Delusions of Gender E-Book

Cordelia Fine

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 583

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Beschreibung

THE BRILLIANT AND HUGELY INFLUENTIAL BOOK BY THE WINNER OF THE 2017 ROYAL SOCIETY INSIGHT INVESTMENT SCIENCE BOOKS PRIZE 'Fun, droll yet deeply serious.' New Scientist 'A brilliant feminist critic of the neurosciences … Read her, enjoy and learn.' Hilary Rose, THES 'A witty and meticulously researched exposé of the sloppy studies that pass for scientific evidence in so many of today's bestselling books on sex differences.' Carol Tavris, TLS Gender inequalities are increasingly defended by citing hard-wired differences between the male and female brain. That's why, we're told, there are so few women in science, so few men in the laundry room – different brains are just suited to different things. With sparkling wit and humour, Cordelia Fine attacks this 'neurosexism', revealing the mind's remarkable plasticity, the substantial influence of culture on identity, and the malleability of what we consider to be 'hardwired' difference. This modern classic shows the surprising extent to which boys and girls, men and women are made – not born.

Leseprobe

Praise for A Mind of Its Own

‘We are all vain bigots, thanks to the foibles of the human brain, so argues Fine in her witty survey of psychology experiments … An ideal gift for anyone interested in psychology’ Focus

‘Clear, accessible writing makes her a science writer to watch.’ Metro

‘Filled with quotable stories and interactive ways of how our brain has a buoyant ego of its own and is not the objective tool we might like to believe’ Bookseller

‘A light and amusing introduction to the brain and how it works on our perceptions and actions’ Publishing News

‘Consistently well-written and meticulously researched … [Fine’s] touching vignettes about life with her young son and her rational but tender husband suggest the buried presence of someone who could in the future rewardingly illuminate the workings of the mind with the studied casualness of the gifted novelist.’ Alain de Botton,Sunday Times

‘In breezy demotic, Fine offers an entertaining tour of current thinking … [she] is especially fascinating on the blurring of the line between pathological delusions and the normal deluded brain.’ Telegraph

‘Fine, with a sharp sense of humour and an intelligent sense of reality, slaps an Asbo on the hundred billion grey cells that – literally – have shifty, ruthless, self-serving minds of their own.’ The Times

‘Fine’s style is chirpy … [with] many affectionately amusing scenes.’ Guardian

‘Engaging, intelligent’ Scotland on Sunday

‘Fine’s flair for the humorous and anecdotal makes this a delightful read.’ Irish Times

‘Fine sets out to demonstrate that the human brain is vainglorious and stubborn. She succeeds brilliantly.’ Mail on Sunday

‘This is one of the most interesting and amusing accounts of how we think we think – I think.’ Alexander McCall Smith

‘A fascinating, funny, disconcerting and lucid book. By the end you’ll realise that your brain can (and does) run rings around you.’ Helen Dunmore

‘Witty and informative’ Philip Pullman

‘Excellent … Fine’s very engaging and chatty style … will delight many readers … Fine has got it just right. Although she is an academic, she writes like a human being … All in all this short and enjoyable book is a must for anyone who wants to get a better understanding of what their brain gets up to when they aren’t watching it. First class.’ Brian Clegg, popularscience.co.uk

‘A fun introduction to some of the factors that can distort our reasoning. I’d recommend it to anyone who is just getting interested in the topic, or as a gift for anyone you know who still thinks that their personal point of view is unprejudiced and reliable.’ Psychologist

‘Fine is that rare academic who’s also an excellent writer. Highly recommended for all public and undergraduate libraries.’ Library Journal

‘Remarkably entertaining’ Los Angeles Times

First published in the UK in 2010 by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

This electronic edition published in the UK in 2012 by Icon Books Ltd

ISBN: 978-1-84831-396-5 (ePub format) ISBN: 978-1-84831-397-2 (Adobe ebook format)

First published in the USA in 2010 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York

Sold in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA or their agents

Distributed in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road, Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

Published in Australia in 2011 by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Text copyright © 2010 Cordelia Fine

The author has asserted her moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

For my mother

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cordelia Fine is a Research Associate at the Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics at Macquarie University, Australia, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her previous book, A Mind of Its Own (Icon, 2006) was hugely acclaimed and she was called ‘a science writer to watch’ by Metro.

CONTENTS

Cover

Praise for A Mind of Its Own

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

About the Author

Introduction

PART 1

‘HALF-CHANGED WORLD’, HALF-CHANGED MINDS

1. We Think, Therefore You Are

2. Why You Should Cover Your Head with a Paper Bag if You Have a Secret You Don’t Want Your Wife to Find Out

3. ‘Backwards and in High Heels’

4. I Don’t Belong Here

5. The Glass Workplace

6. XX-clusion and XXX-clusion

7. Gender Equality Begins (or Ends) at Home

8. Gender Equality 2.0?

PART 2

NEUROSEXISM

9. The ‘Fetal Fork’

10. In ‘the Darkness of the Womb’ (and the First Few Hours in the Light)

11. The Brain of a Boy in the Body of a Girl … or a Monkey?

12. Sex and Premature Speculation

13. What Does It All Mean, Anyway?

14. Brain Scams

15. The ‘Seductive Allure’ of Neuroscience

16. Unravelling Hardwiring

PART 3

RECYCLING GENDER

17. Preconceptions and Postconceptions

18. Parenting with a Half-Changed Mind

19. ‘Gender Detectives’

20. Gender Education

21. The Self-Socialising Child

Epilogue: And S-t-r-e-t-c-h!

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Of all difficulties which impede the progress of thought, and the formation of well-grounded opinions on life and social arrangements, the greatest is now the unspeakable ignorance and inattention of mankind in respect to the influences which form human character. Whatever any portion of the human species now are, or seem to be, such, it is supposed, they have a natural tendency to be: even when the most elementary knowledge of the circumstances in which they have been placed, clearly points out the causes that made them what they are.

—John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869)

INTRODUCTION

Meet Evan.

When his wife, Jane, is upset, he sits with her on the couch, reading a magazine or book ‘to distract himself from his own discomfort’ while he cradles Jane with the other arm. After a few years working on this issue, Evan gradually comes to be able to offer comfort in a more conventional way. The politically correct and/or scientifically uninformed among you may be wondering about the cause of Evan’s peculiar behaviour. Does he secretly find Jane deeply unattractive? Is he in the slow process of recovery from some deeply traumatic incident? Was he raised by wolves until the age of thirteen? Not at all. He’s just a regular guy, with a regular guy-brain that’s wired all wrong for empathy. That a simple act of comfort is not part of Evan’s behavioural repertoire is the fault of the neurons dealt him by nature: neurons that endure a devastating ‘testosterone marination’; neurons that are lacking the same ‘innate ability to read faces and tone of voice for emotional nuance’ as women’s; neurons, in a word, that are male.1

Evan is just one of several curious characters who populate Louann Brizendine’s New York Times best seller, The Female Brain. In her depiction, men’s empathising skills resemble those of the hapless tourist attempting to decipher a foreign menu and are sharply contrasted with the cool proficiency of females’ achievements in this domain. Take Sarah, for example. Sarah can ‘identify and anticipate what [her husband] is feeling – often before he is conscious of it himself.’ Like the magician who knows that you’ll pick the seven of diamonds even before it’s left the pack, Sarah can amaze her husband at whim, thanks to her lucky knack of knowing what he’s feeling before he feels it. (Ta-DA! Is this your emotion?) And no, Sarah is not a fairground psychic. She is simply a woman who enjoys the extraordinary gift of mind reading that, apparently, is bestowed on all owners of a female brain:

Maneuvring like an F-15, Sarah’s female brain is a high-performance emotion machine – geared to tracking, moment by moment, the non-verbal signals of the innermost feelings of others.2

Just what is it that makes the female brain so well suited to stalking people’s private feelings as though they were terrified prey? Why, you are asking, are male neurons not capable of such miracles – better placed instead to navigate the masculine worlds of science and maths? Whatever the answer du jour – whether it’s the foetal testosterone that ravages the male neural circuits, the oversized female corpus callosum, the efficiently specialised organisation of the male brain, the primitively subcortical emotion circuits of boys, or the underendowment of visuospatial processing white matter in the female brain – the underlying message is the same. Male and female brains are different in ways that matter.

Having marital problems, for instance? Turn to What Could He Be Thinking? by ‘educator, therapist, corporate consultant, and … New York Times bestselling author’3 Michael Gurian, and you will discover the epiphany the author experienced with his wife, Gail, on seeing MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and PET (positron emission tomography) scans of male and female brains:

I said, ‘We thought we knew a lot about each other, but maybe we haven’t known enough.’ Gail said, ‘There really is such a thing as a “male” brain. It’s hard to argue with an MRI.’ We realized that our communication, our support of each other, and our understanding of our relationship were just beginning, after six years of marriage.

The information from those scans, says Gurian, was ‘marriage saving.’4

Nor are spouses the only ones who, it is now claimed, can be better understood with the benefit of a little background in brain science. The blurb of the influential book Why Gender Matters by physician Leonard Sax, founder and executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education (NASSPE), promises to show readers how to ‘recognize and understand … hardwired differences [between the sexes] to help every girl and every boy reach their fullest potential.’5 Likewise, parents and teachers are informed in a recent Gurian Institute book that ‘Researchers [using MRI] have literally seen what we have always known. There are fundamental gender differences and they start in the very structure of the human brain.’6 Thus, Gurian suggests that ‘to walk into a classroom or home without knowledge of both how the brain works and how the male and female brains learn differently is to be many steps behind where we can and should be as teachers, parents, and caregivers of children.’7

Even CEOs can, it is said, benefit from a greater understanding of sex differences in the brain. The recent book Leadership and the Sexes ‘links the actual science of male/female brain differences to every aspect of business’ and ‘presents brain science tools with which readers can look into the brains of men and women to understand themselves and one another.’ According to the jacket blurb, the ‘gender science’ in the book ‘has been used successfully by such diverse corporations as IBM, Nissan, Proctor [sic] & Gamble, Deloitte & Touche, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Brooks Sports, and many others.’8

Is it realistic, you will begin to wonder, to expect two kinds of people, with such different brains, to ever have similar values, abilities, achievements, lives? If it’s our differently wired brains that make us different, maybe we can sit back and relax. If you want the answer to persisting gender inequalities, stop peering suspiciously at society and take a look right over here, please, at this brain scan.

If only it were that simple.

About 200 years ago, the English clergyman Thomas Gisborne wrote a book that despite its, to my mind, rather unappealing title – An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex – became an eighteenth-century best seller. In it, Gisborne neatly set out the different mental abilities required to fulfil male versus female roles:

The science of legislation, of jurisprudence, of political economy; the conduct of government in all its executive functions; the abstruse researches of erudition … the knowledge indispensable in the wide field of commercial enterprise … these, and other studies, pursuits, and occupations, assigned chiefly or entirely to men, demand the efforts of a mind endued with the powers of close and comprehensive reasoning, and of intense and continued application.9

It was only natural, the author argued, that these qualities should be ‘impart[ed] … to the female mind with a more sparing hand’ because women have less need of such talents in the discharge of their duties. Women are not inferior, you understand, simply different. After all, when it comes to performance in the feminine sphere ‘the superiority of the female mind is unrivalled’, enjoying ‘powers adapted to unbend the brow of the learned, to refresh the over-laboured faculties of the wise, and to diffuse, throughout the family circle, the enlivening and endearing smile of cheerfulness’.10 What awfully good luck that these womanly talents should coincide so happily with the duties of the female sex.

Fast-forward 200 years, turn to the opening page of The Essential Difference, a highly influential twenty-first-century book about the psychology of men and women, and there you will find Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen expressing much the same idea: ‘The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.’11 Just like Gisborne, Baron-Cohen thinks that it is those with the ‘male brain’ who make the best scientists, engineers, bankers and lawyers, thanks to their capacity to focus in on different aspects of a system (be it a biological, physical, financial or legal system), and their drive to understand how it works. And the soothing reassurance that women, too, have their own special talents remains present and correct. In what has been described as a ‘masterpiece of condescension’,12 Baron-Cohen explains that the female brain’s propensity for understanding others’ thoughts and feelings, and responding to them sympathetically, ideally suits it to occupations that professionalise women’s traditional caring roles: ‘People with the female brain make the most wonderful counsellors, primary-school teachers, nurses, carers, therapists, social workers, mediators, group facilitators or personnel staff.’13 Philosopher Neil Levy’s neat summary of Baron-Cohen’s thesis – that ‘on average, women’s intelligence is best employed in putting people at their ease, while the men get on with understanding the world and building and repairing the things we need in it’14 – can’t help but bring to mind Gisborne’s eighteenth-century wife, busily unbending the brow of her learned husband.

Baron-Cohen does, it must be said, take great pains to point out that not all women have a female, empathising brain, nor all men a male, systemising one. However, this concession does not set him apart from traditional views of sex differences quite as much as he might think. As long ago as 1705, the philosopher Mary Astell observed that women who made great achievements in male domains were said by men to have ‘acted above their Sex. By which one must suppose they wou’d have their Readers understand, That they were not Women who did those Great Actions, but that they were Men in Petticoats!’15 Likewise, a few centuries later intellectually talented women were ‘said to possess “masculine minds”.’16 As one writer opined in the Quarterly Journal of Science:

The savante – the woman of science – like the female athlete, is simply an anomaly, an exceptional being, holding a position more or less intermediate between the two sexes. In one case the brain, as in the other the muscular system, has undergone an abnormal development.17

Baron-Cohen, of course, does not describe as ‘abnormal’ the woman who reports a greater tendency to systemise. But certainly there is an incongruous feel to the idea of a male brain in the body of a woman, or a female brain housed in the skull of a man.

The sheer stability and staying power of the idea that male and female psychologies are inherently different can’t help but impress. Are there, in truth, psychological differences hardwired into the brains of the sexes that explain why, even in the most egalitarian of twenty-first-century societies, women and men’s lives still follow noticeably different paths?

For many people, the experience of becoming a parent quickly abolishes any preconceptions that boys and girls are born more or less the same. When the gender scholar Michael Kimmel became a father, he reports that an old friend cackled to him, ‘Now you’ll see it’s all biological!’18 And what could be more compelling proof of this, as a parent, than to see your own offspring defy your well-meaning attempts at gender-neutral parenting? 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. Believing that they practised gender-neutral parenting, the ‘biology as fallback’ position, as Kane calls it, was the only one left remaining to them.19

Some commentators, casting their eye over society at large, find themselves falling back on biology in much the same way. In her recent book The Sexual Paradox, journalist and psychologist Susan Pinker tackles the question of why ‘gifted, talented women with the most choices and freedoms don’t seem to be choosing the same paths, in the same numbers, as the men around them. Even with barriers stripped away, they don’t behave like male clones.’ Considering this, to some, unexpected outcome, Pinker wonders ‘whether biology is, well, if not destiny exactly, then a profound and meaningful departure point for a discussion about sex differences.’20 The gender gap, she suggests, has in part ‘neurological or hormonal roots’.21 As the barriers of a sexist society continue to fall, there seem to be fewer and fewer social scapegoats to call on to explain continuing gender inequalities and work segregation. When we can’t pin the blame on outside forces, all eyes swivel to the internal – the differences in the structure or functioning of female and male brains. Wired differently from men, many women choose to reject what Pinker calls the ‘vanilla’ male model of life – in which career takes priority over family – and have different interests.

The fallback conclusion that there must be hardwired psychological differences between the sexes also appears to enjoy impressive scientific support. First, there is the surge of foetal testosterone that takes place during the gestation of male, but not female, babies. As Brain Sex authors Anne Moir and David Jessel describe this momentous event:

[At] six or seven weeks after conception … the unborn baby ‘makes up its mind’, and the brain begins to take on a male or a female pattern. What happens, at that critical stage in the darkness of the womb, will determine the structure and organisation of the brain: and that, in turn, will decide the very nature of the mind.22

Like other popular writers, Moir and Jessel leave us in little danger of underestimating the psychological significance of what goes on ‘in the darkness of the womb’. While Louann Brizendine is content to merely state that the effect of prenatal testosterone on the brain ‘defines our innate biological destiny’,23 Moir and Jessel are openly gleeful about the situation. ‘[Infants] have, quite literally, made up their minds in the womb, safe from the legions of social engineers who impatiently await them.’24

Then, there are the differences between male and female brains. Rapid progress in neuroimaging technology enables neuroscientists to see, in ever-increasing detail, sex differences in brain structure and function. Our brains are different, so surely our minds are too? For example, in a New York Times Magazine feature on the so-called opt-out revolution (that is, women who give up their careers to take up traditional roles as stay-at-home mothers) one interviewee told journalist Lisa Belkin that ‘“[i]t’s all in the M.R.I.,” … [referring to] studies that show the brains of men and women “light up” differently when they think or feel. And those different brains, she argues, inevitably make different choices.’25 The neuroscientific discoveries we read about in magazines, newspaper articles, books and sometimes even journals tell a tale of two brains – essentially different – that create timeless and immutable psychological differences between the sexes. It’s a compelling story that offers a neat, satisfying explanation, and justification, of the gender status quo.26

We have been here before, so many times.

In the seventeenth century, women were severely disadvantaged educationally; for example, in their political development they were hindered ‘through their lack of formal education in political rhetoric, their official exclusion from citizenship and government, the perception that women ought not to be involved in political affairs, and the view that it was immodest for a woman to write at all.’27 Yet despite such – to our modern eyes – obvious impediments to women’s intellectual development, they were widely assumed to be naturally inferior by many. While, in retrospect, it might seem to go without saying that men’s apparently superior intellect and achievements might lie in sources other than natural neural endowments, at the time it did need saying. As one seventeenth-century feminist put it: ‘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 bound’.28

In the eighteenth century, as we’ve seen, Thomas Gisborne felt no need to consider an alternative explanation of his observations of sex differences within society. As the writer Joan Smith has pointed out:

[V]ery few women, growing up in England in the late eighteenth century, would have understood the principles of jurisprudence or navigation, but that is solely because they were denied access to them. Obvious as this is to a modern observer, the hundreds of thousands of readers who bought his books accepted his argument at face value because it fitted in with their prejudices.29

And in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women still did not have equal access to higher education. And yet, ‘[w]omen’, declared the well-known psychologist Edward Thorndike, ‘may and doubtless will be scientists and engineers, but the Joseph Henry, the Rowland, and the Edison of the future, will be men’. This confident proclamation, made at a time when women were not granted full membership to, for example, Harvard, Cambridge or Oxford University seems – I don’t know – a bit premature? And, given that at the time women couldn’t vote, was it not also a little rash for Thorndike to claim with such confidence that ‘even should all women vote, they would play a small part in the Senate’?30 In retrospect, the constraints on women are perfectly obvious. Hey, Professor Thorndike, we might think to ourselves, ever think about letting women into the Royal Society, or maybe offering them a little civil entitlement known as the vote, before casting judgement on their limitations in science and politics? Yet to many of those who were there at the time, the slope of the playing field was imperceptible. Thus philosopher John Stuart Mill’s denial in 1869 that ‘any one knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another’31 was revolutionary, and derided. Decades later it was still with only the utmost tentativeness that the early-twentieth-century researcher of ‘eminence’, Cora Castle, asked, ‘Has innate inferiority been the reason for the small number of eminent women, or has civilisation never yet allowed them an opportunity to develop their innate powers and possibilities?’32

There is also nothing new about looking to the brain to explain and justify the gender status quo. In the seventeenth century, the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche declared women ‘incapable of penetrating to truths that are slightly difficult to discover’, claiming that ‘[e]verything abstract is incomprehensible to them.’ The neurological explanation for this, he proposed, lay in the ‘delicacy of the brain fibers’.33 Presumably, one abstract thought too many and – ping! – those fibres snap. Over the intervening centuries, the neurological explanations behind men and women’s different roles, occupations and achievements have been overhauled again and again, as neuroscientific techniques and understanding have become ever more sophisticated. Early brain scientists, using the cutting-edge techniques of the time, busily filled empty skulls with pearl barley, carefully categorised head shape using tape measures and devoted large portions of careers to the weighing of brains.34 Infamously, they proposed that women’s intellectual inferiority stemmed from their smaller and lighter brains, a phenomenon that came to be widely known among the Victorian public as ‘the missing five ounces of the female brain.’35 The hypothesis, widely believed, that this sex difference in the brain was of profound psychological significance was championed by Paul Broca, one of the most eminent scientists of the time. Only when it became inescapably clear that brain weight did not correlate with intelligence did brain scientists acknowledge that men’s larger brains might merely reflect their larger bodies. This inspired a search for a measure of relative, rather than absolute, brain weight that would leave the absolutely bigger-brained sex ahead. As historian of science Cynthia Russett reports:

Many ratios were tried – of brain weight to height, to body weight, to muscular mass, to the size of the heart, even (one begins to sense desperation) to some one bone, such as the femur.36

These days, we have rather more of an inkling of the complexity of the brain. It’s undeniable that by moving into the realm of the brain itself, rather than its outer casing, scientific advance was made. It was certainly an important moment when a forward-thinking nineteenth-century scientist, fingering his tape measure with the tense distraction of one who suspects that his analysis has left certain important details unpenetrated, said thoughtfully, ‘Pass me that brain and those scales, will you?’ But even the untrained twenty-first-century layperson can see that this brought scientists only a little closer to understanding the mystery of how brain cells create the engine of the mind, and can sense the unfortunate hastiness of the conclusion that women’s cognitive inferiority to men could be weighed in ounces.

It may seem like the same sort of prejudice couldn’t possibly creep into the contemporary debate because now we are all so enlightened; perhaps even … overenlightened? Writers who argue that there are hardwired differences between the sexes that account for the gender status quo often like to position themselves as courageous knights of truth, who brave the stifling ideology of political correctness. Yet claims of ‘essential differences’ between the two sexes simply reflect – and give scientific authority to – what I suspect is really a majority opinion.37 If history tells us anything, it is to take a second, closer look at our society and our science. This is the aim of Delusions of Gender.

At the core of the first part of this book, ‘“Half-Changed World”, Half-Changed Minds’, is the critical idea that the psyche is ‘not a discrete entity packed in the brain. Rather, it is a structure of psychological processes that are shaped by and thus closely attuned to the culture that surrounds them.’38 We tend not to think about ourselves this way, and it’s easy to underestimate the impact of what is outside the mind on what takes place inside. When we confidently compare the ‘female mind’ and the ‘male mind’, we think of something stable inside the head of the person, the product of a ‘female’ or ‘male’ brain. But such a tidily isolated data processor is not the mind that social and cultural psychologists are getting to know with ever more intimacy. As Harvard University psychologist Mahzarin Banaji puts it, there is no ‘bright line separating self from culture’, and the culture in which we develop and function enjoys a ‘deep reach’ into our minds.39 It’s for this reason that we can’t understand gender differences in female and male minds – the minds that are the source of our thoughts, feelings, abilities, motivations, and behaviour – without understanding how psychologically permeable is the skull that separates the mind from the sociocultural context in which it operates. 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. And these thoughts, attitudes and behaviours of yours, in turn, become part of the social context. It’s intimate. It’s messy. And it demands a different way of thinking about gender.

Then, there’s the less subtle, consciously performed discrimination against women, the wide-ranging forms of exclusion, the harassment and the various injustices both at work and home. These stem from not-all-that-old, and still powerful, ideas about men and women’s proper roles and places in the world. By the end of the first part of the book, one can’t help but wonder if we have stumbled on the twenty-first-century blind-spot. As University of California–Irvine professor of mathematics Alice Silverberg commented:

When I was a student, women in the generation above me told horror stories about discrimination, and added ‘But everything has changed. That will never happen to you.’ I’m told that this was said even by the generations before that, and now my generation is saying similar things to the next one. Of course, a decade or so later we always say, ‘How could we have thought that was equality?’ Are we serving the next generation well if we tell them that everything is equal and fair when it’s not?40

In the second part of the book, ‘Neurosexism’, we take a closer look at claims about male and female brains. What do people mean when they say that there are inherent gender differences, or that the two sexes are hardwired to be better suited to different roles and occupations? As cognitive neuroscientist Giordana Grossi notes, these readily used phrases, ‘along with the continual references to sex hormones, evoke images of stability and unchangeability: women and men behave differently because their brains are structured differently.’41 Avid readers of popular science books and articles about gender may well have formed the impression that science has shown that the path to a male or a female brain is set in utero, and that these differently structured brains create essentially different minds. There are sex differences in the brain. There are also large (although generally decreasing) sex differences in who does what, and who achieves what. It would make sense if these facts were connected in some way, and perhaps they are. 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. As Brown University professor of biology and gender studies Anne Fausto-Sterling has pointed out, ‘despite the many recent insights of brain research, this organ remains a vast unknown, a perfect medium on which to project, even unwittingly, assumptions about gender.’42 The sheer complexity of the brain lends itself beautifully to overinterpretation and precipitous conclusions. 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.

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. Again and again, claims are made by so-called experts that are ‘simply coating old-fashioned stereotypes with a veneer of scientific credibility’, as Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Barnett warn in the Boston Globe.43 Yet this ‘popular neurosexism’ easily finds its way into apparently scientific books and articles for the interested public, including parents and teachers.44 Already, sexism disguised in neuroscientific finery is changing the way children are taught.

Neurosexism reflects and reinforces cultural beliefs about gender – and it may do so in a particularly powerful way. Dubious ‘brain facts’ about the sexes become part of the cultural lore. And, as I describe in ‘Recycling Gender’, the third part of the book, refreshed and invigorated by neurosexism, the gender cycle is ready to sweep up into it the next generation. Children, keen to understand and find their place in society’s most salient social divide, are born into a half-changed world, to parents with half-changed minds.

I don’t think that in my lifetime there will be a woman Prime Minister.

—Margaret Thatcher (1971), Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1979 to 199045

It’s worth remembering just how much society can change in a relatively short period of time. Precedents are still being set. Could a society in which males and females hold equal places ever exist? Ironically, perhaps it is not biology that is the implacably resistant counterforce, but our culturally attuned minds.46 No one knows whether males and females could ever enjoy perfect equality. But of this I am confident: So long as the counterpoints provided by the work of the many researchers presented in this book are given an audience, in fifty years’ time people will look back on these early-twenty-first-century debates with bewildered amusement, and wonder how we ever could have thought that that was the closest we could get to equality.

The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became. I adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming. If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.

—Jan Morris, a male-to-female transsexual describing her post-transition experiences in her autobiography, Conundrum (1987)1

Suppose a researcher were to tap you on the shoulder and ask you to write down what, according to cultural lore, males and females are like. Would you stare at the researcher blankly and exclaim, ‘But what can you mean? Every person is a unique, multifaceted, sometimes even contradictory individual, and with such an astonishing range of personality traits within each sex, and across contexts, social class, age, experience, educational level, sexuality and ethnicity, it would be pointless and meaningless to attempt to pigeonhole such rich complexity and variability into two crude stereotypes’? No. You’d pick up your pencil and start writing.2 Take a look at the two lists from such a survey, and you will find yourself reading adjectives that would not look out of place in an eighteenth-century treatise on the different duties of the two sexes. One list would probably feature communal personality traits such as compassionate, loves children, dependent, interpersonally sensitive, nurturing. These, you will note, are ideal qualifications for someone who wishes to live to serve the needs of others. On the other character inventory we would see agentic descriptions like leader, aggressive, ambitious, analytical, competitive, dominant, independent and individualistic. These are the perfect traits for bending the world to your command, and earning a wage for it.3 I don’t have to tell you which is the female list and which is the male one: you already know. (These lists, as sociologists Cecilia Ridgeway and Shelley Correll have pointed out, also most closely match stereotypes of ‘white, middle-class, heterosexual men and women, if anyone.’)4

Even if you, personally, don’t subscribe to these stereotypes, there is a part of your mind that isn’t so prissy. Social psychologists are finding that what we can consciously report about ourselves does not tell the whole story.5 Stereotypes, as well as attitudes, goals, and identity also appear to exist at an implicit level, and operate ‘without the encumbrances of awareness, intention, and control’, as social psychologists Brian Nosek and Jeffrey Hansen have put it.6 The implicit associations of the mind can be thought of as a tangled but highly organised network of connections. They connect representations of objects, people, concepts, feelings, your own self, goals, motives and behaviours with one another. The strength of each of these connections depends on your past experiences (and also, interestingly, the current context): how often those two objects, say, or that person and that feeling, or that object and a certain behaviour have gone together in the past.7

So what does the implicit mind automatically associate with women and men? The various tests that social psychologists use to assess implicit associations work from the assumption that if you present your participant with a particular stimulus, then this will rapidly, automatically and unintentionally activate strongly associated concepts, actions, goals and so on, more than weakly associated ones. These primed representations become more readily accessible to influence perception and guide behaviour.8 In one of the most widely used tests, the computer-based Implicit Association Test or IAT (developed by social psychologists Anthony Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji and Brian Nosek), participants must pair categories of words or pictures.9 For example, first they might have to pair female names with communal words (like connected and supportive), and male names with agentic words (like individualistic and competitive). Participants usually find this easier than the opposite pairing (female names with agentic words, and male names with communal words). The small but significant difference in reaction time this creates is taken as a measure of the stronger automatic and unintended associations between women and communality, and men and agency.10

You probably have similar associations, regardless of whether you consciously endorse them. The reason for this is that the learning of these associations is also a process that takes place without the need for awareness, intention and control. The principle behind learning in associative memory is simple: as its name suggests, what is picked up are associations in the environment. Place a woman behind almost every vacuum cleaner being pushed around a carpet and, by Jove, associative memory will pick up the pattern. This certainly has its benefits – it’s an effortless and efficient way to learn about the world around you – but it also has its drawbacks. 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. What this means is that if you are a liberal, politically correct sort of person, then chances are you won’t very much like your implicit mind’s attitudes. Between it and your conscious, reflective self there will be many points of disagreement. Researchers have shown that our implicit representations of social groups are often remarkably reactionary, even when our consciously reported beliefs are modern and progressive.11 As for gender, the automatic associations of the categories male and female are not a few flimsy strands linked to penis and vagina. Measures of implicit associations reveal that men, more than women, are implicitly associated with science, maths, career, hierarchy and high authority. In contrast, women, more than men, are implicitly associated with the liberal arts, family and domesticity, egalitarianism and low authority.12

The results of a series of experiments by Nilanjana Dasgupta and Shaki Asgari at the University of Massachusetts give us an indication of how the media, and life itself, can give rise to these associations, quite independently of our consciously endorsed beliefs. These researchers looked at the effects of counterstereotypic information. In the first study, they gave one group of women a series of short biographies of famous women leaders to read (like Meg Whitman, then CEO of e-Bay, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, US Supreme Court Justice). Afterwards, these women found it easier to pair female names with leadership words on the IAT, compared with controls who had not just read about women leaders. However, reading about these exceptional women had not an ounce of effect on the women’s explicit beliefs about women’s leadership qualities. Dasgupta and Asgari then went on to look at the effects of the real world on the implicit mind. They recruited women from two liberal arts colleges in the United States, one a women’s college and the other coed. The researchers measured the women’s implicit and conscious attitudes towards women and leadership during the first few months of freshman year and then again a year later. The type of college experience – coed or single sex – had no effect on the students’ self-reported beliefs about women’s capacity for leadership. However, it did have an effect on their implicit attitudes. At the beginning of freshman year, both groups of women were slow to pair female and leadership words on the IAT. But by sophomore year, the women at the single-sex college had lost this implicit disinclination to associate women with leadership, while coed students had become even slower at pairing such words. This divergence appeared to be due to students in women’s colleges tending to have more exposure to female faculty, and coed students – particularly those who took maths and science classes – having less experience with women in leadership positions. The patterns of their environment, in other words, altered the gender stereotypes represented in the implicit mind.13

When gender is salient in the environment, or we categorise someone as male or female, gender stereotypes are automatically primed. For several years, social psychologists have been investigating how this activation of stereotypes affects our perception of others.14 But more recently, social psychologists have also become interested in the possibility that sometimes we might also perceive our own selves through the lens of an activated stereotype. For, as it turns out, the self-concept is surprisingly malleable.

Perhaps, on presenting your psyche to a psychiatrist for analysis, you would fail to see a brightening of the eye, a gleam that anticipates an hour that is more pleasure than work. But even if your personality offers little to hold the interest of a shrink, there is nonetheless plenty in there to fascinate the social psychologist. This is because your self has multiple strings to its bow, it’s a rich, complex web, it has a nuance for every occasion. As Walt Whitman neatly put it, ‘I am large: I contain multitudes.’15 But while a self that runs to the multitudes is certainly a fine thing to own, you can immediately see that it is not ideal to have the entire multitude in charge at the same time. What works better is if, at any one time, just a few self-concept items are plucked out from the giant Wardrobe of Self.

Some psychologists refer to whatever self is in current use – the particular self-concept chosen from the multitudes – as the active self.16 As the name implies, this is no passive, sloblike entity that idles unchanging day after day, week after week. Rather, the active self is a dynamic chameleon, changing from moment to moment in response to its social environment. Of course, the mind can only make use of what is available – and for each of us certain portions of the self-concept come more easily to hand than do others. But in all of us, a rather large portion of the Wardrobe of Self is taken up with the stereotypical costumes of the many social identities each person has (New Yorker, father, Hispanic American, vet, squash player, man). Who you are at a particular moment – which part of your self-concept is active – turns out to be very sensitive to context. While sometimes your active self will be personal and idiosyncratic, at other times the context will bring one of your social identities hurtling towards the active self for use. With a particular social identity in place, it would not be surprising if self-perception became more stereotypic as a result. In line with this idea, priming gender seems to have exactly this effect.17

In one study, for example, a group of French high school students was asked to rate the truth of stereotypes about gender difference in talent in maths and the arts before rating their own abilities in these domains. So, for these students, gender stereotypes were very salient as they rated their own ability. Next, they were asked to report their scores in maths and the arts on a very important national standardised test taken about two years earlier. Unlike students in a control condition, those in the stereotype-salient group altered the memory of their own objective achievements to fit the well-known stereotype. The girls remembered doing better than they really had in the arts, while the boys inflated their marks in maths. They gave themselves, on average, almost an extra 3 percent on their real score while the girls subtracted the same amount from their actual maths score. This might not seem like a large effect, but it’s not impossible to imagine two young people considering different occupational paths when, with gender in mind, a boy sees himself as an A student while an equally successful girl thinks she’s only a B.18

If this method of priming gender doesn’t seem very subtle, it’s because it isn’t. Of course that’s not to say that it might not provide a useful proxy for the real world. Gender stereotypes are ubiquitous, sometimes even in settings where they shouldn’t be. When the Scottish Qualifications Authority recently announced a drive to increase the dismally low numbers of senior school girls in subjects like physics, woodworking, and computing, some teachers freely expressed doubt that it was worth the effort. ‘I think it is much better to realise that there are differences between boys and girls, and ways in which they learn’, said a headmaster at a well-known Edinburgh private school. ‘Overall, boys choose subjects to suit their learning style, which is more logic based’.19 He was gracious enough to leave his audience to make the inference that girls’ preferred learning style is an illogical one, rather than making the point explicitly. But importantly, gender identity can also be primed without the help of openly expressed stereotypes. Have you, for example, ever filled in a question on a form that looks something like this?

□ Male

□ Female

Even an innocently neutral question of this kind can prime gender. Researchers asked American university students to rate their mathematical and verbal abilities, but beforehand, some students were asked to note down their gender in a short demographics section, and others to mark their ethnicity.20 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, compared with when they identified themselves as European American. In contrast, European American men rated their maths ability higher when they were thinking of themselves as men (rather than as European Americans), but their verbal ability better when their ethnicity had been made salient.

Even stimuli that are so subtle as to be imperceptible can bring about a change in self-perception. Psychologists Jennifer Steele and Nalini Ambady gave female students a vigilance task, in which they had to indicate with a key press, as quickly as possible, on which side of the computer screen a series of flashes appeared.21 These flashes, were, in fact, subliminal primes: words replaced so quickly by a string of Xs that the word itself couldn’t be identified. For one group, the words primed ‘female’ (aunt, doll, earring, flower, girl and so on). The other group saw words like uncle, hammer, suit, cigar and boy. Then, the volunteers were asked to rate how much pleasure they found in both feminine activities (like writing an essay or taking a literature exam) and masculine tasks (like solving an equation, taking a calculus exam or computing compound interest). The male-primed group of women rated both types of activity as equally enjoyable. But the female-primed group reported a preference for arts-related activities over maths-based ones. The prime ‘changed women’s lens of self-perception’, the authors suggest.22

We are not just influenced by the imperceptible, but also the intangible. The Australian writer Helen Garner noted that one can either ‘think of people as discrete bubbles floating past each other and sometimes colliding, or … see them overlap, seep into each other’s lives, penetrate the fabric of each other’.23 Research supports the latter view. 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). As William James put it, ‘a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him and carry an image of him in their mind.’24 By way of scientific support for James’s idea, Princeton University psychologist Stacey Sinclair and her colleagues 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. With a particular person in mind, or in anticipation of interacting with them, self-conception adjusts to create a shared reality. This means that when their perception of you is stereotypical, your own mind follows suit. For example, Sinclair manipulated one group of women into thinking that they were about to spend some time with a charmingly sexist man. (Not a woman-hater, but the kind of man who thinks that women deserve to be cherished and protected by men, while being rather less enthusiastic about them being too confident and assertive.) Obligingly, the women socially tuned their view of themselves to better match these traditional opinions. They regarded themselves as more stereotypically feminine, compared with another group of women who were expecting instead to interact with a man with a more modern view of their sex.25 Interestingly, this social tuning only seems to happen when there is some sort of motivation for a good relationship. This suggests that close or powerful others in your life may be especially likely to act as a mirror in which you perceive your own qualities.

These shifts in the self-concept do not just bring about changes in the eye of the self-beholder. They can also change behaviour. In her report of kindergarten children, sociologist Bronwyn Davies describes how one little girl, Catherine, reacts when the doll she is playing with is snatched away by a boy. After one failed attempt to retrieve the doll, Catherine strides to the dress-up cupboard and pulls out a man’s waistcoat. She puts it on, and ‘marches out. This time she returns victorious with the dolly under her arm. She immediately takes off the waistcoat and drops it on the floor.’26 When adults pull a new active self out of the wardrobe, the change of costume is merely metaphorical. But might it nonetheless, as it did for Catherine, help us better fulfil a particular role or goal? Research suggests that it can.

In a recent series of experiments, Adam Galinsky at Northwestern University and his colleagues showed participants a photograph of someone: a cheerleader, a professor, an elderly man, or an African American man. In each case, some of the volunteers were asked to pretend to actually be the person in the photograph and to write about a typical day as that person. Control participants were told to write about a typical day in the person’s life from a more dispassionate, third-person (he/she …) point of view. (This meant the researchers could see the effects of perspective-taking over and above any effects of priming a stereotype.) The researchers discovered that perspective-taking gave rise to ‘self-other merging’. Asked to rate their own traits after the exercise, those who had imagined themselves as a cheerleader rated themselves as more attractive, gorgeous and sexy, compared with controls. Those who imagined themselves as professors felt smarter, those who walked in the shoes of the elderly felt weaker and more dependent, and those who had temporarily lived life as an African American man rated themselves as more aggressive and athletic. Self-perception absorbed the stereotypical qualities of another social group.27

The researchers then went on to show that these changes in the self-concept had an effect on behaviour. Galinsky and his colleagues found that pretending to be a professor improved analytic skills compared with controls, while a self-merging with cheerleader traits impaired them. Those who had imagined themselves as an African American man behaved more competitively in a game than those who had briefly imagined themselves to be elderly. 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.

No less remarkable effects on behaviour were seen by Stacey Sinclair and her colleagues. You’ll recall that women who thought they were about to meet a man with traditional views of women perceived themselves as more feminine than women who expected to meet a man with more modern opinions. In one experiment, Sinclair arranged for her participants to actually interact with this man. (Of course, he was really a stooge, but didn’t know what each woman thought he thought about women.) Women who thought he was a benevolent sexist didn’t just think themselves more feminine, they also behaved in a more stereotypically feminine way.28 (As a psychologist who has worked for several years in philosophy departments, perhaps this is a good moment to suggest to any colleagues who have found tearoom conversations with me intellectually unsatisfying that they have only their low opinion of psychologists to blame.)

It’s not hard to see just how useful and adaptable a dynamic sense of self can be.29 As the pivot through which the social context – which includes the minds of others – alters self-perception, a changing social self can help to ensure that we are wearing the right psychological hat for every situation. As we’ve begun to see, this change in the self-concept can then have effects for behaviour, a phenomenon we’ll look at more closely in the chapters that follow. With the right social identity for the occasion or the companion, this malleability and sensitivity to the social world helps us to fit ourselves into, as well as better perform, our current social role. No doubt the female self and the male self can be as useful as any other social identity in the right circumstances. But flexible, context-sensitive and useful is not the same as ‘hardwired’. And, when we take a closer look at the gender gap in empathising, we find that what is being chalked up to hardwiring on closer inspection starts to look more like the sensitive tuning of the self to the expectations lurking in the social context.

One morning at breakfast, my patient Jane looked up to see that her husband, Evan, was smiling. He held the newspaper, but his gaze was lifted and his eyes darted back and forth, though he wasn’t looking at her. She had seen this behavior many times before in her lawyer husband and asked, ‘What are you thinking about? Who are you beating in court right now?’ Evan responded, ‘I’m not thinking about anything.’ But in fact he was unconsciously rehearsing an exchange with counsel he might be having later that day – he had a great argument and was looking forward to mopping up the courtroom with his opponent. Jane knew it before he did.

—Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain (2007)1

Goodness, but Brizendine sets the bar high for women. I am trying in vain to recall an occasion during our many years together when, glancing up to see my husband’s fingers twitching over the cereal bowl, I startled him by presciently asking, ‘What are you thinking about? What invoice are you paying right now?’ To be brutally honest, at breakfast I prefer to reserve the majority of my neurons for the thinking of my own thoughts, not those of others. But while Brizendine’s claims are somewhat extravagant – is it really true that women have more privileged access to men’s thoughts than they do themselves, or that ‘a man can’t seem to spot an emotion unless someone cries or threatens bodily harm’?2 – we’re all familiar with the concept of womanly intuition and womanly tenderness.

It’s important, by the way, not to jumble together these two distinct ‘feminine’ skills. When a man looks for a soul mate to refresh his overlaboured faculties and unbend his learned brow, if he is wise he will check for two different qualities in his potential candidates. First, he needs someone who is quick to discern – from, for example, its furrowed appearance – that his brow is indeed in need of straightening. This is cognitive empathy, the ability to intuit what another person is thinking or feeling. But in addition, she needs to be the kind of person who will use her powers of interpersonal perception for good, not evil. Affective empathy is what we commonly think of as sympathy – feeling and caring about the other person’s distress. Put the two together and you have an angel in human form. As Baron-Cohen describes it in The Essential Difference, ‘imagine you not only see Jane’s pain, but you also automatically feel concern, wince, and feel a desire to run across and help alleviate her pain.’3

As we already know, according to Baron-Cohen it is women on average who are ‘predominantly hard-wired’ to see, feel, wince, run and alleviate. His Empathy Quotient (or EQ) questionnaire asks people to report their skill and inclination for both cognitive and affective empathy with statements like I can easily tell if someone else wants to enter a conversation and I really enjoy caring for other people. (The person filling in the questionnaire agrees or disagrees, slightly or strongly, with each statement.) To diagnose what he calls brain sex, Baron-Cohen uses the EQ together with its brother the Systemising Quotient (SQ), which poses questions like If there was a problem with the electrical wiring in my home, I’d be able to fix it myself and When I read the newspaper, I am drawn to tables of information, such as football league scores or stock market indices.4 People who score higher on the EQ than the SQ have an E-type or female brain, and the opposite result indicates an S-type or male brain. The large minority who score approximately equally on the two tests are deemed to have a balanced brain. Baron-Cohen reports that just under 50 percent of women, but only 17 percent of men, have a female brain.5

As journalist Amanda Schaffer pointed out in Slate there is something curious about equating empathising with the female brain when, albeit by a whisker, the majority of women do not claim to have a predominantly empathising focus. She reports that when she asked Baron-Cohen about this, he ‘admitted that he’s thought twice about his male brain/female brain terminology, but he didn’t disavow it.’6 And, while we’re on the subject of terminology, calling a test the ‘Empathy Quotient’ does not, on its own, make it a test of empathising. 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, or assessing motor skills by asking people to agree or disagree with statements like I can pick up new sports very quickly. There’s something doubtfully subjective about the approach.