took ten anatomical measurements on each infant and found that on the whole the male infants were slightly larger than the females, but there were no differences in variability between the sexes. "for the first time a serious crack had appeared in the armor of the variability hypothesis".