Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences

by Cordelia Fine

‘For a Man ought no more to value himself upon being Wiser than a Woman, if he owe his Advantage to a better Education, and greater means of Information, then he ought to boast of his Courage, for beating a Man, when his Hands were

‘the missing five ounces of the female

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.

And it’s important for scientists to remain aware of this possibility because from the seeds of scientific speculation grow the monstrous fictions of popular writers.

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.

have shown in a string of experiments that people socially ‘tune’ their self-evaluations to blend with the opinion of the self held by others.

‘how empathetic they would like to appear to others (and, perhaps, to themselves)

empathy, femininity and thoughtfulness are virtually useless when it comes to predicting actual interpersonal accuracy.

politely academic way of saying that if you want to predict people’s empathic ability you might as well save everyone’s time and get monkeys to fill out the self-report questionnaires.

‘people are thinking of themselves in terms of a particular group membership – whenever a social rather than personal identity is salient – people’s emotional experiences and reports will be shaped and determined by that group

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.

countries. Intriguingly, they found that across countries, over and above the effect of consciously reported stereotypes, the more strongly males are implicitly associated with science and females with liberal arts, the greater boys’ advantage in science and maths in the eighth grade.

‘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

Luckily for them, there is an alternative to turning away from maths – and this is to turn away from being female.

women who want to succeed in these domains strategically shed these desires in response to reminders that maths is not for women.

women also took up antifemale attitudes, denigrating other women as emotional, and ‘heaped scorn’ on women-focused programmes and any work-related gatherings dominated by women.

say “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his

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.

Although self-reported endorsement of sexist attitudes didn’t predict hiring bias, self-reported objectivity in decision making did.

technology industry, gave herself a male alias and discovered that the emails that ‘Finn’ received were completely different from those sent to ‘Josephine’. Finn got the scoops and Josephine got the ‘

41 percent of the UK’s lap-dancing clubs specifically promote corporate entertainment on their Web sites, and 86 percent of the London clubs offer discreet receipts, which enable the cost of the evening’s activities to be claimed as a company

After that – when she starts to earn more than him – something very curious starts to happen. The more she earns, the more housework she

exist.30 If

a male rat, without even the aid of a William Sears baby-care manual, can be inspired to parent then I would suggest that the prospects for human fathers are pretty good.

When a child clings on to a highly desirable toy and claims that his companion ‘doesn’t want to play with it

‘Oh, not bad. The light comes on, I press the bar, they write me a cheque. How about you?’

Women with children who decide not to adapt their careers to family life can look forward to paying a gender deviance tax that takes the form of extra housework, extra child care, and a psychological pussyfooting around his ego.

a recent survey of forty-four countries found that as economic prosperity increases within developing and transitional countries, women are increasingly likely to turn away from degrees in engineering, maths and natural science (that

However, as is the case in adults, this difference is much smaller when based on observations rather than self-report or report by another

There’s something a little shocking about the discrepancy between the weakness of the scientific data on the one hand and the strength of the popular claims on the other.

For example, adolescent girls with CAH are intermediate between boys and girls in their interest in sex-typical activities (football versus needlepoint, embroidery or macramé) and future occupations (like engineer versus professional ice skater).

She proposed that the effect of foetal hormones in primates is to predispose them to be receptive to whatever behaviours happen to go with their own sex in the particular society into which they are born.

worth noting, then, that when the researchers divided up their stimuli in a different way – comparing amount of play with animate toys (the dog and the doll) with object toys (the pan, ball, car, and book) – they found no differences between the sexes.

‘If the hormones determine the roles, one would expect to find the same sex occupying the same roles in all societies. This is patently not the

various studies have found that higher testosterone levels are associated with better mental rotation performance, worse mental rotation performance or equal mental rotation performance.

‘Unfortunately, these pretty pictures hide the sausage factory’, as one neurologist put it.

especially unreliable, because nuisance variables (like breathing rate and caffeine intake, or even menstrual cycle in women) can dramatically change the imaging signal without having any effect on behaviour.

analyses used to establish sex differences in brain activation can also ‘discover’ brain activation differences between randomly created groups (matched on sex, performance and obvious demographic

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.

counterintuitive possibility that always needs to be considered is that sex differences in the brain may also ‘just as well do the exact opposite, that is, they may prevent sex differences in overt functions and behavior by compensating for sex differences in

there are physical reasons for different arrangements in differently sized

recent studies of brain structure have argued that it is not that women have larger corpora callosa, or a more generous serving of grey matter, relative to brain volume. Rather, it is people with small brains, male or female, who show this quality.

researchers can even present these opposing hypotheses, quite without embarrassment, within the very same

Gurs should stick to the lower-maintenance hypothesis that optimal performance requires whatever features of the brain happen to be observed in

Possibly Sandra Witelson really did present her samples of dead brain tissue with emotionally charged images – but if she did, it’s not mentioned in the published report.

scope of the damage included pretty much all of the brain regions that have been reliably activated in literally dozens of functional imaging studies of mind reading. Yet the patient was fine at mind reading!

[O]ne of the most common uses of brain scanners – taking a complex psychological phenomenon and pinning it to a particular bit of cortex – is now being criticized as a potentially serious oversimplification of how the brain works.…

‘blobology’),

have to wonder about the effect of this kind of information as it feeds back into society.

In each cognitive domain, there were countries in which females’ scores were more variable than