More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Angela Saini
Read between
January 27 - March 28, 2018
Characterizing the sexes in this way is sometimes euphemistically phrased as women and men “complementing” each other. Different but equal.
The notion of complementarity thrived through to the Victorian era and ultimately became epitomized in the 1950s middle-class suburban housewife. She fulfilled her natural role as wife and mother, while her husband fulfilled his role as breadwinner.
According to Ruben Gur, his findings reinforce this idea that women complement men.
“This is an eighteenth-, nineteenth-century problem. We really shouldn’t be talking in these terms. I don’t know why we’re still doing it,” complains Gina Rippon, professor of cognitive neuroimaging at Aston University in Birmingham in the United Kingdom.
Studies, including some carried out by Ruben Gur at the University of Pennsylvania, saw sex differences in the brain when it came to almost everything. Examples included verbal and spatial tasks, listening to someone read, responding to psychological stress, experiencing emotion, eating chocolate, looking at erotic photos, and even smelling. One claimed that the brains of homosexual men had more in common with the brains of straight women than straight men.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging produces pictures that can be easily skewed by noise and false positives.
The authors explained that one big complication is that scientists are under enormous pressure to publish their work, and journals tend to publish results that are statistically significant.
“As a consequence, researchers have strong incentives to engage in research practices that make their findings publishable quickly, even if those practices reduce the likelihood that the findings reflect a true. . .effect,”
Gina Rippon believes that sex difference research continues to suffer from bad research because it remains such a hot-button topic. For scientists and journals, a sexy study on sex difference can equal instant global publicity.
The vast majority of experiments and studies show no sex difference, she adds. But they’re not the ones that get published.
Cordelia Fine coins the term “neurosexism” to describe scientific studies that fall back on gender stereotypes, even when these underlying stereotypes are themselves unproven.
Study after study has shown almost all behavioral and psychological differences between the sexes to be small or nonexistent. Cambridge University psychologist Melissa Hines and others have repeatedly demonstrated that boys and girls have little, if any, noticeable gaps between them when it comes to fine motor skills, spatial visualization, mathematics ability, and verbal fluency.
every sex difference that Ruben Gur and his colleagues claim to see can be accounted for by the fact that men have a larger body size and brain volume. As the brain gets bigger, other areas have to get bigger too, in different proportions depending on what’s important to keep the brain functioning normally.
“Sex differences in the brain are irresistible to those looking to explain stereotypic differences between men and women,” she told reporters when her paper came out. “They often make a big splash, in spite of being based on small samples. But as we explore multiple data sets and are able to coalesce very large samples of males and females, we find these differences often disappear or are trivial.”
“There are people like Larry Cahill who call us ‘sex difference deniers,’ but it’s the same kind of attack that gets put on feminism at each stage, or whatever wave you think you’re in,”
“Science doesn’t operate in a political vacuum,” she explains. “I think there are some sciences which can be more objective than others. But we are dealing with people, we’re not the Large Hadron Collider.”
“I go into schools and talk to girls, and their whole expectation is far more gendered than it used to be. These are toxic stereotypes and these girls’ futures are being affected by this.”
“As a conversation evolved, cultural and gender stereotypes were progressively projected onto that scientific information, to the extent that people were describing the research as the discovery of stuff that wasn’t even mentioned in the original scientific article,”
we like to justify the social system we’re in.
“These changes are terribly tiny, but they are measurable,”
it also raises an important question: If intense experience and learning a new task can shape a person’s brain, could the experience of being a woman shape it as well? Could plasticity therefore explain the sex differences that are sometimes seen in the brain?
plasticity is a phenomena that has been oddly ignored when people talk about sex differences in neuroscience.
Rippon, Fine, Jordan-Young, and Kaiser have argued that biology and society are “entangled”—that they work in concert with each other, through mechanisms like plasticity, to create the complicated picture we call “gender.”
If mathematics ability were rooted in biology and sex differences were fixed, then we wouldn’t expect to see these changes over time. What’s more, we would expect the differences to be the same everywhere. And they’re not.
“We’re good at what the brain allows us to be good at and, as we become good at something, our brain changes to enable that,”
On the flip side, exposing someone to bad stereotypes can impair their performance.
With all these effects on the brain, in a world as gendered as ours, says Rippon, it’s actually surprising that we don’t see more sex differences in the brain than we do. But then, so many factors other than our gender affect us.
Plasticity and entanglement imply that every single brain must be unique, for the simple fact that every person’s life experience is different. It is this, argues Daphna Joel at Tel Aviv University, that makes looking for differences between groups so fraught with error. Evidence of sex difference in the brain is statistically problematic because each brain varies from the next.
“We should take more of a fingerprint type of approach. So there is some kind of individual characteristic of the brain, which is true of the life experiences of that person.
By this logic, there can’t be any such thing as an average male or average female brain. We are all, each one of us, a mix. Our brains are intersex.
Anne Jaap Jacobson, a philosopher and emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, now based at the University of Houston, has coined the word neurofeminism to describe this alternative approach to brain science, which attempts to root out stereotypes and look at brains objectively.
“Comparing males and females at any one time point is a complicated question to make meaningful, because it is actually so ill-defined as posed,”
for every difference or similarity we see, there must be some evolutionary purpose to it. This is where the sex differences and similarities that biologists claim to see in our bodies and brains connect with the story of our past. If women are better survivors than men, the explanation for it is in this tale. If women and men have quite similar brains, the reasons for that are here, too.
As Charles Darwin’s work in the nineteenth century proves, the narratives have often been shaped by the attitudes of the time. Even he, the father of evolutionary biology, was so affected by a culture of sexism that he believed women to be the intellectually inferior sex.
Hrdy believes that being a woman in her field is one reason she noticed behavior that hadn’t been recognized before.
if other female primates could show so much variation in their behavior, why did evolutionary biologists still characterize women as the naturally gentler, more passive, and submissive sex?
Hrdy’s feminism and science met in the middle, not just because of the behavior of some men in her field but also because she recognized that scientific theories that ignored female behavior were incomplete.
One of the most important frontiers, as she saw it, was understanding mothers and how they defined a woman’s role in human evolution.
She describes this system as “cooperative breeding.”
Hrdy’s hypothesis about the profound importance of cooperative breeding is a difficult one to prove, especially given the myriad pressures that pregnant women experience in the modern world. But it also has the power to release women of the guilt they may feel when they’re unable to cope alone.
