Delusions of Gender (20 page)

So what
does
go on in the darkness of the womb? Consider the boldness of the statements made in the popular media about the effect of foetal testosterone on the brain. Now consider the inadequacy of the data showing links between exposure of the foetal brain to testosterone (which, you will recall, these studies might not even be tapping) and brain ‘type’. Contrast, for a moment, the confidence of claims that boys and girls arrive with differently prewired interests, against the flimsiness of the evidence. There’s something a little shocking about the discrepancy between the weakness of the scientific data on the one hand and the strength of the popular claims on the other. As Simon Baron-Cohen himself has written, ‘the field of sex differences in mind needs to proceed in a fashion that is sensitive … by cautiously looking at the evidence and being careful not to overstate what can be concluded.’
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At last, something on which we can all agree.

It’s a good life. If I die tomorrow, I’ll die a happy woman, because I’ll feel like I’ve done a lot of good work.

—Kerin Fielding, orthopaedic surgeon
¹

T
oday, women are strongly represented in fields such as biology, psychology, medicine, and forensic and veterinary science. Some think this reflects ‘the feminine propensity to protect and nurture – and the desire to work with living things’, as Christina Hoff Sommers suggested by way of explaining the recent influx of women into the once male-dominated domain of veterinary medicine.
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Maybe. But there is something a little unsatisfying about this reframing of the life sciences as:
Now with added empathising for extra feminine appeal!
Is the supposed female drive to work with living things, or to engage with mental states, really likely to be satisfied by looking at cells under microscopes or de-sexing cats? Even academic psychology, most of which
is
at least about people, is devoted to the pursuit of understanding the laws and principles – one might even say
systems
– that underlie cognition and behaviour. Apart from the lab teamwork common to science in general, the core work of an academic psychologist – making sense of the literature, designing experiments and analysing and interpreting data – puts few demands on empathising abilities. And what about forensic science, which draws in more than three times as many
women as men?
³
On the one hand, it does indeed sometimes have
people
as its subject of study. But, on the other hand, when it does, often they are dead.

As journalist Amanda Schaffer has pointed out:

[I]f history is any guide, today’s gender breakdowns are likely to keep changing. What’s so magical, after all, about the current numbers? A few decades ago, most biology and math majors were men. So were most doctors. Now maths undergraduate majors split close to 50/50. In 1976, only 8 percent of Ph.D.s in biology went to women; by 2004, 44 percent did. Today, half of M.D.s go to women. Even in engineering, physics, chemistry, and math, the number of women receiving doctorates tripled or quadrupled between 1976 and 2001. Why assume that we have just now reached some natural limit?
⁴

It’s a good point. Perhaps in a few decades we will be redefining women’s new levels of participation in the physical sciences, politics and business as reflecting their innate drive to nurture. After all, is there any more powerful way to help others than to develop sustainable technologies, set tough emissions targets or, like Bill Gates, write big fat cheques to charitable causes?

As some psychologists have pointed out, such historical shifts – including the movement away from male dominance in teaching and secretarial work – don’t lend themselves especially well to explanations in terms of hormones and genes.
⁵
So with this malleability of sex segregation in mind, let’s turn to the next two ways of investigating the link between foetal testosterone and later sex-typed behaviour: females whose in utero living conditions were, hormonally speaking, wrong for their chromosomal sex; and monkeys.

In a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), the child’s genetic state results in the foetus’s being exposed to unusually high levels of testosterone. In girls with CAH, this triggers
development of male external genitalia. (The female internal reproductive organs, however, develop normally.) Girls with CAH are born with genital virilisation – that is, they look more-or-less like a boy at birth, depending on the severity of the condition. Usually the condition is detected at birth. The child is then given ongoing hormonal treatment, some time later undergoes surgery to feminise her genitalia, and is raised as a girl. This offers an opportunity for researchers to explore the effects of high foetal testosterone, disentangled from what normally comes with that experience, namely, also being reared as a boy. However, it’s important to point out that girls with CAH are not simply girls plus extra foetal testosterone. Not only are other hormone levels also awry (and are therefore potential candidates for being behind any differences in behaviour), but also these girls are born with ambiguous genitalia, and receive continuous hormonal treatment as well as, most likely, extensive surgery on the genitalia. (When this happens seems to be quite variable.) It’s not impossible to imagine that this could create a certain ambivalence around the child’s gender in the mind of a parent, and perhaps in the child herself, for which there is a little evidence.
⁶

But, nonetheless, are girls with CAH more likely to be systemisers than empathisers? So far, we can’t say. Older girls and adults with CAH do report less tender-mindedness, interest in infants, and social skills than their non-CAH relatives. But on the other hand, they report equal communication ability (assessed with questions like
I am good at social chit-chat
, and
I find it easy to ‘read between the lines’ when someone is talking to me
) and no greater dominance (which includes masculine qualities like being aggressive, authoritative and competitive).
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So the evidence is a little mixed and, as we learned in
Chapter 2
, self-report scales may tell us little about people’s actual empathic tendencies and skills. As for systemising, in the absence of an actual test of this ability it’s impossible to know. One study found that girls with CAH report
less
attention to detail than control girls (a skill that Baron-Cohen considers especially important for systemising).
⁸
And there’s no
evidence that the high prenatal-testosterone levels of CAH serve to improve mathematical performance – it’s even been suggested that it
impairs
it.
⁹
Researchers have also tested girls with CAH on the ubiquitous mental rotation tasks, and the evidence currently points towards an advantage for them over unaffected girls.
¹⁰
But, as has been pointed out, this could be the result of their more boyish play experiences, rather than prenatal testosterone per se.

And girls with CAH definitely do differ from their non-CAH sisters and relatives in their play. In as much as we can take at face value their caregivers’ reports and behaviour when under observation in the lab, this seems to be despite the best efforts of their parents.
¹¹
Girls with CAH play much more at boyish activities and toys than do control girls (although not quite as much as boys do), and they are also less interested in girlish toys and pastimes.
¹²
This boyishness seems to continue into adolescence. For example, adolescent girls with CAH are intermediate between boys and girls in their interest in sex-typical activities (football versus needlepoint, embroidery or macramé) and future occupations (like engineer versus professional ice skater).
¹³

These tomboyish interests seem to provide a compelling case for the idea that foetal testosterone organises the brain to be drawn to certain kinds of stimuli that lie behind sex differences in play behaviour and, by implication, occupational segregation.
¹⁴
But what is a little odd is that no attempt seems to have been made to work out whether girls with CAH are drawn to some particular
quality
in boyish toys and activities or whether they are drawn to them simply by virtue of the fact that they are associated with males.
¹⁵
Take, for instance, the Pre-School Activities Inventory, on which girls with CAH score more like males than unaffected girls. The inventory includes questions about playing with cars and dolls, and so on.
¹⁶
But girls with CAH can also get a higher score than unaffected girls by, for example, showing little interest in jewellery, pretty things, dressing up in girlish clothes and pretending to be a female character.
¹⁷
Another study (drawing on a different clinical group) found that greater prenatal androgen
exposure led to less interest in activities like ballet, dressing up as a fairy, dressing up as a witch, dressing up as a woman, gymnastics, playing hairdresser and working with clay, but more interest in basketball, dressing up as an alien, dressing up as a cowboy, dressing up as a man, dressing up as a pirate and playing spaceman.
¹⁸
Likewise, women with CAH asked to recall their childhood activities score significantly differently from controls on a questionnaire that, among other questions, asks about use of cosmetics and jewellery, hating feminine clothes, the gender of admired or imitated characters on TV or in movies and whether they dressed up more as male or female characters.
¹⁹

In most lab-based toy studies, too, there is a question mark over what the researchers are really measuring. The boyish toys on offer always include vehicles and construction toys, while the girlish toys always include dolls with accessories and tea sets. (Interestingly, one of the staples of the boyish toys, the Lincoln Logs construction set, recently had to be replaced because girls liked it so much!)
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But if it’s stimulation of their visuospatial skills that girls with CAH are drawn to, why don’t they (and boys, for that matter) spend longer than girls on the neutral toys, which often include a puzzle and a sketchpad? What form of brain masculinisation could lead to a preference for dressing up as an alien rather than a witch, an interest in fishing over needlepoint, a desire to wash and wax the car rather than try out for cheerleading, or masculine costumes over feminine ones?
²¹
Is it possible that what researchers are seeing in girls with CAH is greater identification with male activities, whatever they might be?

Interestingly, studies that have looked at the correlations between early testosterone and later gendered-play behaviour in nonclinical children – which so far have shown the most convincing relationships (although they are still not very impressive) – encounter this very same problem. For example, one study found correlations between amniotic testosterone and male-typical play within both boys and girls, while an earlier study found a correlation between maternal testosterone and play behaviour, although
only in girls. But in both studies the behavioural measure used was the Pre-School Activities Inventory, which, as mentioned earlier, includes items that may have more to do with cultural gender rules than more fundamental psychological predispositions. (A third study, using a different measure of gendered play, found no relationship at all between amniotic testosterone and play preferences.)
²²

In short, we just don’t know what’s going on. One researcher has suggested that ‘androgen may affect the reward value of moving stimuli, so that objects that move and have moving parts may be more rewarding to girls with CAH and to boys than to typical girls.’
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But we just don’t know until this idea is tested. If in these toy preference studies Barbie came with a pink car instead of clothes and hair accessories, would girls with CAH play with her more than control girls? That’s what the brain organisation hypothesis would predict. Would a girl with CAH rather play with a toy stroller that can be wheeled around, over a firetruck that cannot? Would the changing proportion of men in an occupation, like veterinary medicine, have no effect on its appeal to girls with CAH?

Perhaps. But another possibility is that girls with CAH are drawn to what is culturally ascribed to males. Thirty years ago, primatologist Frances Burton put forward an intriguing suggestion that casts the data from females with CAH in an entirely new light. She proposed that the effect of foetal hormones in primates is to predispose them to be receptive to whatever behaviours happen to go with their own sex in the particular society into which they are born.
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(We’ll shortly see what led her to this hypothesis.) As Melissa Hines points out, this would provide a very ‘flexible design’, enabling ‘new members of the species to develop sex-appropriate behaviors despite changes in what those behaviors might be. This hormonal mechanism would liberate the species from a “hard-wired” masculinity or femininity that would be unable to adapt to changes in the environment that make it advantageous for males and females to modify their niche in society.’
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