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After combing through the controversies, we’ll ask whether modern neuroscientific explanations of gender inequality are doomed to join the same scrap heap as measures of skull volume, brain weight and neuron delicacy.
‘admitted that he’s thought twice about his male brain/female brain terminology, but he didn’t disavow it.’
Prolly shoulda thought three times
‘still surprising conclusion that people, in general, are not very reliable judges of their own mind-reading abilities.’
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
The researchers then went on to provide evidence that it is not simply that women who like to wear lipstick and fondly imagine having children one day are intrinsically less interested in maths. Rather, women who want to succeed in these domains strategically shed these desires in response to reminders that maths is not for women.
In her book Scientists Anonymous, Patricia Fara describes how, around the turn of the nineteenth century, botanist Jeanne Baret and mathematician Sophie Germain were obliged to present themselves as men to carry out their research.1 Unlike Baret, today’s female biologists do not have to pretend to be men to carry out fieldwork.
Damn what a tie in to the previous point of women acting more 'masculine'
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.
In an empirical investigation of this damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation for women leaders, Victoria Brescoll and Eric Uhlmann found that while expressing anger often enhances men’s status and competency in the eyes of others, it can be very costly to women in terms of how they are perceived.
Although self-reported endorsement of sexist attitudes didn’t predict hiring bias, self-reported objectivity in decision making did.
Experimental studies find that, unlike men, when they try to negotiate greater compensation they are disliked. When they try out intimidation tactics they are disliked. When they succeed in a male occupation they are disliked. When they fail to perform the altruistic acts that are optional for men, they are disliked. When they do go beyond the call of duty they are not, as men are, liked more for it. When they criticise, they are disparaged. Even when they merely offer an opinion, people look displeased.
Deborah Cameron, discussing the work of Janet Holmes who recorded and analysed about 2,500 workplace interactions, describes how Clara, the team leader in a multinational company, uses a typically masculine style of leadership. It’s firm, abrupt and direct. So, to deal with being issued orders by her, the team has developed a running joke whereby she is referred to as Queen Clara. For instance, when Clara says ‘it’s a no’, one of her team members responds that it’s a ‘royal no’. As Cameron points out: [W]ould a man in Clara’s position who behaved in a similar way have to make the same
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So long as women stick to their traditional caring roles, they can bask in the stereotype of the ‘wonderful’ woman – caring, nurturing, supportive and the needful recipients of men’s knightly chivalry – without whom no man is complete. But the woman who seeks nontraditional high-status and high-power roles risks triggering the hostile sexism that ‘views women as adversaries in a power struggle’.2 Hostile discrimination against women in the workplace is intentionally and consciously done. It can involve ‘segregation, exclusion, demeaning comments, harassment, and attack.’3 It’s still with us.
Women prefer those kinds of dead-end jobs because they fit better with their family commitments, the companies typically claimed in their defence when their happily fulfilled female employees filed lawsuits against them.
No less remarkably rude is the behaviour of a surgeon remembered by Kerin Fielding, one of Australia’s few female orthopaedic surgeons. She recalls having had ‘many battles’ during her training, including one particular surgeon who refused to work with her. When Fielding met the same man years later he condescendingly enquired whether she had many patients, insultingly adding, ‘It’s just toes, fingers, I suppose.’9
I thought, this just really sums up … my position in the department of [name removed] surgery, something I’ve worked for for a lot of years, not my whole life, but a lot of years, and they reduce all my hard work and all my sacrifice and my brains and my technical abilities and everything that I’ve done to this, you know, like this is how they perceive, you know, me. [R becomes visibly upset, begins crying]
‘The school drop-off is the political, the staying home when the kids are sick is the political, the writing of the shopping list is the political, the buying of the birthday presents is the political, the arranging of the baby-sitter is the political, the packing of the lunch boxes is the political, the thinking about what to have for supper is the political, the remembering of the need to cut the children’s toenails is the political, the asking of the location of the butter dish is the political …’
John Gray, author of the Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus books, has recently made a valiant stab at arguing that performing routine housework chores is actually selectively beneficial to women, including – if not especially – those with demanding jobs.
first grade horse shit
Halving It All author Francine Deutsch describes two couples she encountered. In one couple, he was a college professor and she was a physician, and in the other couple she was the college professor and he the physician. But in both cases, ‘both the husband and wife claimed the man’s job was less flexible.’19 Then, there’s the motherhood penalty (in addition to other gender-based pay inequalities) that increases the financial clout of his salary relative to hers.20 Finally, the more a woman adapts her career to family commitments, and the longer the accommodation goes on, the wider the gap
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And if this fails to convince, consider the rat. Male rats don’t experience the hormonal changes that trigger maternal behaviour in female rats. They never normally participate in infant care. Yet put a baby rat in a cage with a male adult and after a few days he will be caring for the baby almost as if he were its mother. He’ll pick it up, nestle it close to him as a nursing female would, keep the baby rat clean and comforted and even build a comfy nest for it.29 The parenting circuits are there in the male brain, even in a species in which paternal care doesn’t normally exist.30 If a male
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Favourite quote in the book
Contrary to what you might expect, people from more gender-egalitarian countries are often less egalitarian when it comes to the gender stereotypes they typically endorse.11
For two millennia, ‘impartial experts’ have given us such trenchant insights as the fact that women lack sufficient heat to boil the blood and purify the soul, that their heads are too small, their wombs too big, their hormones too debilitating, that they think with their hearts or the wrong side of the brain. The list is never-ending. —Beth B. Hess, sociologist (1990)1
‘We’ve been studying this nucleus for 15 years, and we still don’t know what it does.’19
In fact, their descriptions of scientific intuition bear a striking resemblance to Baron-Cohen’s characterisation of empathising as ‘an imaginative leap in the dark in the absence of complete data’
damning stuff on homeboy baron cohen right here
One study even found that physical scientists have more-feminine digit ratios than do social scientists.
looool
If, by the way, you are curious about the choice of a pan as a girlish toy, you are not alone. Although it is true that primatologists regularly uncover hitherto unknown skills in our nonhuman cousins, the art of heated cuisine is not yet one of them. Frances Burton has informed me that, in her long career of observing monkeys, she has never met one that could cook.
(Whether or not the stuffed animals were actually nurtured is unclear, especially as one trial had to be terminated early when ‘a plush toy was torn into multiple pieces’
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.
For example, in the nineteenth century, when the seat of the intellect was thought to reside in the frontal lobes, careful observation of male and female brains revealed that this region appeared both larger and more complexly structured in males, while the parietal lobes were better developed in women. Yet when scientific thought came to the opinion that it was instead the parietal lobes that furnished powers of abstract intellectual thought, subsequent observations revealed that the parietal lobes were more developed in the male, after all.
To illustrate this point, some researchers recently scanned an Atlantic salmon while showing it emotionally charged photographs. The salmon – which, by the way, ‘was not alive at the time of scanning’ – was ‘asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.’ Using standard statistical procedures, they found significant brain activity in one small region of the dead fish’s brain while it performed the empathising task, compared with brain activity during ‘rest’. The researchers conclude not that this particular region of the brain is involved in postmortem
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damn this girl hilarious
among Asian American kids, the pattern was different. At the 95th percentile boys’ advantage was less, and at the 99th percentile there were more girls than boys.15 Start to look in other countries and you find further evidence that sex differences in variability are, well, variable.
In the early 1980s, highly gifted boys identified by the SMPY outnumbered girls 13 to 1. By 2005, this ratio had plummeted to 2.8 to 1.19 That’s a big change.
Non-Hispanic white girls born in North America are sorely underrepresented: there are about twenty times fewer of them on IMO teams than you’d expect based on their numbers in the population, and they virtually never attend the highly selective MOSP. But this isn’t the case for non-Hispanic white girls who were born in Europe, immigrants from countries like Romania, Russia and the Ukraine, who manage on the whole to keep their end up when it comes to participating in these prestigious competitions and programmes.
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’.
One study, for example, found that mothers conversed and interacted more with girl babies and young toddlers, even when they were as young as six months old.7 This was despite the fact that boys were no less responsive to their mother’s speech and were no more likely to leave their mother’s side.
Man this is sad ☹️
Many parents drew the line at Barbie, for instance (who was regularly requested by the little boys) or tried to diminish her quintessential femininity: ‘I would ask him, “What do you want for your birthday?” … and he always kept saying Barbie … So we compromised, we got him a NASCAR [National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing] Barbie.’ Another father said that if his son ‘really wanted to dance, I’d let him …, but at the same time, I’d be doing other things to compensate for the fact that I signed him up for dance.’19
Cross-gender behaviour is seen as less acceptable in boys than it is in girls: unlike the term ‘tomboy’ there is nothing positive implied by its male counterpart, the ‘sissy’.
A parent who has just read an impressively scientific-sounding popular book or article about how boy and girl babies come differently prewired, or have differently structured brains, might not even try.
In other words, colour-coding for boys and girls once quite openly served the purpose of helping young children learn gender distinctions.
[O]ne child believed that men drank tea and women drank coffee, because that was the way it was in his house. He was thus perplexed when a male visitor requested coffee. Another child, dangling his legs with his father in a very cold lake, announced ‘only boys like cold water, right Dad?’ Such examples suggest that children are actively seeking and ‘chewing’ on information about gender, rather than passively absorbing it from the environment.
Your typical preschooler enjoys a detailed knowledge of gender roles, but remains a bit hazy regarding the hard, biological fact that males differ from females when it comes to the allocation of such items as penises, testicles and vaginas.
dam i remember this
[O]ur son Jeremy, then age four, … decided to wear barrettes [hair slides] to nursery school. Several times that day, another little boy told Jeremy that he, Jeremy, must be a girl because ‘only girls wear barrettes.’ After trying to explain to this child that ‘wearing barrettes doesn’t matter’ and that ‘being a boy means having a penis and testicles,’ Jeremy finally pulled down his pants as a way of making his point more convincingly. The other child was not impressed. He simply said, ‘Everybody has a penis; only girls wear barrettes.’
damn i love this
One mother who insisted on supplying her daughter with tools rather than dolls finally gave up when she discovered the child undressing a hammer and singing it to sleep. ‘It must be hormonal,’ was the mother’s explanation. At least until someone asked who had been putting her daughter to bed.
four- to six-year-old boys express more interest in playing with boyish toys when they are with peers
(one boy is described furtively dressing and undressing a doll under the table, looking over his shoulder all the while to be sure he wasn’t spotted by other boys)
awww :(
Meet the Jetsons, the family of the future, as imagined by cartoonists in the 1960s. George flies to work in his bubble car while Jane whips up instant meals from a tiny pill using a nuclear energy oven. Even though the Jetsons live in a biomorphic building with a robot for a maid, in terms of gender relations, they might as well be the Flintstones. Dad works and worries about money while mom either stays at home or shops … Although the show’s creators were highly imaginative when it came to the technological gadgets … they could not envision the real change that families underwent.
the absurdity of the fact that 40 percent of women (at that time) were in the labour force, and yet ‘not one woman in the Caldecott sample had a job or profession.’14
Even so, it is easier to find an adventurous girl than a sissy boy.
‘Children scanning the list of titles of what have been designated as the very best children’s books are bound to receive the impression that girls are not very important because no one has bothered to write books about them. The content of the books rarely dispels this impression’,
mothers almost always label gender-neutral characters in picture books as male.
They also seem to learn, uncomfortably young, that females are ‘other’.
