Delusions of Gender (26 page)

Perhaps my own corpus callosum runs to a smaller size than the standard female issue, but I find these intuitive leaps from brain structure to psychological function unconvincing, as noted in the previous chapter. Why should arriving at a solution to a problem through an analysis of data and proof require any less integration between hemispheres? As an example of just how wrong our intuitions can be in these matters, despite the popular assumption that a more lateralised brain will be worse at multitasking, neurobiologist Lesley Rogers and her colleagues found precisely the opposite to be the case in chicks.
⁶
Chicks with more lateralised brains were better at simultaneously pecking for food grains and looking out for predators (the established chick equivalent of frying a steak while making a salad).

While it may not be too surprising to discover self-appointed ‘thought-leaders’ dressing up stereotypes in neuroscientific finery, it is more of a shock to see this in an alumnus of Harvard Medical School, the University of California–Berkeley, and Yale School of Medicine. Step forward Louann Brizendine, director of the University of California–San Francisco Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic. Her book,
The Female Brain
, cites literally hundreds of academic articles. To the unwary reader, both she and the book seem reliable and authoritative. And yet, as a review of the book in
Nature
comments, ‘despite the author’s extensive academic credentials,
The Female Brain
disappointingly fails to meet even
the most basic standards of scientific accuracy and balance. The book is riddled with scientific errors and is misleading about the processes of brain development, the neuroendocrine system, and the nature of sex differences in general.’ The reviewers later go on to say that, ‘[t]he text is rife with “facts” that do not exist in the supporting references.’
⁷
This is a common discovery made by people who take the time to fact-check Brizendine’s claims. Mark Liberman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania with no special interest in gender issues, has nonetheless been provoked to provide many detailed but humorous critiques of pseudoscientific claims about gender differences on his online Language Log. His patient corrections of Brizendine’s many false assertions about sex differences in communication is a chore that, as he puts it, ‘is starting to make me feel like the circus clown that follows the elephant around the ring with a shovel.’
⁸

But despite these forewarnings, when I decided to follow up Brizendine’s claim that the female brain is wired to empathise, it nonetheless proved to be an exercise that turned up surprise after surprise. I tracked down every neuroscience study cited by Brizendine as evidence for feminine superiority in mind reading. (No, really, no need to thank me. I do this sort of thing for pleasure.) There were many such references, over just a few pages of text, creating the impression it was no mere opinion, but scientifically established fact, that the female brain is wired for empathy in a way that the male brain is not. Yet fact-checking revealed the deployment of some rather misleading practices. For example, let’s work our way through the middle of page 162 to the top of page 164 in her book. We kick off with a study of psychotherapists, which found that therapists develop a good rapport with their clients by mirroring their actions.
⁹
Casually, Brizendine notes, ‘All of the therapists who showed these responses happened to be women.’
¹⁰
For some reason, she fails to mention that this is because only female therapists, selected from phone directories, happened to be recruited for the study.

Brizendine’s next claim – that girls have an advantage in
understanding others’ feelings – does find support in the work of Erin McClure and Judith Hall, which she cites. These researchers both conducted meta-analyses that found advantages for females in decoding nonverbal expressions of emotion.
¹¹
The edge is, however, moderate. McClure’s meta-analysis suggests that about 54 percent of girls will perform above average in facial emotion processing, compared with 46 percent of boys. Hall’s review of research with tests such as the PONS nonverbal decoding task (which we encountered in
Chapter 2
) suggests that if you randomly chose a boy and a girl, over and over, more than a third of the time the boy would outperform the girl. Brizendine does not understate these findings, then, when she says that ‘[g]irls are years ahead of boys’ in these abilities.
¹²
She then speculates that mirror neurons may lie behind these skills, enabling girls to observe, imitate and mirror the nonverbal cues of others as a way to intuit their feelings. (Mirror neurons are neurons that respond to another animal’s actions as though the animal-observer itself were acting. Some scientists think that mirror neurons may provide the neural grounding for understanding people’s minds. Other scientists are dubious about the whole concept.) The study she cites here does explore the potential role of the mirror system in intuiting others’ mental states – but not specifically in females.
¹³
Indeed, its participants (some of whom had autism-spectrum disorders) were all male.

A little later, readers are told that ‘brain-imaging studies show that the mere act of observing or imagining another person in a particular emotional state can automatically activate similar brain patterns in the observer – and females are especially good at this kind of emotional mirroring.’
¹⁴
Cited as support for this feminine superiority in emotional mirroring is a 2004 neuroimaging study by cognitive neuroscientist Tania Singer and colleagues, who compared brain activation when someone was either receiving a painful electric shock to the hand or was aware that a loved one was receiving the same painful electric shock to the hand.
¹⁵
Singer and colleagues found that some brain regions were activated both by
being shocked and watching someone else be shocked. If you think I’m going to be nitpicky about what any sex differences in activation in this study
mean
, you’re wrong. Actually, the problem of interpretation is rather more basic. Only women were scanned.

Continuing the theme of women’s special sensitivity to the pain of others in the next paragraph, Brizendine informs us that when a woman, for example, responds empathically to the stubbed toe of another, she is ‘demonstrating an extreme form of what the female brain does naturally from childhood and even more in adulthood – experience the pain of another person.’
¹⁶
Brizendine marshals two functional neuroimaging studies as support for this claim. The first is Singer’s 2004 study of females’ empathic responses to pain. The second is a study by Tetsuya Iidaka and colleagues, who asked participants to judge the gender of faces showing positive, negative or neutral expressions. They compared brain activations in young versus old participants, but not in females versus males.
¹⁷
(Her third citation is a review of anxiety and depression in childhood and adolescence. It doesn’t discuss responses to others’ pain, or gender differences in this capacity, although the authors note that ‘[b]ecause females are known to be more emotionally responsive than males to the problems of
others
, a wider range of interpersonal contexts may arouse them.’)
¹⁸

In the last part of this page range, Brizendine describes Singer’s 2004 study, and states that ‘the same pain areas of [the women’s] brains that had activated when they themselves were shocked lit up when they learned their partners were being strongly shocked.’
¹⁹
She references the Singer 2004 study here, naturally, but also another functional neuroimaging study by the same research team, published in 2006.
²⁰
This study was similar, but instead of being a romantic partner who was shocked, it was a confederate who had played either fairly or unfairly in a game just before. In this study, both men and women were scanned. Again, empathy-related responses were seen in reaction to the pain of another, although in men this was only the case when the confederate had played fairly. Having referenced these two studies,
Brizendine concludes that ‘[t]he women were feeling their partner’s pain.… Researchers have been unable to elicit similar brain responses from men.’
²¹
She has, however, just cited a study that
did
elicit similar brain responses from men, albeit only in response to people they liked.

By this point the reader may have a poor opinion indeed of the male neurological capacity for empathy – especially since earlier on in the chapter Brizendine suggests that females may have more of the neurons that enable mirroring. She writes that ‘[a]lthough most of the studies on this topic have been done on primates, scientists speculate that there may be more mirror neurons in the human female brain than in the human male brain.’ Look to the notes at the back of the book and no fewer than five scholarly references appear to affirm this claim.
²²
The first study is in Russian. Although it did compare the sexes, from the abstract I would lay a substantial bet on it not offering much insight into gender differences in mirror neurons, as it was a postmortem study of neuron characteristics in the frontal lobes. (One would, I imagine, have to see mirror neurons in action to be able to identify them.) Three further studies did indeed look at some aspect of what is thought to be the mirror neuron system. However, none of them compared males and females, or speculated about possible differences between the sexes. And that leaves just one remaining citation, which is ‘personal communication’ with Harvard-based cognitive neuroscientist Lindsay Oberman, entitled ‘There may be a difference in male and female mirror neuron functioning’. When I emailed Dr. Oberman to confirm, to my surprise, she informed me that not only had she never communicated with Brizendine, but went on to write that, ‘to the contrary, I have looked at many of my studies and have not found evidence for better mirror neuron functioning in females.’
²³
(Once you’ve picked your jaw up off the floor, don’t forget to briefly think about the 5 percent rule I mentioned in
Chapter 12
, in which only sex
differences
get reported.)

What is deliciously ironic about all of this is that Brizendine presents herself as the reluctant but fearless messenger of truth:

In writing this book I have struggled with two voices in my head – one is the scientific truth, the other is political correctness. I have chosen to emphasize scientific truth over political correctness even though scientific truths may not always be welcome.
²⁴

When I am in the mood to be irked, I flip through Brizendine’s book. Perhaps because of the particular stage of life I happen to be in, I found myself most enraged by her claim that only when ‘the children leave home, the mommy brain circuits are finally free to be applied to new ambitions, new thoughts, new ideas.’
²⁵
But it’s the sexism that bursts through the doors of preschools and schools, cleverly disguised in neuroscientific finery, that I find most disturbing. As neuroimaging takes its first steps on the long journey to understanding how neuronal firing yields mental abilities, you will find no shortage of so-called experts willing to explain the educational implications of differences in boy wiring and girl wiring. The medal for the most outrageous claim must surely go to an American educational speaker. According to reports sent to Mark Liberman’s Language Log, this educational consultant has been informing audiences that girls see the details while boys see the big picture because the ‘crockus’ – a region of the brain that does not exist – is four times larger in girls than in boys.
²⁶

I should reassure you that most people who talk about the educational implications of sex differences in the brain do limit themselves to regions recognised by the majority of the scientific community. I also have little doubt that many of them have the very best intentions behind their use of the brain science literature. They want to improve educational outcomes for children of both sexes. Those who promote single-sex schools may certainly have good reasons for their cause that have nothing to do with the
brain. But promoting that cause by projecting gender stereotypes onto brain data is worse than useless.

Perhaps the most influential of this group of educational speakers is Leonard Sax of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education (NASSPE), and author of two books that argue a brain-based need for single-sex schooling. Sax has a punishing speaking schedule, that so far has included the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as well as countries in Europe – and some schools are clearly impressed. NASSPE has been involved in about half of the 360 single-sex public school programmes in the United States, and Sax has told
New York Times
journalist Elizabeth Weil that about 300 of them ‘are coming at this from a neuroscience basis.’
²⁷
Let’s take a closer look at what that means.

Take an English class, for example. In the girls’ class, you will find teachers asking their students to reflect on story protagonists’ feelings and motives:
how would you
feel
if?
… sort of questions. But not in the boys’ classroom, because ‘[t]hat question requires boys to link
emotional
information in the amygdala with
language
information in the cerebral cortex. It’s like trying to recite poetry and juggle bowling pins at the same time. You have to use two different parts of the brain that don’t normally work together.’ The problem for boys and young children, according to Sax, is that emotion is processed in the amygdala, a primitive, basic part of the brain – ‘that makes few direct connections with the cerebral cortex.’
²⁸
(In fact, the amygdala appears to be richly interconnected with the cerebral cortex.)
²⁹
This supposedly renders them incapable of talking about their feelings. But in older girls, emotion is processed in the cerebral cortex, which conveniently enables them to employ language to communicate what they’re feeling. The implications for teaching are clear:
girls to the left, phylogenetically primitive ape-brains to the right!
Yet this ‘fact’ about male brains – variants of which I have seen repeated several times in popular media – is based on a small functional neuroimaging study in which children stared passively at fearful faces.
³⁰
It’s doubtful whether any negative emotion was involved during the study (except perhaps boredom);
³¹
the children were not asked to speak or talk about what they were feeling and, critically, brain activity was not even measured in most of the areas of the brain involved in processing emotion and language.
³²
As Mark Liberman has pointed out, ‘the disproportion between the reported facts and Sax’s interpretation is spectacular.’
³³
Even if studies
did
show what Sax claims (questionable),
³⁴
why on earth would we assume that the language parts of the brain wouldn’t get involved if the child wished to speak? Shifting information from A to B is, after all, what axons and dendrites are
for
. Yet Sax describes with admiration a boy-brain-friendly English class in which boys study
The Lord of the Flies
by reading the text not with an eye on the plot, or characterisation, but so as to be able to construct a map of the island.