Delusions of Gender (19 page)

Slightly more on target is a study of the toy choices of thirteen-month-old children. Boys spent more time than did girls playing with the boyish toys, which were a trailer with four cars, a garbage truck, and what was somewhat unhelpfully described as ‘a set of three plastic pieces of equipment’. Are these systemising toys? I suppose you could make a case for it. You push a car or a trailer, it
moves. And we’ll give the ‘plastic pieces of equipment’ the benefit of the doubt. Certainly, these toys are probably better candidates than the tea set, dolls, baby bottle and cradle with which girls spent more time than boys. But then again, the three gender-neutral toys (a plastic friction dog, a wooden puzzle and a stacking pole with rings), with which boys and girls spent equal time, seem at least as systemising as the boyish toys, if not more so. Not that it matters, since neither amniotic testosterone nor maternal testosterone turned out to be related to play behaviour anyway.
²⁰
(Disclaimer: When I say ‘boyish’ toys, I am referring to toys traditionally marketed to boys; likewise for ‘girlish’ toys.)

Nor do studies of correlations between amniotic testosterone and cognitive performance lend much support to the idea that higher prenatal testosterone is associated with greater skill on visuospatial tasks, mathematics, or other vaguely scientific-like skills. Does accuracy on a mental rotation test at age seven correlate with amniotic testosterone? No.
²¹
Does a four-year-old’s skill at copying a block structure, understanding number facts and concepts, and counting and sorting increase with higher levels of amniotic testosterone? No, it
decreases
in girls, and has no relationship in boys. Puzzle solving? No. Classification skills (for example, ‘find all the small ones’?) No.
²²
A test of spatial ability? No.
²³
And again, while some digit-ratio studies do provide a spattering of support, others have failed to find correlations between digit ratio and SQ score, and mental rotation ability. One study even found that physical scientists have more-feminine digit ratios than do social scientists.
²⁴
There are a few more prenatal testosterone studies, which we’ll come to in a later chapter. But there is, I think, something a little underwhelming about the evidence so far.

The prenatal-testosterone studies are, however, just one source of evidence for the fetal fork hypothesis. The period shortly after the baby is born supposedly provides another:

One of the first things your daughter’s female brain will compel her to do is study faces. Whereas child developmental
specialists originally thought all infants came wired for mutual gazing, your daughter may be more interested in staring at a human face than the newborn male.
²⁵

This quote from the Gurian Institute’s book
It’s a Baby Girl!
is a typical popular take on a study conducted several years ago by Simon Baron-Cohen, together with graduate student Jennifer Connellan and other colleagues. They looked for gender differences in newborns who were on average just a day-and-a-half old. The logic was simple: any differences between the sexes seen at this tender age can’t be chalked up to socialisation. One hundred and two babies were offered, one at a time, Connellan’s own face and a mobile to look at. The idea was to measure the babies’ interest in the face versus interest in the mobile: empathising versus systemising. Each baby’s eye gaze was filmed, and this recording was later used to time how long each baby spent looking at the face and the mobile. Male and female babies spent equal amounts of time looking at the face: both sexes, on average, spent just under half the total looking time (which was about a minute) looking at Connellan’s face. However, males looked longer at the mobile than did females (51 percent of looking time versus 41 percent for females) and females, as a group, looked longer at the face than the mobile (49 percent versus 41 percent of looking time).
²⁶

Much has been made of the significance of this study. ‘The results of this experiment suggest that girls are born prewired to be interested in faces while boys are prewired to be more interested in moving objects’, writes Leonard Sax in his book
Why Gender Matters
,
²⁷
a conclusion echoed in the popular media around the world. The implications for career choices are clear. Cambridge academic Peter Lawrence, citing the newborn study, argues that men and women are ‘constitutionally different’ and thus unlikely to ever become professors of physics and literature in equal numbers.
²⁸
And in his contribution to the book
Why Aren’t More Women in Science?
Baron-Cohen suggests from the newborn study that the
‘“bias” in attention to things rather than emotions (in boys) and vice versa (in girls)’ reflects ‘partly innate differences’ that culture then amplifies. Sex differences in the empathising versus systemising bias, Baron-Cohen argues, ‘suggests that we should not expect the sex ratio in occupations such as math or physics to ever be 50-50 if we leave the workplace to simply reflect the numbers of applicants of each sex who are drawn to such fields.’
²⁹
In other words, short of some very heavy-handed social engineering, gender equality in the workplace is an impossible ideal.

But unfortunately, as some researchers have pointed out, the study was simply not done well.
³⁰
When you are claiming nothing less than evidence of the biological origins of a gender-stratified society, it helps to have a methodology that stands up to scrutiny. No study is perfect, of course, but this one was flawed in ways it simply need not have been, as psychologists Alison Nash and Giordana Grossi have pointed out. Some of these problems concern the sort of detail that may provoke a small yawn in the non-specialist, but a severe case of eyebrow-in-the-hairline for experts. First of all, there are standard procedures when it comes to testing newborns for their visual preferences. A baby’s attention span is not at its peak in the first few days of life, waxing and waning over short periods of time. For this reason, when infant researchers want to find out which of two stimuli a newborn finds most interesting, they usually present them simultaneously. If you don’t, and instead present them one after another, then you don’t really know whether the baby looked at stimulus A more because she genuinely found it more interesting, or whether she was irritated by some internal rumblings, about to fall asleep, or simply a little tired of life when stimulus B was on show.

In Connellan’s study, the face and the mobile were presented separately.

Another important thing to know about very little babies is that they can’t see very well. They actually aren’t even drawn to faces per se but to visual stimuli that, like the face, have a top-heavy pattern. In fact, before the age of three months, babies actually
prefer top-heavy, facelike patterns over real faces. It’s important, therefore, to ensure that babies all view the stimuli from the same angle, otherwise the same stimulus can appear to be different, including its degree of top-heaviness.

In Connellan’s study, some babies were tested on their backs in a cot, and other babies were tested in a parent’s lap. (If more girls than boys, say, were on their backs, then on average your groups of boys and girls are not seeing the same stimuli.)

But the most major problem with the study, described by Nash and Grossi as a ‘striking design flaw’, was its potential for experimenter expectancy effects.
³¹
If you have ever visited a new mother in a maternity ward, there is a good chance that you will have seen one or more of the following items: a baby wearing a pink or blue (or otherwise gendered) outfit; a pink or blue balloon; a pink or blue blanket; an arrangement of predominantly pink or blue flowers; pink or blue congratulation cards; or even (as was the case in the hospital in which I gave birth) a pink or blue name card on the baby’s bassinet. Clues, in short, as to the baby’s sex. Now if you are an experimenter and stimulus rolled into one neat package with a particular hypothesis in mind (not to mention a head full of cultural assumptions), you have to make sure that this information doesn’t unconsciously affect your behaviour towards the baby. This, of course, is impossible. As we saw in the first part of this book, even information that doesn’t register with consciousness can subtly change behaviour. Researchers therefore usually take this problem very seriously and go to some effort to eliminate experimenter expectancy effects. Here, for example, are the precautions taken by another recent study that also looked for gender differences in newborn eye gaze:

We instructed all participants that the infant must be dressed in a gender-neutral outfit and that the interacters in the study room must remain unaware of the baby’s sex throughout the interaction, as well as after the interaction was complete. Because parents often had either pink or blue outfits for their
newborn, many opted to dress their baby in the white outfits provided by the hospital …

We decided that the study should take place in a room other than the mother’s room in order to decrease the likelihood that something in the room would provide clues to the interacters as to the sex of the infant.…

To keep the interacters blind to the sex of the infant all identifying information on the infant’s bassinet was covered or removed upon arrival to the study room.

Researchers do not go to such lengths merely to make life awkward for themselves and the parents of newly born babies. (In this carefully designed study, no gender differences in eye gaze were found in newborns although, interestingly, they did find gender differences in eye gaze in a follow-up three to four months later. This, they point out, suggests the possibility ‘that the gender-typed behaviour pattern is not innate but, instead, learned in early infancy.’)
³²

No such precautions were taken in Connellan’s study.

She knew the sex of at least some of the newborns she tested, and it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that, on other occasions, clues as to the baby’s sex unconsciously undetected could have swayed her behaviour in a direction consistent with gender stereotypes.
³³
Unfortunately, this was a study in which even slight differences in the experimenter’s behaviour could well create experimenter expectancy effects. Motion, open eyes and mutual eye gaze are all visual stimuli that newborns especially like and are sensitive to.
³⁴
It is, I imagine, rather hard to hold up a mobile, and look at a newborn, in exactly the same way 102 times. What if Connellan inadvertently moved the mobile more when she held it up for boys, or looked more directly, or with wider eyes, for the girls?

But even if a redoing of the study, performed with a less cavalier approach to normal policy and procedure in infant testing, got the same result, what would it actually signify? Nash and
Grossi have argued that if the sex differences in the newborn study reflect differences in brain organisation then we should see increasing divergence between girls and boys as these skills develop. Yet boys’ greater interest in the mobile doesn’t seem to serve them much advantage. As Nash and Grossi have pointed out, as has Harvard University developmental psychologist Elizabeth Spelke, there is little evidence for a systemising advantage in young boys: a large body of research exploring infants’ understanding of objects and mechanical motion finds no advantage for males.
³⁵
As for the development of empathy, evidence of divergence is modest. Boys and girls develop an understanding of the mental states of others at a similar rate. But girls do have a small advantage, on average, in facial expression processing and, overall, studies find signs of greater affective empathy in girls. However, as is the case in adults, this difference is much smaller when based on observations rather than self-report or report by another (such as a parent).
³⁶
But also, these psychologists have pointed out, why think that what a newborn prefers to look at provides any kind of window, however grimy, into their future abilities and interests? It might come down to something as boring as girls responding more or less to some other difference between the two kinds of stimuli – visual, auditory or olfactory – that has nothing to do with faces versus objects per se. We have no idea whether newborn preferences reflect what their later abilities will be – such an assumption is, as Neil Levy puts it, ‘essentially unargued for’ and ‘questionable at best’.
³⁷

Many studies have methodological flaws. Many studies are overinterpreted. But not many studies inspire in their authors and others the conclusion that innate differences in part lie behind our gender-stratified society.
³⁸
This is a study that really needs to be repeated before it is taken too seriously, and with closer attention to what the results might actually mean, as well as those little details that make all the difference between the study the expert feels she can trust and the study that leaves her eyebrow muscles aching and exhausted.