Delusions of Gender (36 page)

A child’s toy preferences are no doubt influenced by a whole host of factors, with his or her gender knowledge being just one part of a complicated mix. But nonetheless, although this literature is somewhat mixed, overall it does suggest that gender identity (
I am a boy
) and gender stereotype knowledge (
Boys don’t play with this toy
) motivate gender stereotypical play.
¹¹
For example, psychologist Kristina Zosuls and her colleagues recently tracked what seemed to be the very start of this process in children who were not yet two years old. They looked at toddlers’ play behaviour at both seventeen and twenty-one months of age, to see how it changed
as the children started to use gender labels (like
lady
and
boy
) to refer to themselves or others. At seventeen months, boys and girls were equally interested in the doll, tea set, brush and comb set and blocks, although girls spent less time playing with the truck. But four months later, girls had increased their doll play and boys had decreased it. A closer look at this shift revealed that gender labelling was associated with more gender-stereotypical play.
¹²

With older children, who are in no doubt about their gender identity, you can manipulate gender labels and watch what happens. In school-aged children, subtle gender labels like ‘This is a test to see how good you would be at mechanics or at operating machinery’ (versus needlework, sewing or knitting) affect children’s performance in stereotype-consistent ways.
¹³
And with children under age six, putting a gender label on a gender-neutral toy is a reliable way of creating gender-stereotypical behaviour. For example, four-year-old children will play for three times as long with a xylophone or balloon if it is labelled as being for their own sex rather than for children of the other sex. A less attractive gender-neutral toy can be rendered instantly more desirable simply by applying the correct gender-label. And conversely, an attractive novel toy becomes less so when labelled as for the other sex.
¹⁴

It’s also possible to make even decidedly gender-stereotyped toys more appealing, especially perhaps to girls, by showing them that they can be played with by the other sex, too. In one small study, Rebecca Bigler and her colleagues identified eight preschoolers, four girls and four boys, who reliably avoided toys traditionally played with by the other sex. These children were then read two carefully constructed tales that unsubtly exploded gender stereotypes at every turn: one story starred the exuberant Sally Slapcabbage and her pilot mother; the second featured Billy Bunter, who finds and cherishes a talking doll. Thanks to the stories, two of the four boys overcame a little of their reluctance to explore their feminine side on the playmat, venturing to play with the sorts of toys they would normally ignore. Yet even more
remarkable was the effect of the stories on three of the four girls. After just a few readings of the counterstereotypic stories, these girls abandoned stroller, baby doll and ironing board to experiment with fire trucks, blocks and helicopters. By the last few days of the experiment these girls were playing almost exclusively with the boyish toys.
¹⁵
After just a few doses of Sally Slapcabbage, one would be hard-pressed to distinguish these once ultrafeminine preschoolers from the girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (exposed to unusually high levels of foetal testosterone) we met in
Chapter 11
.

So what are we to make now of the little girl tucking ‘baby truckie’ into bed? If we focus in just on her, then yes, the failure of gender-neutral parenting to achieve its aim will indeed seem comical. But widen your field of vision to include the less-visible cultural waters in which the sponges that are our children are immersed, and the real joke is the idea that children are being reared in a gender-neutral fashion. Emily Kane suggests that the rapidity with which highly educated and privileged parents fall back on biological explanations reflects their position at ‘the vanguard of a limited sociological imagination’.
¹⁶
Harsh but, I think, fair.

Children’s views about gender differences reach ‘peak rigidity’ between five and seven years of age.
¹⁷
From then on, they increasingly understand that it is not only boys who like to be active, and make things and sometimes be nasty, and it is not only women who can be affectionate, cry, and clean and tidy the house. (The few children who don’t come around to this insight often go on to have very successful careers writing popular books based on rigid gender stereotypes.)
¹⁸
But even as their growing cognitive flexibility enables them to consciously modify or even reject certain gender stereotypes, we can only presume that these stereotypical gender associations linger on, continuing to be reinforced by the patterns of a half-changed world. There they will be, ready to flesh out the details of the self-concept whenever the
social context brings a gender identity to the fore. There they will be as they judge their work colleagues and negotiate privileges and patterns in their romantic relationships. There, perhaps, they will be as they interpret sex differences in the brain. And there they will be if they become parents themselves.

And so it goes on.

W
hen a distinguished man of Harvard makes a few ill-advisedly public comments about women’s limited aptitude for a male-dominated profession, you can be sure there will be controversy. So discovered Professor Richard Cabot of Harvard Medical School, who in 1915 addressed the graduating class of the Woman’s Medical College of Philadelphia. According to newspaper reports, Cabot suggested to these ambitious young women that female physicians are temperamentally and physically ill-suited to the more demanding branches of medicine. They should therefore, in his opinion, avoid general practice and research and instead restrict themselves to social service work.
¹
As one newspaper headlined the event:
Doctor Man Calls Doctor Woman Unfit
. In the debate that followed, Cabot was defended by another distinguished medical professional, Dr. Simon Baruch, who agreed that women’s nature curbed their options within medicine, arguing that women doctors, while enjoying the ‘truly feminine temperamental qualities that spring from the biological maternal source’, at the same time lack ‘originality, logic, initiative, courage, and other distinctly masculine qualities’. Naturally, then, the ‘true woman’ will enjoy her greatest achievements in ‘her own sphere’ of ‘nurturing civilisation’.

Dr. Baruch concluded his letter with the general concern that ‘the dear women are “obsessed” with their fitness for all things
masculine which blinds them to a sane view of their biological limitations.’ He added, lest this remark be churlishly taken the wrong way, that ‘[t]hese lines are written in no spirit of controversy, simply to point out the irrevocable law of nature’.
²
By way of support, he referred to arguments made by the neurologist Dr. Charles L. Dana who, you will recall, was anxious that the upper half of the female spinal cord was a little on the light side for politics. And that is not all. Noting that ‘women are rather more subject than men to the pure psychoses’, Dana dolefully predicted that ‘[i]f women achieve the feministic ideal and live as men do, they would incur the risk of 25 per cent more insanity than they have now.’
³

These fears do not look reasonable in the sharp focus of hindsight. At a time when, in the United States, women physicians in training outnumber men in dermatology, family medicine, psychiatry, paediatrics, OB/GYN, and are ‘closing in fast’ in internal medicine,
⁴
we can’t help but judge a little harshly the career advice that women physicians should limit themselves to social welfare work. Dr. Cabot’s prophecy that women physicians who ignore this advice are destined to become ‘disappointed and dissatisfied’ seems unnecessarily gloomy.
⁵
Likewise, Dr. Dana’s worry that ‘woman suffrage would … add to our voting and administrative forces the biological element of an unstable preciosity which might do injury to itself without promoting the community’s good’ appears to have been unfounded.
⁶
So far as I know, science has not documented any dangerous unravelling of feminine refinement and mental stability wrought by the sheer vulgarity of marking an X on a ballot. But we should not be too critical. These educated, intelligent men were simply worried by the prospect of social change. What would be the consequences for women who abandoned the nurturing roles for which they were biologically designed? Was it wise for them to be encouraged by feminists to seek access to the public spheres of men when they so clearly lacked the necessary mental and physical fitness? Had the biological limits of equality been reached, or even surpassed?

The error of these gloomy soothsayers, it’s easy enough to see
now, lay in their failure to adequately stretch the sociological imagination. So focused were they on locating the cause of inequality in some internal limitation of women – the lightweight brains, the energy-sapping ovaries, the special nurturing skills that leave no room for masculine ones – that they failed to see the injustice, as Stephen J. Gould put it, of ‘a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within’.
⁷

It would be better not to continue making the same mistake.

Take a look around. The gender inequality that you see is
in
your mind. So are the cultural beliefs about gender that are so familiar to us all. They are in that messy tangle of mental associations that interact with the social context. Out of this interaction emerges your self-perception, your interests, your values, your behaviour, even your abilities. Gender can become salient in the environment in so many ways: an imbalance of the sexes in a group, an advertisement, a comment by a colleague, a query about sex on a form, perhaps also a pronoun, the sign on a toilet door, the feel of a skirt, the awareness of one’s own body. When the context activates gendered associations, that tangle serves as a barrier to nonstereotypical self-perception, concerns, emotions, sense of belonging and behaviour – and more readily allows what is traditionally expected of the sexes.

The fluidity of the self and the mind is impressive and is in continual cahoots with the environment. When social psychologists discover, for example, that mere words (like
competition
), everyday objects (like briefcases and boardroom tables), people or even scenery can trigger particular motives in us, or that similar role models can seep into our most private ambitions, it makes sense to start questioning the direction of causality between gender difference and gender inequality.
⁸
We are justified in wondering whether, as gender scholar Michael Kimmel suggests, ‘gender difference is the product of gender inequality, and not the other way around.’
⁹

Nor is gender inequality just part of our minds – it is also an inextricable part of our biology. We tend to think of the chain of
command passing from genes, to hormones, to brain, to environment. (As biologist Robert Sapolsky describes this common misconception, ‘DNA is the commander, the epicenter from which biology emanates. Nobody tells a gene what to do; it’s always the other way around.’)
¹⁰
Yet most developmental scientists will tell you that one-way arrows of causality are just
so
last century. The circuits of the brain are quite literally a product of your physical, social and cultural environment, as well as your behaviour and thoughts. What we experience and do creates neural activity that can alter the brain, either directly or through changes in gene expression. This neuroplasticity means that, as Kaiser puts it, the social phenomenon of gender ‘comes into the brain’ and ‘becomes part of our cerebral biology’.
¹¹

As for hormones that act on the brain, if you cuddle a baby, get a promotion, see billboard after billboard of near-naked women or hear a gender stereotype that places one sex at a higher status than the other, don’t expect your hormonal state to remain impervious. It won’t. ‘Even how we behave or what we think about can affect the levels of our sex hormones’, point out
Gene Worship
authors Gisela Kaplan and Lesley Rogers.
¹²
This continuous interplay between the biological and the social means that, as Anne Fausto-Sterling has put it, ‘components of our political, social, and moral struggles become, quite literally, embodied, incorporated into our very physiological being.’
¹³

And so, when researchers look for sex differences in the brain or the mind, they are hunting a moving target. Both are in continuous interaction with the social context. Some researchers have even started to investigate how the brain, or hormones, respond differently while doing stereotyped tasks, depending on whether gender stereotypes are made salient.
¹⁴
And gender differences in the mind can shift from moment to moment: for example, as stereotype threat is created or dispersed, or self-identity changes. But also, our actions and attitudes change the very cultural patterns that interact with the minds of others to coproduce
their
actions and attitudes that, in turn, become part of the cultural milieu: in
short, ‘culture and psyche make each other up.’
¹⁵
When a woman persists with a high-level maths course or runs as a presidential candidate, or a father leaves work early to pick up the children from school, they are altering, little by little, the implicit patterns of the minds around them. As society slowly changes, so too do the differences between male and female selves, abilities, emotions, values, interests, hormones and brains – because each is inextricably intimate with the social context in which it develops and functions.

Where the convergence between female and male lives might end is anybody’s guess. (A tip: the mistake is usually to undershoot.) But it
is
remarkable how similar the two sexes become, psychologically, when gender fades into the background. ‘Love, tenderness, nurturance; competence, ambition, assertion – these are
human
qualities, and all human beings – both women and men – should have equal access to them’, argues Kimmel.
¹⁶
Doesn’t that sound nice? But it is still the case today that gender inequalities, and the gender stereotypes they evoke, interact with our minds in ways that create inequality of access.