Delusions of Gender (2 page)

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: