Delusions of Gender (37 page)

Meanwhile, neuroscience is used by some in a way that it has often been used in the past: to reinforce, with all the authority of science, old-fashioned stereotypes and roles. ‘The brain has frequently been the battle site in controversies over sex or race differences’, as Ruth Bleier has noted.
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Researching popular claims about the differences between male and female brains is not an activity that is particularly good for the blood pressure. The sheer audacity of the overinterpretations and misinformation is startling. Some commentators declare themselves to be courageous taboo-breakers, who shout the scientific truth about sex differences into the hushed silence demanded by political correctness. But this is exactly how they shouldn’t be regarded. For one thing, neurosexism is so popular, so mainstream, that I think it is difficult to argue that our attitude towards the supposedly unmentionable idea of innate sex differences is usually anything other than casual and forgiving. Can you imagine schools implementing brain-based
single-race classrooms after seeing a few slides and pseudo-scientific facts about differences between ‘black’ brains and ‘white’ brains? If to talk about innate psychological differences between males and females was truly shocking and provocative, would publishers wave on to their hot list, or editors into their columns, books and articles that so misinform and mislead?

But also, to those interested in gender equality there is nothing at all frightening about good science. It is only carelessly done science, or poorly interpreted science, or the neurosexism it feeds, that creates cause for concern. Unfortunately, pointing out the problems can easily be framed as desperate nitpicking or the shooting of the messenger. Yet as Kaplan and Rogers point out, ‘[s]cepticism and rigorous science are not bad faults compared to moving prematurely to conclusions, especially when they influence social attitudes.’
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These social attitudes about gender are an important part of the culture in which our brains and minds develop.

And it is into this powerful, pervasive web of social attitudes that children are born, parented and develop. Gender associations are soon learned, a legacy to last a lifetime, ready to be primed by the social context. Given the continual emphasis on gender in the young child’s life, together with a rich fodder of information about its cultural correlates, it is hardly surprising that gender-neutral parenting fails. As sociologist Bronwyn Davies explains the problem for children:

Children cannot both be required to position themselves as identifiably male or female and at the same time be deprived of the means of signifying maleness and femaleness. Yet this is what the vast majority of non-sexist programmes have expected them to do.
¹⁹

The relentless gendering of everything around the child – from clothes, shoes, bedding, lunch boxes, even giftwrap, as well as the wider world around – makes this an all-but-impossible task. One effect of what has been described as ‘the pernicious pinkification of
little girls’
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must surely be that gender becomes salient – to both boys and girls – with every rustle of pink tulle or twinkle of pretty shoes. How should children ignore gender when they continually watch it, hear it, see it; are clothed in it, sleep in it, eat off it?

Our minds, society and neurosexism create difference. Together, they wire gender. But the wiring is soft, not hard. It is flexible, malleable and changeable. And, if we only believe this, it will continue to unravel.

The research described in this book spans many different academic fields, and I am very grateful for the extremely helpful feedback and encouragement I received from the many experts in those areas, who generously found time to read and comment on portions of the manuscript. My warmest thanks go to Rebecca Bigler, Suparna Choudhury, Isabelle Dussauge, Ione Fine, Kit Fine, William Ickes, Anelis Kaiser, Emily Kane, Simon Laham, Carol Martin, Cindy Miller, Kristen Pammer, Alice Silverberg and especially Frances Burton, Anne Fine, Ian Gold, Giordana Grossi, Christine Kenneally, Neil Levy and Lesley Rogers. This book has been greatly improved by the expertise of these readers, as well as the many more academics who responded so helpfully to my queries. Any errors or misinterpretations that remain are my own.

My thanks also go to Jeanette Kennett, Neil Levy and the Centre for Applied Philosophy & Public Ethics, University of Melbourne, for support during and prior to the writing of this book. I am also grateful to everyone who played a part in making it fit for publication. My agent, Barbara Lowenstein, had an essential role in helping me develop my ideas. I thank her for her assistance and support. I am also extremely grateful to Simon Flynn and his colleagues Najma Finlay, Andrew Furlow and Sarah Higgins at Icon Books. Erica Stern was my endlessly patient and helpful contact at W. W. Norton, and I am very grateful to her, Carol Rose and my editor, Angela von der Lippe, for their many valuable comments and improvements to the manuscript. I also thank Laura Romain for her assistance.

Finally, my sincere thanks and gratitude go to my husband, Russell.

It is, I imagine, extremely hard to say anything original about gender, and this has not been my goal. In synthesising material from many different disciplines my aim has been not to stand on the shoulders of others, but to report the view from that position in an accessible way. I am very appreciative of the important research, all done by others, cited in the long list of notes that follow. A few books stand out as deserving particular mention because of the important role they played in my own understanding of the areas they discuss, an influence that is hard to footnote in a book like this. When I first had the idea for this book, my concern about neuroscientific explanations of gender difference was limited to the crass popular interpretations of this literature. However, five books in particular laid the foundation for my understanding of the need for critical attention to the neuroscientific and neuroendocrinological research itself. Ruth Bleier’s
Science and Gender
, Anne Fausto-Sterling’s two classics,
The Myths of Gender
and
Sexing the Body
, and Gisela Kaplan and Lesley Rogers’s
Gene Worship
were eye-opening to me in their challenges and critiques of the unintended biases and unexamined assumptions often built into gender-difference research. Unexpectedly,
Sexual Science
, Cynthia Russett’s historical account of Victorian sexual science, was also very helpful in this regard. Laurie Rudman and Peter Glick’s recent book
The Social Psychology of Gender
, which comprehensively reviews this rapidly expanding field in a wonderfully coherent way, was an excellent resource. And a number of review articles and
chapters by developmental psychologists Rebecca Bigler, Lynn Liben, Carol Martin, Cindy Miller, Diane Ruble and their colleagues were also extremely helpful. I am very grateful to all these scholars (and many more besides) for their work.