Delusions of Gender (3 page)

Many ratios were tried – of brain weight to height, to body weight, to muscular mass, to the size of the heart, even (one begins to sense desperation) to some one bone, such as the femur.
³⁶

These days, we have rather more of an inkling of the complexity of the brain. It’s undeniable that by moving into the realm of the brain itself, rather than its outer casing, scientific advance was made. It was certainly an important moment when a forward-thinking nineteenth-century scientist, fingering his tape measure with the tense distraction of one who suspects that his analysis has left certain important details unpenetrated, said thoughtfully, ‘Pass me that brain and those scales, will you?’ But even the untrained twenty-first-century layperson can see that this brought scientists only a little closer to understanding the mystery of how brain cells create the engine of the mind, and can sense the unfortunate hastiness of the conclusion that women’s cognitive inferiority to men could be weighed in ounces.

It may seem like the same sort of prejudice couldn’t possibly creep into the contemporary debate because now we are all so enlightened; perhaps even …
over
enlightened? Writers who argue that there are hardwired differences between the sexes that account for the gender status quo often like to position themselves as courageous knights of truth, who brave the stifling ideology of political correctness. Yet claims of ‘essential differences’ between the two sexes simply reflect – and give scientific authority to – what I suspect is really a majority opinion.
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If history tells us anything, it is to take a second, closer look at our society and our science. This is the aim of
Delusions of Gender
.

At the core of the first part of this book, ‘“Half-Changed World”, Half-Changed Minds’, is the critical idea that the psyche is ‘not a discrete entity packed in the brain. Rather, it is a structure of psychological processes that are shaped by and thus closely attuned to the culture that surrounds them.’
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We tend not to think about ourselves this way, and it’s easy to underestimate the impact of what is
outside
the mind on what takes place inside. When we confidently compare the ‘female mind’ and the ‘male mind’, we think of something stable inside the head of the person, the product of a ‘female’ or ‘male’ brain. But such a tidily isolated data processor is not the mind that social and cultural psychologists are getting to know with ever more intimacy. As Harvard University psychologist Mahzarin Banaji puts it, there is no ‘bright line separating self from culture’, and the culture in which we develop and function enjoys a ‘deep reach’ into our minds.
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It’s for this reason that we can’t understand gender differences in female and male minds – the minds that are the source of our thoughts, feelings, abilities, motivations, and behaviour – without understanding how psychologically permeable is the skull that separates the mind from the sociocultural context in which it operates. When the environment makes gender salient, there is a ripple effect on the mind. We start to think of ourselves in terms of our gender, and stereotypes and social expectations become more prominent in the mind. This can change self-perception, alter interests, debilitate or enhance ability, and trigger unintentional discrimination. In other words, the social context influences who you are, how you think and what you do. And these thoughts, attitudes and behaviours of yours, in turn, become part of the social context. It’s intimate. It’s messy. And it demands a different way of thinking about gender.

Then, there’s the less subtle, consciously performed discrimination against women, the wide-ranging forms of exclusion, the harassment and the various injustices both at work and home. These stem from not-all-that-old, and still powerful, ideas about men and women’s proper roles and places in the world. By the end of the first part of the book, one can’t help but wonder if we have
stumbled on the twenty-first-century blind-spot. As University of California–Irvine professor of mathematics Alice Silverberg commented:

When I was a student, women in the generation above me told horror stories about discrimination, and added ‘But everything has changed. That will never happen to you.’ I’m told that this was said even by the generations before that, and now my generation is saying similar things to the next one. Of course, a decade or so later we always say, ‘How could we have thought
that
was equality?’ Are we serving the next generation well if we tell them that everything is equal and fair when it’s not?
⁴⁰

In the second part of the book, ‘Neurosexism’, we take a closer look at claims about male and female brains. What do people
mean
when they say that there are inherent gender differences, or that the two sexes are hardwired to be better suited to different roles and occupations? As cognitive neuroscientist Giordana Grossi notes, these readily used phrases, ‘along with the continual references to sex hormones, evoke images of stability and unchangeability: women and men behave differently because their brains are structured differently.’
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Avid readers of popular science books and articles about gender may well have formed the impression that science has shown that the path to a male or a female brain is set in utero, and that these differently structured brains create essentially different minds. There
are
sex differences in the brain. There are also large (although generally decreasing) sex differences in who does what, and who achieves what. It would make sense if these facts were connected in some way, and perhaps they are. But when we follow the trail of contemporary science we discover a surprising number of gaps, assumptions, inconsistencies, poor methodologies, and leaps of faith – as well as more than one echo of the insalubrious past. As Brown University professor of biology and gender studies Anne Fausto-Sterling has pointed out, ‘despite the many recent insights of brain research, this organ remains a
vast unknown, a perfect medium on which to project, even unwittingly, assumptions about gender.’
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The sheer complexity of the brain lends itself beautifully to overinterpretation and precipitous conclusions. After combing through the controversies, we’ll ask whether modern neuroscientific explanations of gender inequality are doomed to join the same scrap heap as measures of skull volume, brain weight and neuron delicacy.

And it’s important for scientists to remain aware of this possibility because from the seeds of scientific speculation grow the monstrous fictions of popular writers. Again and again, claims are made by so-called experts that are ‘simply coating old-fashioned stereotypes with a veneer of scientific credibility’, as Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Barnett warn in the
Boston Globe
.
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Yet this ‘popular neurosexism’ easily finds its way into apparently scientific books and articles for the interested public, including parents and teachers.
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Already, sexism disguised in neuroscientific finery is changing the way children are taught.

Neurosexism reflects and reinforces cultural beliefs about gender – and it may do so in a particularly powerful way. Dubious ‘brain facts’ about the sexes become part of the cultural lore. And, as I describe in ‘Recycling Gender’, the third part of the book, refreshed and invigorated by neurosexism, the gender cycle is ready to sweep up into it the next generation. Children, keen to understand and find their place in society’s most salient social divide, are born into a half-changed world, to parents with half-changed minds.

I don’t think that in my lifetime there will be a woman Prime Minister.

—Margaret Thatcher (1971), Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1979 to 1990
⁴⁵

It’s worth remembering just how much society can change in a relatively short period of time. Precedents are still being set. Could
a society in which males and females hold equal places ever exist? Ironically, perhaps it is not biology that is the implacably resistant counterforce, but our culturally attuned minds.
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No one knows whether males and females could ever enjoy perfect equality. But of this I am confident: So long as the counterpoints provided by the work of the many researchers presented in this book are given an audience, in fifty years’ time people will look back on these early-twenty-first-century debates with bewildered amusement, and wonder how we ever could have thought that
that
was the closest we could get to equality.

The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became. I adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming. If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.

—Jan Morris, a male-to-female transsexual describing her post-transition experiences in her autobiography,
Conundrum
(1987)
¹

S
uppose a researcher were to tap you on the shoulder and ask you to write down what, according to cultural lore, males and females are like. Would you stare at the researcher blankly and exclaim, ‘But what can you mean? Every person is a unique, multifaceted, sometimes even contradictory individual, and with such an astonishing range of personality traits within each sex, and across contexts, social class, age, experience, educational level, sexuality and ethnicity, it would be pointless and meaningless to attempt to pigeonhole such rich complexity and variability into two crude stereotypes’? No. You’d pick up your pencil and start writing.
²
Take a look at the two lists from such a survey, and you will find yourself reading adjectives that would not look out of place in an eighteenth-century treatise on the different duties of the two sexes. One list would probably feature communal personality traits such as
compassionate, loves children, dependent, interpersonally sensitive, nurturing
. These, you will note, are ideal qualifications for someone who wishes to live to serve the needs of others. On the
other character inventory we would see agentic descriptions like
leader, aggressive, ambitious, analytical, competitive, dominant, independent
and
individualistic
. These are the perfect traits for bending the world to your command, and earning a wage for it.
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I don’t have to tell you which is the female list and which is the male one: you already know. (These lists, as sociologists Cecilia Ridgeway and Shelley Correll have pointed out, also most closely match stereotypes of ‘white, middle-class, heterosexual men and women, if anyone.’)
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Even if you, personally, don’t subscribe to these stereotypes, there is a part of your mind that isn’t so prissy. Social psychologists are finding that what we can consciously report about ourselves does not tell the whole story.
⁵
Stereotypes, as well as attitudes, goals, and identity also appear to exist at an implicit level, and operate ‘without the encumbrances of awareness, intention, and control’, as social psychologists Brian Nosek and Jeffrey Hansen have put it.
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The implicit associations of the mind can be thought of as a tangled but highly organised network of connections. They connect representations of objects, people, concepts, feelings, your own self, goals, motives and behaviours with one another. The strength of each of these connections depends on your past experiences (and also, interestingly, the current context): how often those two objects, say, or that person and that feeling, or that object and a certain behaviour have gone together in the past.
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So what does the implicit mind automatically associate with women and men? The various tests that social psychologists use to assess implicit associations work from the assumption that if you present your participant with a particular stimulus, then this will rapidly, automatically and unintentionally activate strongly associated concepts, actions, goals and so on, more than weakly associated ones. These primed representations become more readily accessible to influence perception and guide behaviour.
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In one of the most widely used tests, the computer-based Implicit Association Test or IAT (developed by social psychologists Anthony Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji and Brian Nosek), participants must
pair categories of words or pictures.
⁹
For example, first they might have to pair female names with communal words (like
connected
and
supportive
), and male names with agentic words (like
individualistic
and
competitive
). Participants usually find this easier than the opposite pairing (female names with agentic words, and male names with communal words). The small but significant difference in reaction time this creates is taken as a measure of the stronger automatic and unintended associations between women and communality, and men and agency.
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