Delusions of Gender (30 page)

Interestingly, for men who tend to the view that sex
discrimination is a thing of the past, the appeal of essentialist research is enhanced by evidence that the gender gap is closing, Morton and his colleagues also found. Participants were asked to rate research that investigated the genetic basis of sex differences in mouse brains, as well as claiming that similar factors may underlie psychological gender differences in humans. Beforehand they read an article, supposedly from a national newspaper, arguing either that gender inequality was stable, or closing. After reading about women’s gains these men more readily agreed that ‘this type of research should continue, deserved more funding, was good for society, represented the facts about gender differences, and made a major contribution to understanding human nature’.
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Taken together, Morton’s findings suggest that women’s gains will, in certain quarters, increase demand for essentialist research. As this research trickles back into society, people will turn away from social and structural explanations of gender difference. They will give up on the idea of further social change. And, to help the belief in the inevitability of inequality come true, workplace discrimination against women will increase.

It is, I think, time to raise the bar when it comes to the interpretation and communication of sex differences in the brain. How long, exactly, do we need to learn from the mistakes of the past?

As we’ve seen in this part of the book, speculating about sex differences from the frontiers of science is not a job for the faint-hearted who hate to get it wrong. So far, the items on that list of brain differences that are thought to explain the gender status quo have always, in the end, been crossed off.
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But before this happens, speculation becomes elevated to the status of fact, especially in the hands of some popular writers. Once in the public domain these supposed facts about male and female brains become part of the culture, often lingering on well past their best-by dates. Here, they reinforce and legitimate the gender stereotypes that interact with our minds, helping to create the very gender inequalities that the neuroscientific claims seek to explain.
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‘It’s made me think a lot more about genetic influence, she’s got two X chromosomes, and that somehow, I don’t know, because we don’t push the Barbie stuff at all, in fact I would prefer her not to have it … so I’m kind of intrigued at how even though I am sort of doing the middle of the road, that she is nonetheless veering over towards being more feminine, and I think it’s genetic.’ (White, upper-middle class, lesbian mother, describing her three-year-old daughter).

—Comment from Emily Kane’s interview study (2006)

W
hen I tell parents that I’m writing a book about gender, the most common response I get is an anecdote about how they tried gender-neutral parenting, and it simply didn’t work. (The next most frequent reaction is a polite edging away.) This is a common experience, found sociologist Emily Kane. She interviewed forty-two parents of preschoolers, from a wide range of backgrounds, and asked them why they thought that their sons or daughters sometimes behaved in sex-typed ways. Many parents called on evolutionary or divine reasons to explain why there should be innate biological differences between girls and boys (although most also mentioned social factors). But over a third of the interviewed parents – mostly white and middle or upper middle class – expressed the ‘biology as fallback’ position, as Kane called it. Only by process of elimination did they come to the conclusion
that differences between boys and girls were biological. Believing that they practised gender-neutral parenting, biology was the only remaining explanation:

‘It’s not as if (my sons) haven’t been exposed to all that princess stuff … they’re around it, but they show no interest, they haven’t been clamouring for any special princess toys or Ken and Barbie stuff … I think that’s the hard-wired stuff, to even see it and for it to be prevalent, and to not be interested in it.’ (White, upper-middle class, heterosexual father, describing his three and four year old sons’ lack of interest in their six-year-old sister’s toys).

Parents see their young children behaving in stereotypically boyish or girlish ways and, as Kane puts it, ‘assume that only something immutable could intervene between their gender-neutral efforts and the gendered outcomes they witness.’
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They are in distinguished company. As part of his suggestions regarding women’s possible intrinsically inferior aptitude for, and interest in, high-level scientific careers, Lawrence Summers offered an opinion on the essential differences between the sexes, gleaned from the nursery hearth:

So, I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my experience with my two and a half year old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck, tells me something. And I think it’s just something that you probably have to recognize.
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Likewise, in a scientific debate about the reasons behind the gender gap in science, Steven Pinker joked: ‘It is said that there is a technical term for people who believe that little boys and little girls are born indistinguishable and are moulded into their natures by parental socialization. The term is “childless”.’
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The frustration of the naively nonsexist parent has become a
staple joke. An all but obligatory paragraph in contemporary books and articles about hardwired gender differences gleefully describes a parent’s valiant, but always comically hopeless, attempts at gender-neutral parenting:

One of my [Louann Brizendine’s] patients gave her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter many unisex toys, including a bright red fire truck instead of a doll. She walked into her daughter’s room one afternoon to find her cuddling the truck in a baby blanket, rocking it back and forth saying, ‘Don’t worry, little truckie, everything will be all right.’
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As it happens, I can match anecdote with counter anecdote. Both of my sons, as toddlers, behaved in much the same way as Lawrence Summers’s and Brizendine’s patient’s young daughters. They too, despite being male, tucked trucks into pretend beds and, yes, called them Daddy, Mummy and Baby.

Yet parents are right when they say that young boys and girls play differently, even if the contrast isn’t nearly as black-and-white as it’s often portrayed. As the quotations with which this chapter began suggest, the received popular wisdom is that this happens despite the nonsexist, gender-neutral environment in which children are now raised: ‘Today we know that the truth is … [that] parents raise girls and boys differently because girls and boys are so different from birth. Girls and boys behave differently because their brains are wired differently’, says Leonard Sax.
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Well, as we now know, there’s more than one loophole in the ‘wiring’ argument. And as we’ll see in this part of the book, there are many reasons, ranging from subtle to blatant, why a gender-neutral environment is not something that any parent does, could or perhaps even wants to provide.

The obstacles to gender-neutral parenting begin well before a baby is born. When Emily Kane asked her sample of parents about
their preferences for sons or daughters before they even became parents, the themes of their responses showed that they had gendered expectations of even hypothetical children. The men tended to want a son, a common reason being that they liked the idea of teaching him to play sports. ‘I always wanted a son … I think that’s just a normal thing for a guy to want. I wanted to teach my son to play basketball, I wanted to teach my son to play baseball, and so forth. Just thinking of all the things you could do with your son’ was how one father put it. (An alien researcher from outer space, reading Kane’s transcripts, might be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that human females are born without arms and legs.) Mothers in the study, too, seemed to fall in with the assumption that boys and girls are good for different things. Kane found that if mothers wanted a son, it was to provide their husbands with a companion with whom to do things, like sports, that apparently couldn’t be done with girls. Daughters, by contrast, were expected to offer very different kinds of parental experiences: ‘A girl, I wanted that more … to dress her up and to buy the dolls and you know, the dance classes … A girl was someone that you could do all the things that you like to do with more than you could a boy.’ More often, though, girls were wanted because of the emotional connection they would provide. Only a daughter would be naturally inclined to emotional intimacy and the remembering of birthdays, was the unspoken assumption. Not yet conceived, and already the sons were off the hook for remembering to call or send birthday flowers.
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Postconception, the gendered expectations continue. Sociologist Barbara Rothman asked a group of mothers to describe the movements of their foetuses in the last three months of pregnancy. Among the women who didn’t know the sex of their baby while they were pregnant, there was no particular pattern to the way that (what turned out to be) male and female babies were described. But women who knew the sex of their unborn baby described the movements of sons and daughters differently. All were ‘active’, but male activity was more likely to be described as ‘vigorous’ and
‘strong’, including what Rothman teasingly describes as ‘the “John Wayne fetus” – “calm but strong”’. Female activity, by contrast, was described in gentler terms: ‘
Not
violent,
not
excessively energetic,
not
terribly active were used for females’.
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Then, there are the intriguing experiences of Kara Smith, an educational researcher with a background in women’s studies, who kept pregnancy field notes. Throughout the entire nine months of the pregnancy, Smith noted all the words and feelings expressed to the unborn baby. And, in the sixth month of the pregnancy, an ultrasound revealed his sex:

He was a boy. He was ‘stronger’ now than the child I had known only one minute before. He did not need to be addressed with such light and fluffy language, such as ‘little one’.… Thus, I lowered my voice to a deeper octave. It lost its tenderness. The tone in my voice was more articulate and short, whereas, before, the pitch in my voice was high and feminine. I wanted him to be ‘strong’ and ‘athletic’, therefore, I had to speak to him with a stereotypical ‘strong’, ‘masculine’ voice to encourage this ‘innate strength’.

What startled Smith most about this exercise was that someone like herself, well-versed in the negative consequences of gender socialisation, was inadvertently drawing on stereotypes in the way she responded to the baby. ‘I was, quite honestly, shocked by the findings’, she writes. Here was a mother – and, let’s not forget, not just any old mother, but the sort of feminist mother so beloved of unisex-parenting-gone-wrong stories – finding herself socialising her child into gender roles before he was even born.
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This is just one person’s experience. But Smith’s observation – that her behaviour was undermining her values – is backed by a large body of research. If all of our actions and judgements stemmed from reflected, consciously endorsed beliefs and values then not only would the world be a better place, but this book would be several pages shorter. Social psychologists, who have
been unravelling how implicit and explicit processes interact to make up our perceptions, feelings and behaviour, stress the importance of understanding ‘what happens in minds without explicit permission.’
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And this is particularly important when implicit associations don’t match the more-modern beliefs of the conscious mind. Implicit attitudes play an important part in our psychology. They distort social perception, they leak out into our behaviour, they influence our decisions – and all without us realising.
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Parents’ gender associations are firmly in place well before a child is even a twinkle in daddy’s eye. The scant but suggestive data of this chapter hint that beliefs about gender – either consciously or unconsciously held – are already shaping expectations about a future child’s interests and values, already biasing the mother’s perception of the little kicking baby inside her, and are already moulding a mother’s communication with her unborn child.