Delusions of Gender

[sawyl]

I've mentioned it once already, but here are some more thoughts on Cordelia Fine's pithy, funny, fascinating Delusions of Gender. The book examines many of the common claims made about the differences between the sexes and and surveys the evidence to see if they claims are scientifically justifiable. Which, it transpires, they generally aren't.

The first section of the book tackles the lack of female equality at the highest levels of science and industry. After examining Simon Baron-Cohen's research that suggests men are better at systematising and maths because they possess a male brain, Fine notes the methodological problems associated with questionnaires that rely on self-reporting and uses it to jump into a discussion of the way in which cultural factors and pre-existing stereotypical beliefs can distort test performance and become self-reinforcing:

The test packet handed out to each student included some information about the test. Students in the stereotype threat condition were told that the test was designed to measure their maths abilities, to try to better understand what makes some people better at maths than others. This kind of statement can on its own create stereotype threat for women, who are well aware of their own stereotyped inferiority in mathematics. But added to this, in the nonthreat condition, was the information that despite testing on thousands of students no gender difference had ever been found. So what was the effect of this extra information?

The men and women in the two groups had, on average, all received much the same course grades. You'd expect then, given their apparently equivalent ability, that males and females in the thread and nonthreadcondition would perform at about the same level on the test. Instead, the researchers found thet females performed better in the nonthreat condition, and this was particularly striking among Anglo-American participants, who generally show the greatest sex difference in maths performance. Among these participants, men and women in the threat condition, as well as men in the nonthreat condition, all scored about 19 percent on this very difficult test. But women in the nonthreat group scored an average of 30 percent correct, thus outperforming every other group — including both groups of men. In other words, the standard presentation of a test seemed to suppress women's ability, but when the same test was presented to women as equally hard men and women, it 'unleashed their mathematical potential.'

Fine, C., (2010), Delusions of Gender, Icon Books, 30–31

This is followed by an examination of some of the routine ways in which women are culturally excluded in the workplace, by for example, holding key business meetings in the misogynistic environs of the golf club and the strip bar — a point Fine emphasizes with an appallingly reactionary quote from a fellow Coventarian:

A survey by the UK's Fawcett Society, based on anonymous testimony from city workers, found that it is 'increasingly normal' for clients to be entertained at these kinds of venues. Expected, even. Regarding the issuing of a licence to a lap-dancing club in Coventry, England, a 'leading businessman' argued to the council that '[i]f Coventry has aspirations to be a major business area, then it has to have a quality adult entertainment area, and that would include a lap-dancing club.' How an earth did men ever manage to get business done in the days before establishments where they can pay to have their penises massaged by the genitalia of naked women?

ibid. 71

So much, then, for workplace equality. But things are every bit as bad in the home, where the evidence shows that women still do almost all the routine tasks around the home, even when they are the sole breadwinner, and that the amount of work a woman does around the home seems to increase rather than diminish as salary and work levels increase. As mentioned, I was particularly awed by the University of California study which showed female faculty members doing far more domestic labour than their male colleagues because, if such a thing can happen in California, what hope for the rest of us?

With the social problems of gender inequality firmly established, the book moves on to examine claims that these inequalities are actually the result of biological differences between the sexes. Examining the question of whether foetal testosterone might explain the greater representation of men at the top levels of sciences — as represented by, say, numbers of Nobel laureates — Fine identifies a number of problems: research based on self-reporting of mathematical and analytical abilities, a method prone to unreliability and stereotype threats; the use of surrogate measures to determine foetal testosterone exposure; the problem that systematising abilities are difficult to measure; and that many Nobel scientists have reported that imagination and intuition — supposedly female traits — have played significant roles in their success. This is followed by an examination of studies conducted using girls affected by congenital adrenal hyperplasia and studies with primates (although, as noted in text, the idea that vervet monkeys playing with different toys — a police car versus a cooking pan — based on human conceptions of the toys' gender associations seems odd to say the least!)

Particular scorn is poured on the gross misuse of neuroimaging, which Fine suggests is a sort of modern day phrenology. The problems with the scans themselves seem myriad: slow response from equipment used to measure rapid events; an inability to see much more than gross details; dodgy statistical methods; and a tendency to focus on differences between subjects rather than absolute levels of activity. However the results from this interesting, if imperfect method of analysis are then presented as definitive proof for every hypothesis under the sun, even when the available evidence has to be twisted to fit the theory — particular ire is reserved for Louann Brizendine, who is found wanting after being subject to a comprehensive footnote audit.

The book concludes with an examination of the tendency of parents to assume, following the failure of their attempts to raise their children in a gender-neutral fashion, that sex differences must have a biological origin. However analyses of subconscious cues and tells, including the quantative analyses of the language used in newspaper birth announcements and the impact of body language on childrens' attitudes, suggests that despite parents' conscious attempts to maintain neutrality, their actual, culturally biased attitudes may instead leak out through their subconscious behaviours, language choices, possibly even the selection of their childrens' names:

People unconsciously place a special value on the letter that begins their own name. With this phenomenon in mind, Jost and colleagues looked for evidence of 'implicit paternalism' in the names that parents chose for their children. They found that boys were more likely to be given names that began with the paternal first initial than the maternal initial, but girls were equally likely to share a first initial with their mother or father. (And this wasn't because of sons being named after their dads; kids with exactly the same name were excluded from this analysis.) In other words, parents seemed to be unconsciously overvaluing fathers' names and perhaps also boys, who were more often bestowed the higher-value male initial.

ibid. 195–196

Children also pick up their own gender clues, not just from the way that they're dressed — children's clothing being gender specified from birth — but also from the behaviour of the adults around them, as this charming little quote from Ruble, Lurye, & Zosuls shows: "one child believed men drank tea and women drank coffee, because that was the way it was in his house. He was thus perplexed when a male visitor requested coffee." And all of this says nothing of childrens' own tendencies to self-censure, choosing to play out more conservative gender roles when with their peers but opting for less clearly defined roles with there is no-one around to censure them for say, playing with a toy perceived to be associated with the other gender.

Delusions of Gender a delightful and necessary reminder both of the continued need for better gender equality and of the the dangers of making bold social claims on the grounds of weak science. Fine's evidence-heavy approach gives the book a solid grounding and believability, while her snarky sense of humour — "...researchers don't actually know for sure whether what they are measuring correlates well, or even at all with the level of testosterone acting on the foetal brain. We won't let this hold us back. (After all, we're only trying to find the biological roots to gender inequality, so why be fussy, right?" ibid. 109 — keeps things moving and prevents the sort of dryness and chaffing that all too often results from heavy fact exposure.

Highly recommended.