Delusions of Gender (7 page)

Let’s rejoin Jane and Evan at the breakfast table and take stock for a moment.

In the eighteenth century Thomas Gisborne observed with pleasure how nature had conveniently endowed the female mind with those very qualities she most needed to discharge her social duties. Nowadays, the argument plays the other way: women choose the social roles that best fit their female mind. But perhaps Gisborne was nearly right, after all. The mind, triggered by social cues, uses its female identity to endow
itself
with the greater sensitivity, sympathy, and compassion ascribed to it by cultural belief. Then, just as remarkably, these enhancements are gone. It’s as good as magic. But as we’ll see in the next chapter, social psychology is full of these now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t tricks.

P
ick a gender difference, any difference. Now watch very closely as –
poof!
– it’s gone.

Social psychologists are becoming rather brilliant at setting up these gender difference sleights of hand. The examples are piling up in all sorts of domains – from social sensitivity to chess to negotiation – but the pièce de resistance is the visuospatial skill of mental rotation performance.

In the classic and most widely used test of this ability, the test taker is shown an unfamiliar three-dimensional shape made up of little cubes – the target – and four other similar shapes. Two of these are the same as the original but have been rotated in three-dimensional space, and two are mirror images. The task is to work out which two are the same as the target. Mental rotation performance is the largest and most reliable gender difference in cognition. In a typical sample, about 75 percent of people who score above average are male.
¹
Gender differences in mental rotation ability have even recently been seen in babies three to four and five months of age.
²
While it’s easy to see that a high score on the mental rotation test would be a distinct advantage when it comes to playing Tetris, some also claim (although they’re often strongly disputed) that male superiority in this domain plays a significant role in explaining males’ better representation in science, engineering and maths.
³

People’s mental rotation ability is malleable; it can be greatly enhanced by training.
⁴
But there are far quicker, easier ways to
modulate mental rotation ability. By now, you already know what these methods involve: manipulating the social context in such a way that it changes the mind that is performing the task. For example, you can feminise the task. When, in one study, participants were told that performance on mental rotation is probably linked with success on such tasks as ‘in-flight and carrier-based aviation engineering … nuclear propulsion engineering, undersea approach and evasion, [and] navigation’, the men came out well ahead. Yet when the same test was described as predicting facility for ‘clothing and dress design, interior decoration and interior design … decorative creative needlepoint, creative sewing and knitting, crocheting [and] flower arrangement’, this emasculating list of activities had a draining effect on male performance.
⁵

Alternatively, instead of changing the gender of the task, you can keep the task the same but push gender into the mental background. Matthew McGlone and Joshua Aronson, for example, measured mental rotation ability in students at a selective liberal arts college in the northeastern United States. One group was primed with gender, while another group was primed with their exclusive private-college identity. Women who had been induced to think of themselves as a student at a selective liberal arts college enjoyed a performance boost, scoring significantly higher than gender-primed women.
⁶
Likewise, Markus Hausmann and colleagues found that although gender-stereotype-primed men outperformed gender-stereotype-primed women, men and women primed with an irrelevant (geographical region-based) stereotype performed similarly on the mental rotation task.
⁷

Another outrageous, but successful, approach was recently devised by Italian researcher Angelica Moè.
⁸
She described the mental rotation test to her Italian high school student participants as a test of spatial abilities and told one group that ‘men perform better than women in this test, probably for genetic reasons.’ The control group was given no information about gender. But a third group was presented with a downright lie. That group was told that ‘women perform better than men in this test, probably for
genetic reasons.’ So what effect did this have? In both the men-are-better and the control group, men outperformed women with the usual size of gender difference. But women in the women-are-better group, the recipients of the little white lie, performed just as well as the men.

How can such easy manoeuvres – changing the way a task is described, bringing a particular social identity to the fore, or telling a simple fib – have such an erosive effect on the most robust gender difference in cognition in the literature? We saw in the previous chapter that the social demands of a situation can change how motivated men and women are to perform well. And psychologists are beginning to uncover other ways in which the social context can change, for better or for worse, the mind’s power and effectiveness. There turn out to be a striking number of ways that being in the ‘wrong’ social group creates a trickier psychological path to navigate. With regards to gender, researchers have had quite a lot of success unravelling how the social context interacts with ability in traditionally masculine domains, especially mathematics. As we’ll see in this chapter, a female doing traditionally male work faces the same problem as the dancer Ginger Rogers, who, as it was once famously noted, ‘did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels’.

In her history of American women in medicine,
Sympathy and Science
, Regina Markell Morantz-Sanchez relates the memorable operating room experience of an early-twentieth-century medical student, Mary Ritter:

As the gruesome operation proceeded I gritted my teeth, clenched my hands, and held on. Next to me stood a senior woman student. I watched her turn a greenish white and sway a little. Contrary to the ethics of an operating room, where silence is the rule, I hissed in her ear, ‘Don’t you dare faint.’ … The two women students did not faint and thus
disgrace the sex. That three men did faint was merely due to a passing circulatory disturbance of no significance; but had the two women medical students fainted, it would have been incontrovertible evidence of the unfitness of the entire sex for the medical profession.
⁹

Ritter, as a female interloper in the mostly male domain of medicine, was acutely aware of what today is referred to as stereotype threat (or, sometimes, social identity threat), the ‘real-time threat of being judged and treated poorly in settings where a negative stereotype about one’s group applies’.
¹⁰
A now-substantial literature shows that, as in the mental rotation examples described earlier, changing the threat level of the context can have a tangible effect on ability.
¹¹
One very striking and real-world demonstration of this was provided by City University of New York psychologist Catherine Good and colleagues, who used as their participants more than 100 university students enrolled in a fast and difficult calculus class that was a pipeline to the hard sciences.
¹²
The students were given a calculus test made up of questions from the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) Maths test and, to motivate them, were told that they would get extra credit based on their performance. (In reality, everyone received the same credit.) The test packet handed out to each student included some information about the test. Students in the stereotype threat condition were told that the test was designed to measure their maths ability, to try to better understand what makes some people better at maths than others. This kind of statement can on its own create stereotype threat for women, who are well aware of their own stereotyped inferiority in mathematics.
¹³
But added to this, in the nonthreat condition, was the information that despite testing on thousands of students no gender difference had ever been found. So what was the effect of this extra information?

The men and women in the two groups had, on average, all received much the same course grades. You’d expect then, given their apparently equivalent ability, that males and females in the
threat and nonthreat condition would perform at about the same level on the test. Instead, the researchers found that females performed better in the nonthreat condition, and this was particularly striking among Anglo-American participants, who generally show the greatest sex difference in maths performance. Among these participants, men and women in the threat condition, as well as men in the nonthreat condition, all scored about 19 percent on this very difficult test. But women in the nonthreat group scored an average of 30 percent correct, thus outperforming every other group – including both groups of men. In other words, the standard presentation of a test seemed to suppress women’s ability, but when the same test was presented to women as equally hard for men and women, it ‘unleashed their mathematics potential.’
¹⁴

It’s disconcerting to think that those who belong to negatively stereotyped groups might be pervasively hampered by stereotype threat effects in their academic lives. Recently, Stanford University’s Gregory Walton and his colleague Steven Spencer analysed data from dozens of stereotype threat experiments to test the idea that negatively stereotyped students’ real-world academic performance is ‘like the time of a track star running into a stiff headwind: It underestimates her time without the headwind.’ They confirmed that negatively stereotyped participants (that is, females doing maths and non-Asian minority students), matched on real-world academic tests like the SAT, performed worse than nonstereotyped groups under stereotype threat. But importantly, when stereotype threat was removed, the stereotyped groups actually
outperformed
nonstereotyped peers who, from real-world tests, one would think had the same ability.
¹⁵

Psychologists have been very creative in working out how stereotype threat can have such a dampening effect on performance. Occasionally, psychologists make up their own negative stereotypes. But mostly, they are content to exploit preexisting cultural beliefs about group differences, like women’s inferior mathematical ability. This can be done in disquietingly naturalistic ways. Stereotype threat effects have been seen in women who: record
their sex at the beginning of a quantitative test (which is standard practice for many tests); are in the minority as they take the test; have just watched women acting in air-headed ways in commercials, or have instructors or peers who hold – consciously or otherwise – sexist attitudes.
¹⁶
Indeed, subtle triggers for stereotype threat seem to be more harmful than blatant cues,
¹⁷
which suggests the intriguing possibility that stereotype threat may be more of an issue for women now than it was decades ago, when people were more loose-lipped when it came to denigrating female ability.

So what happens to the female mind under threat? Somewhat inconveniently, when faced with the prospect of a maths test that will probe one’s mathematical strengths and weaknesses, the female mind brings out its gender identity.
¹⁸
The stereotype that females are poor at maths is now officially self-relevant, and this seems to be important. This might be why the private-college-primed women in Matthew McGlone’s mental rotation study performed better than their gender-primed counterparts: the former were construing themselves as members of an intellectually elite establishment, rather than women. Research suggests that the deadly combination of ‘knowing-and-being’ (
women are bad at maths
and
I am a woman
) can lower performance expectations, as well as trigger performance anxiety and other negative emotions.
¹⁹
For example, Mara Cadinu and her colleagues at the University of Padova gave women a maths test similar to the Graduate Record Examination. Beforehand, some women were told that ‘recent research has shown that there are clear differences in the scores obtained by men and women in logical-mathematical tasks’, while the other participants were told that there were no such differences.
²⁰
Before each of the problems in the test, the women were given a blank page on which they were asked to write down anything that popped into their heads. Women in the stereotype threat condition listed more than twice as many negative thoughts about the maths test (like, ‘These exercises are too difficult for me’). As this negativity built up, it increasingly interfered with performance. Although in the first half of the test both groups scored on average around 70 percent, by the latter
half of the exercise the control group’s performance had slightly improved (to 81 percent) whereas the threat group’s performance had plummeted to 56 percent.