This book is wondrous. I recommend it strongly! Buy it here.
Here be the quotes:
Even the very youngest members of our world, highly dependent newborn babies, are in fact much more sophisticated socialites than we ever realized. Despite their fuzzy vision, rather rudimentary hearing and absence of pretty much all basic survival skills, babies are quickly picking up on useful social information: as well as key facts such as whose face and voice might signal the arrival of food and comfort, they start to register who is part of their in-crowd, to recognize different emotions in others. They appear to be tiny social sponges, quickly soaking up the cultural information from the world around them. A story that neatly illustrates this comes from a remote village in Ethiopia, where computers had never been seen. Some researchers dropped off a pile of boxes, taped shut. The boxes contained brand-new laptops, preloaded with some games, apps and songs. And no instructions.
The scientists videoed what happened next. Within four minutes, one child had opened a box, found the on-off switch and powered the computer up. Within five days, every child in the village was using forty or more of the apps they found and singing the songs the researchers had preloaded. Within five months, they had hacked the operating system in order to reboot the camera that had been disabled.
Our brains are like these children. Unguided, they will work out the rules of the world, learn the applications, go beyond what was initially thought possible. They work by a combination of astute detection and self-organization. And they will start very young! And one of the first things they will turn their attention to is the rules of the gender game. With the relentless gender bombardment coming from social and mainstream media, it is an aspect of these little humans’ world that we should be watching very carefully.
Once we acknowledge that our brains are not only rule-hungry scavengers, with a particular appetite for social rules, but that they are also plastic and moldable, then the power of gender stereotypes becomes evident. If we could follow the brain journey of a baby girl or a baby boy, we could see that right from the moment of birth, or even before, these brains may be set on different roads. Toys, clothes, books, parents, families, teachers, schools, universities, employers, social and cultural norms—and, of course, gender stereotypes—all can signpost different directions for different brains.
For Poullain, there was no evidence that women’s inferior position in the world was due to some biological deficit. “L’esprit n’a point de sexe,” he declared: the mind has no sex.
A favorite quote of mine comes from one Gustave Le Bon, a Parisian interested in anthropology and psychology. His main focus was on demonstrating the inferiority of non-European races, but he clearly had a special place in his heart for women: Without a doubt there exist some distinguished women, very superior to the average man but they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads; consequently, we may neglect them entirely.
A group of mathematicians at University College London soon got involved in the great measuring game, and their findings would end up leaving craniology in disrepute.
This group of researchers, headed by Karl Pearson, the father of statistics, also included Alice Lee, one of the first women to graduate from London University. Lee created a mathematically based volumetric formula to work out skull capacity, which she intended to correlate with intelligence. She used this measurement on a group of thirty women students from Bedford College, twenty-five male staff at UCL and (a good move, this) a group of thirty-five leading anatomists who attended a meeting of the Anatomical Society in Dublin in 1898.
The results of her study were the nail in the coffin for craniology; she found that one of the most eminent of these anatomists had one of the smallest heads and, indeed, that one of her future examiners, a Sir William Turner, was eighth from the bottom. The discovery that these eminent men’s heads were on the smaller side magically created a large number of instant converts to the conclusion that linking skull capacity to intelligence was obviously ludicrous (especially as some of the Bedford students had greater cranial capacities than the anatomists).
A series of other such studies followed, and in a 1906 paper, Pearson declared that measure of head size was not an effective indication of intelligence.
One thing we should note is that, although androgens are described as male hormones, and estrogens and progestogens as female hormones, they are found in all of us, both male and female alike (although there was an early suggestion that the estrogen found in men actually came from their consumption of rice and sweet potatoes—thus, presumably, freeing the field to attribute the negative aspects of estrogen just to the natural and unchangeable version found in women).
It is the levels of each that vary between men and women; the range of testosterone is naturally generally higher in men than it is in women, and estrogen higher in women than men, but it is worth bearing this dual possession in mind when considering explanations of hormone-related sex differences in behavior.
Interestingly, World Health Organization surveys suggest that there are cultural variations in the kinds of complaint that are associated with the premenstrual phase. The emotional changes reported above are almost exclusively found in Western Europe, Australia and North America, whereas women in Eastern cultures such as China are more likely to note physical symptoms such as water retention but rarely mention emotional problems.
More recent work has shown that there may in fact be a link between female hormones and positive behavioral changes (which, of course, would not be the focus of attention of those of the school of Gustave Le Bon, J. McGrigor Allan and Edgar Berman). An emerging consensus is that the most reliable findings are of improved cognitive and affective processing associated with the ovulatory and postovulatory phases, rather than of the alleged deficits that have been claimed to emerge premenstrually.
In a recent systematic review of cognitive functioning and emotion processing throughout the menstrual cycle, which included fMRI measures as well as hormone assays, improved performance in verbal and spatial working memory was found to be associated with high estradiol levels.24 Emotion-related changes, such as better emotion recognition accuracy and enhanced emotional memory, were found when both estrogen and progesterone levels were high. These were associated with increased reactivity in the amygdala, part of the brain’s emotion-processing network. I haven’t, as yet, come across an Ovulation Euphoria Questionnaire!
Animal models were used to test for many different aspects of behavior, not just simple learning processes but also high-level cognitive skills such as spatial cognition (maze learning) or social skills such as nurturance (care of pups). Parallels between nonhuman and human types of behavior were sought so that you could measure the effects of direct intervention on the former, given that for ethical reasons it might be tricky to carry out the necessary experiments on the latter.
Is there a biological reason for boys being more active than girls (setting aside for the moment whether or not these levels of activity really are different)? You could measure the effect on “rough and tumble” play of exposing female embryos to high levels of testosterone. Is it hormones that give females a “maternal instinct”? Try manipulating estrogen in female rats and see what happens to their “pup retrieval” or “anogenital licking.”
You’d be surprised how often some of the more careless of populist science writers somehow forget to mention that the research they are quoting in support of their particular sex-difference meme was carried out in songbirds or prairie voles, and not people.
One of the most frequently reported outcomes of such studies is about gender-typed play, with CAH girls reportedly more likely to play with male-type toys, more likely to want to play with boys and more likely to be described as “tomboyish” by their families and teachers.
Definitions of the term “tomboy” tend to include descriptors such as “wild,” “romping,” “boisterous,” or “a girl who acts like a spirited boy.” Just to ensure scientific credibility, there is a Tomboy Index, which includes questions about preferring “climbing trees and playing army to ballet or dressing up,” preferring “shorts or jeans to dresses,” and taking part in “traditionally male sports such as football, baseball, basketball.”
You might have spotted that behind such questions appears to be a pretty fixed assumption about what constitutes appropriate behavior for girls. That could be related to the fact that the index was partly developed by studying the activities of females who thought themselves to be tomboys, and partly by asking people what they thought was typical tomboy behavior. So it’s likely this is not a totally objective, context-free measure of this particular label.
Similarly, there is strong evidence of working backward from stereotypes when you read the kind of ways in which researchers characterized the tomboyishness of the girls they were studying. The features they identified as indicative of tomboyishness were a lack of interest in self-adornment, a lack of interest in “rehearsal of maternalism” (meaning negligible doll play) and a lack of interest in marriage. Although these early studies were conducted back in the 1950s and 1960s, and we might hope that things have moved on a bit since then, the Tomboy Index continues to be used in studies today, suggesting there is still a firmly entrenched yardstick against which girls’ behavior is measured.
The emergence of psychology in the twentieth century provided another avenue to explore in the quest for sex differences. How did this new science inform our understanding of men’s and women’s brains and behavior? Helen Thompson Woolley, a psychologist herself and a pioneer in studies of gender differences, summarized in 1910: There is perhaps no field aspiring to be scientific where flagrant personal bias, logic martyred in the cause of supporting a prejudice, unfounded assertions, and even sentimental rot and drivel, have run riot to such an extent as here.
This is mirrored in the words of Cordelia Fine, speaking in 2010: But when we follow the trail of contemporary science we discover a surprising number of gaps, assumptions, inconsistencies, poor methodologies, and leaps of faith—as well as more than one echo of the insalubrious past.
Brain science was cited as evidence in 2012 by the Daily Mail when they (mis)quoted some neuroscientists on the origins of Justin Bieber obsession (a rush of dopamine similar to that caused by orgasm or chocolate—or both perhaps), so the brains of the “Beliebers” are allegedly “hardwired” to be obsessed by him.
In the same year, The Guardian published an essay on the brain science of creativity in terms of “the neuroscience of Bob’s Dylan’s genius.”
As you might have predicted, a combination of “sex” and “brain” findings proved a gift to the purveyors of neurotrash and, once that particular genie was out of the bottle, a tidal wave of “brainsex”-type books followed.45 As well as the well-known Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, we had Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps (with follow-ups of Why Men Lie and Women Cry and Why Men Don’t Have a Clue and Women Always Need More Shoes).
These were joined by the intriguing Why Men Like Straight Lines and Women Like Polka Dots, Men are Clams, Women are Crowbars and Why Men Don’t Iron.
Single-sex schooling advocate Michael Gurian produced Boys and Girls Learn Differently and we got a religious spin from Walt and Bar Larimore with His Brain, Her Brain: How Divinely Designed Differences Can Strengthen Your Marriage.
Anything that could be done to reinforce the notion that men and women were so different they could be from different planets was rife in such publications. One of the most famous, or infamous, of the genre is psychiatrist Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain, published in 2006.
The notoriety, in neuroscience circles, comes from a dispiriting range of scientific inaccuracies, anecdotes masquerading as evidence and occasionally hilarious misquotes and misdirection.
One claim in the book is that “differences between men’s and women’s brains make women more talkative”; Brizendine tells her reader that language areas in the brain are larger in women than in men, and that women on average use 20,000 words a day and men use only 7,000.
Mark Liberman, a linguist from the University of Pennsylvania, followed up on this assertion but couldn’t track down the original source. He found that it had been repeated, in various forms, in a range of other self-help books but there seemed to be no research findings to back it up. To make his point, he did his own calculations, based on a British database of conversations, and arrived at a somewhat different conclusion: men’s level of word use was just over 6,000 a day as compared to just under 9,000 for women.
Just focusing on Brizendine’s claims about sex differences in language use and the brain-based explanations for them, Liberman was able to find that many of her factual assertions were either contradicted by research she did cite or would have been by research she didn’t. In Liberman’s words: “There’s a technical term that philosophers use to describe the practice of asserting things without caring much about whether they’re actually true or not: they call this bullshit.”
Psychologist Cordelia Fine has also had a good go at the Brizendine bloopers. For example, she checked through the five references Brizendine had cited in support of her statement that men’s brains have little capacity for empathy.
One study was in Russian and on the frontal lobes of dead people, three didn’t actually compare males and females, and one was supposedly a personal communication from a cognitive neuroscientist who, when contacted, said she had never communicated with Brizendine and had never found evidence for any kind of sex differences in the brain on the basis of empathy.
Armed with these helpful trash-spotting tips from the likes of Liberman and Fine, you would hope that these kinds of publications would be swept aside and discredited for their inaccuracies and even fabrications. But as we saw with the neurotrash trend earlier, falsities have an alarming way of staying around and continuing to sustain unhelpful neuromyths such as boys and girls having different brains that require different (and separate) types of education.
Louann Brizendine’s book, full of bloopers as it is, has been translated into many languages and it has now been made into a film, released in 2017.
To quote Mary Wollstonecraft: “What a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!”
Within two days of arrival in the world, they can tell the difference between big numbers and small numbers, matching short bursts of beeps to pictures showing just a few smiley faces, and long bursts of beeps to pictures with lots of smiley faces.
Two or three months later, they will express surprise if a ball doesn’t roll out of the end of the tube they saw it roll into; five months later, they are perturbed when what looks like a liquid in a glass turns out to be solid, as their stripy drinking straw stops on the surface of the pretend water into which it has been dropped.
So, within five months of making it into the world, babies are already demonstrating a grasp of basic mathematics (or numeracy) and of intuitive physics, of how objects normally behave and what the basic characteristics of substances are.
The emergence of language offers clear insights into the clue-gathering activity of our junior gender detectives. Using gender-specific labels, such as “girl” as opposed to “child,” appears quite early on in the language development timeline.
A team of New York psychologists tracked the emergence of such labels in a group of children aged from nine to twenty-one months and found that there was little evidence of gender labeling before seventeen months, but by twenty-one months most of the children were appropriately using multiple labels such as “man,” “girl” and “boy.” And this included self-labeling (“me little girl”) as well as the tagging of people and things in their outside world.
The researchers also noted that the girls produced such labels earlier than the boys. They offered socialization as a possible explanation for this, noting that “girly” clothes and decorations are more distinctive (the “PFD” phenomenon—which you will know, of course, stands for “pink frilly dress”), so that girls are offered earlier visible clues about which individuals are girls and what these girls should wear. A later study by some members of this team showed that 3–4-year-old girls were much more likely to go through a phase of “gender rigidity” in their appearance, showing implacable opposition to wearing anything other than skirts, tutus, ballet shoes and, yes, pink frilly dresses.
And the clues our young detectives are picking up are not just about themselves. The children show a surprisingly early level of general gender knowledge as well, tagging items or events in the outside world as “gender appropriate.” Show a 24-month-old a picture of a man applying lipstick or a woman putting on a tie and you will certainly capture her attention.
If anything characterizes the twenty-first-century social signaling of sex differences, it is the increased emphasis on “pink for girls and blue for boys,” with female “pinkification” probably carrying the most strident message. Clothes, toys, birthday cards, wrapping paper, party invitations, computers, phones, bedrooms, bicycles—you name it, the marketing people seem prepared to “pinkify” it. The “pink problem,” now quite often with a hefty helping of “princess” thrown in, has been the subject of concerned discussion in the last decade or so.
Journalist and writer Peggy Orenstein commented on it in her 2011 book Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, noting that there were over 25,000 Disney Princess products on the market.
The topic of this rampant pinkification has frequently and acutely been forthrightly criticized, in books such as this and many others, so I had thought that I might not have to cover the pink issue again. But unfortunately for us all, this is another Whac-A-Mole problem and it shows little evidence of disappearing any time soon.
For a talk I was giving recently, I was mining the internet for examples of those dreadful pink “It’s a Girl” cards when I came across something even more jaw-droppingly awful: “gender reveal” parties.
If you haven’t already heard of these, they go something like this: at about twenty weeks into a pregnancy, it is usually possible to tell the sex of the child you are expecting from an ultrasound scan, thus, apparently, triggering the need for an expensive party.
There are two versions, and both are a marketing dream. In version 1, you decide to remain in ignorance and instruct your ultrasound technician to put the exciting news in a sealed envelope and send it to your gender reveal party organizer of choice. In version 2, you find out for yourself but decide to break the news at the party. You then summon family and friends to the event via invites bearing a question such as “A bouncing little ‘he’ or a pretty little ‘she’?,” “Guns or Glitter?” or “Rifles or Ruffles?”
At the party itself you might be confronted with a white iced cake which can be cut open to reveal blue or pink filling (it may also be decorated with the words “Buck or Doe? Cut to know”).
[...] as we grow older we don’t grow out of or away from the power of stereotypes—they can continue to mold our brains and our behaviors throughout our lives.
One study in Scandinavia reported that women had to be 2.5 times more productive than men to get the same score on a points-based system for awarding postdoctoral fellowships.
An additional factor that has attracted comment is a dramatic increase in the number of children who declare themselves to be gender-diverse and a decrease in the age at which this is happening. A report in the Telegraph in 2017 said that the number of children under ten years old visiting the NHS’s sole facility for transgender children had quadrupled in four years, from 36 in 2012/13 to 165 in 2016/17.
It was also noted that eighty-four children aged between three and seven were referred in 2016/17, compared to twenty in 2012/13.
At 0.7% of the population, 150,000 Americans between 13 and 17 years old reportedly identify as transgender. A controversial aspect of this is that one form of treatment involves the use of puberty-blocking hormones, sometimes followed by cross-gender hormones to enable the development of the secondary sexual characteristics of the gender with which the child/adolescent wishes to identify.
I treasure a cutting from Cristina Odone, writing in the Telegraph: “Pity the scientist. Locked up in labs, handling vials full of toxic liquids, surrounded by white mice and white coats—no wonder she sometimes loses her common sense. This seems to be the case with Gina Rippon.”
I’m further taken to task for espousing a theory which “smacks of feminism with an equality fetish.” I’ll gloss over another description from a Daily Mail comments thread that I am “full of carp” (I am assuming that this is a spelling mistake and not a criticism of my fish-eating habits).
And add “grumpy old harridan” and “post-menopausal affirmative action loser” into the mix and you’ll begin to get the picture.
Understanding our brains as deep-learning systems means we can see how, just like Microsoft’s unfortunate chatbot, Tay, a biased world will produce a biased brain. We need to register the gendered bombardment that is coming from social and cultural media, as well as from family, friends, employers, teachers (and ourselves), and understand the very real impact it is having on our brains.
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