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December 5, 2017 - February 16, 2018
This is a common experience, discovered sociologist Emily Kane. Many parents of preschoolers – particularly the white, middle-and upper-middle-class ones – came to the conclusion that differences between boys and girls were biological by process of elimination.
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.
Even if you, personally, don’t subscribe to these stereotypes, there is a part of your mind that isn’t so prissy.
Unlike explicitly held knowledge, where you can be reflective and picky about what you believe, associative memory seems to be fairly indiscriminate in what it takes on board. Most likely, it picks up and responds to cultural patterns in society, media and advertising, which may well be reinforcing implicit associations you don’t consciously endorse.
Researchers have shown that our implicit representations of social groups are often remarkably reactionary, even when our consciously reported beliefs are modern and progressive.
The simple process of ticking a box had surprising effects. European American women, for example, felt more confident about their verbal skills when gender was salient (consistent with the prevailing belief that females have the edge when it comes to language skills) and rated their maths ability lower,
The boundary of the self-concept is permeable to other people’s conceptions of you (or, somewhat more accurately, your perception of their perception of you).
This means that when their perception of you is stereotypical, your own mind follows suit.
The simple, brief experience of imagining oneself as another transformed both self-perception and, through this transformation, behaviour. The maxim ‘fake it till you make it’ gains empirical support.
Asking people to report on their own social sensitivity is a bit like testing mathematical ability with questions like I can easily solve differential equations,
They found that people’s ratings of their own social sensitivity, empathy, femininity and thoughtfulness are virtually useless when it comes to predicting actual interpersonal accuracy.
This financial incentive levelled the performance of women and men, showing that when it literally ‘pays to understand’ male insensitivity is curiously easily overcome.
Men who read this passage performed better on the empathic accuracy task than did control men
Clearly, one’s performance on cognitive empathy tasks involves a combination of motivation and ability.
If social expectations can create a motivation gap, could they also be responsible for an ability gap?
The take-home message of these studies is that we can’t separate people’s empathising ability and motivation from the social situation.
they became so malelike that their self-ratings on these stereotypical traits were statistically indistinguishable from the men’s.
In other words, when we are not thinking of ourselves as ‘male’ or ‘female’, our judgements are the same,
‘it is the salience of gender and gender-related norms, rather than gender per se, that lead to differences between women and men.’
Stereotype threat hits hardest those who actually care about their maths skills and how they do on tests, and thus have the most to lose by doing badly, compared with women who don’t much identify with maths.
It doesn’t require any special sociological training to read the barely veiled message being communicated to these talented and ambitious women: You don’t belong here.
oday’s achievements in software are built on the shoulders of the first pioneering women programmers.’
‘personality traits that are typical of a given profession often are mistakenly thought to be necessary to the practice of the profession.’
Both women and computer science are the losers when a geeky stereotype serves as an unnecessary gatekeeper to the profession.
‘boys do not pursue mathematical activities at a higher rate than girls do because they are better at mathematics. They do so, at least partially, because they think they are better.’
‘[m]any of our clients think I’m in the meetings to take notes for the men … some even apologise for boring me with the technical discussions, assuming I have no idea what they’re talking about.’
Thomas, an attorney, related how a colleague praised the boss for getting rid of Susan, whom he regarded as incompetent. He then added that the ‘new guy’, Thomas, was ‘just delightful’ – not realising, of course, that Thomas and Susan were one and the same.
Without any intention of bias, once we have categorised someone as male or female, activated gender stereotypes can then colour our perception.
While parenthood served as no disadvantage at all to men, there was evidence of a substantial ‘motherhood penalty’. Mothers received only half as many callbacks as their identically qualified childless counterparts.
Although self-reported endorsement of sexist attitudes didn’t predict hiring bias, self-reported objectivity in decision making did.
The same behaviour that enhances his status simply makes her less popular.
Men are parents, too, and actually women will never be equal outside the home until men are equal inside the home.’
Behind every great academic man there is a woman, but behind every great academic woman is an unpeeled potato and a child who needs some attention.
According to Louann Brizendine, for instance, the effect of male levels of testosterone on the foetal neural circuits is like nothing so much as the ravaging of a village by enemy soldiers:
has been doing a brilliant marketing campaign for foetal testosterone. It is rapidly becoming the must-have accessory for the budding hard scientist or mathematician.
Nearly a decade later, neuroendocrinologist Geert De Vries pointed out again that scientists have ‘not gotten an inch closer’ to working out how this sex difference in the brain translates into behaviour.
This should make us concerned that social experiences might also be involved somewhere along the path between hormones and behaviour,
As we discovered earlier, a person’s approach to the world can depend on what kind of social identity is in place or the social expectations that are salient.
As the observant reader might have noticed, we have yet to encounter an actual test of systemising ability.
‘[i]ntelligence, even in the hard sciences, and even in innovation, is as much an “empathizing” power as it is systemizing.’
In truth, ‘[n]o perfect set of cognitive abilities that makes one a successful scientist has been identified’.
But unfortunately, as some researchers have pointed out, the study was simply not done well.
If, by the way, you are curious about the choice of a pan as a girlish toy, you are not alone.
various studies have found that higher testosterone levels are associated with better mental rotation performance, worse mental rotation performance or equal mental rotation performance.47 Likewise, Steven Pinker describes this literature as ‘messy’ and ‘contradictory’
‘no significant sex difference in functional language lateralization’.12
Nonexistent sex differences in language lateralisation, mediated by nonexistent sex differences in corpus callosum structure, are widely believed to explain nonexistent sex differences in language skills.
‘[m] ay as well say hairier body so fuzzier thinker.
It might also be worth mentioning that it was a postmortem study.
The location of activation in the brain is also surprisingly uninformative. Clearly, the whole brain isn’t involved in doing everything.
‘Specialisation is therefore not an intrinsic property of any region’, argue Price and Friston, and that means that seeing a brain region in action doesn’t mean you know what it’s up to in your particular task.
