Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (22 page)

In his book Baron-Cohen described this experiment at length, and concluded from it, ‘The fact that this difference is present at birth strongly suggests that biology plays a role.’
¹³
The study has been frequently retold, sometimes in articles by Simon Baron-Cohen himself, in the
New York Times
and the
Guardian
,
¹⁴
and also by other writers. For instance, in the
New Statesman
the journalist Nick Cohen wrote that men are more likely than women to systemise the outside world, and quicker to see patterns, while women are better at empathising with others and producing a sympathetic response. As evidence he mentioned this experiment: ‘Simon Baron-Cohen found that newborn boys, untouched by culture, were more likely than girls to look at a mobile than a human face.’
¹⁵
In the
Guardian
, the philosopher Helena Cronin wrote that there was a wealth of evidence that men and women differed in this way, ‘even at one day old, girls prefer a human face, boys a mechanical mobile’.
¹⁶
In her book
The Sexual Paradox
, Susan Pinker argued that the differences we see in working patterns among men and women arise partly because women are more empathetic, and that this is seen from early infancy, well before any cultural expectations about women as nurturers can be absorbed. ‘Just a few days after birth, the majority of newborn girls show more interest in looking at a human face than at a mechanical mobile,’ she said.
¹⁷

If a single study is given this much weight, we might expect that it would be taken seriously by the scientists’ peers. Yet some of these peers are much less than respectful. They are scathing. When I talked to Elizabeth Spelke, this is what she had to say
about this famous experiment. ‘This is one single isolated experiment. Its findings fly in the face of dozens of studies on similar aspects of cognition carried out on young babies over decades. It is astonishing how much this one study has been cited, when the many studies that show no difference between the sexes, or a difference in the other direction, are ignored.’ In a published article, Spelke pulled the experiment to pieces, arguing that it was unsatisfactory in three respects.
¹⁸
First, because it stands alone. It is usual, in infant research, to replicate key findings and assemble multiple experiments in support of any claim, in order to ensure that the result wasn’t down to pure chance – chance will always produce a few rogue results. Yet no replication of this particular experiment has been published. This lack of replication is particularly telling because the other, numerous studies in this field, ‘provide no evidence that male infants are more focused on objects and female infants are more focused on people from birth onwards’.
¹⁹
Second, because no attempt was made to break down the raw finding into something more precise – what was it that the male infants preferred about the mobile? Would their preference for an inanimate object remain if it was something other than this particular object that was chosen? And lastly, she feels that the study was not protected against experimenter’s bias; it is rare for one person to devise and also carry out a study of this nature, as it is too easy in those situations for the researcher to bring her expectations to bear on the material.

Of all these criticisms, it is obviously the first, that this is an isolated result and that the other numerous studies in this field have failed to find similar results, that stands out. The history of such experiments, as Elizabeth Spelke states, goes back a long way. No one else has done a study identical to that carried out by Connellan, but other scientists have carried out studies that should, if the grand claims for innate gender differences are correct, show similar results. For instance, way back in 1966 five researchers – Jerome Kagan, Barbara Henker, Amy Hen-Tov,
Janet Levine and Michael Lewis – chose to study four-month-old infants and see how they reacted to four different three-dimensional objects: a regular face, a face in which the eyes, nose and mouth were rearranged, a face with no eyes, and a blank face (a face shape with the features removed). It seemed pretty clear that infants preferred the regular face – they smiled more at it. The only difference to emerge between the boys and girls was that the boys looked more at all the faces and smiled more at all the faces than the girls did; a difference that goes in the opposite direction to the observations of Connellan and Baron-Cohen.
²⁰

Reading through the article that describes this experiment, I was struck by another distinct difference. Connellan and Baron-Cohen took as given that longer gaze from babies on a particular object showed ‘preference’ for that object. So when the boy babies looked longer at what they called a mechanical mobile (though it was less a machine than a piece of abstract art), they called it ‘mobile preference’, and proof of ‘stronger interest in mechanical objects’, while female gaze at the face shows ‘a stronger interest in the face’.
²¹
But the earlier researchers, Kagan, Henker, Hen-Tov, Levine and Lewis, have a much more intriguing view of what a longer gaze on the part of a pre-verbal baby might mean. It might mean liking, but it might mean being disconcerted. A baby does not have the luxury of speech to explain why it is gazing. We should be careful how we interpret their glances. As the earlier researchers stated, ‘Adults gaze at colourful, graceful birds out of preference’ but ‘they stare at wingless flying objects because they wish to categorize them and reduce the uncertainty created by violation of a familiar schema. A long fixation, without additional information from other response modes, does not allow one to determine which of these two incentives is eliciting the sustained attention’.
²²
In other words, if a baby looked longer at a scrambled face, one could have said that he or she was disconcerted that it didn’t look as they expected and hoped a face should look, and was gazing at it out
of anxiety. The greater subtlety and nuance expressed by researchers forty years ago when looking at infants’ behaviour is telling.

Other researchers tell similar stories about the similarities among boys and girls and the ways they respond to faces. In 1968, two researchers called Howard Moss and Kenneth Robson set up an experiment which investigated how much boy and girl infants at one and three months of age looked at their mothers, how much they looked at geometric patterns, and how much they looked at regular and scrambled images of faces.
²³
The study was primarily concerned to test the correlation between maternal anxiety and the behaviour of the infant, so it is coming from a rather different angle. Yet again, unlike Connellan and Baron-Cohen, they found no preference for the geometric over the picture of the face among the boys. It’s particularly striking to note that the amount of time the babies spent gazing at their mothers’ faces was similar for males and for females.

If boys were more drawn to objects than girls are, then it would follow that baby boys would be better than girls at assessing objects’ properties and behaviour. This is where there is even more available research, none of which shows any such differences among infants.
²⁴
Some find that girls were better ‘systemisers’ than boys. For instance, psychologists have found that babies look for longer when shown impossible physical events, such as boxes being suspended in mid-air, than at possible events, such as the box falling, but girls sometimes show this awareness of the difference between certain impossible and possible events at a younger age than boys do.
²⁵
Given this long history of study of boy and girl infants over the years, Elizabeth Spelke has said this with confidence: ‘Hundreds of well-controlled experiments reveal no male advantage for perceiving objects or learning about mechanical systems.’
²⁶
The male and female babies in the three decades of research before Jennifer
Connellan and Simon Baron-Cohen’s experiment have engaged equally with objects and people. When I spoke to Spelke by telephone, she was damning about the way that the one study that did show a difference in the hoped-for direction between male and female babies had been allowed, by the media, to drown out this long history of research on infants’ development. ‘Thirty to forty years of experiments in the field of cognitive development in young children have shown no consistent evidence for cognitive sex differences favouring males. If anything, young girls often seem to outperform boys in tests of early spatial awareness.’

Another popular writer who has promoted the theory that biology lies behind all observable differences between boys and girls is Louann Brizendine, whose book
The Female Brain
was published in 2006, and was covered numerous times in the British press, including extracts, interviews and commentaries in the
Daily Mail, Sunday Times
and
Daily Telegraph
. She believes that in contrast to boys, who have no interest in social interaction, girls are born with an automatic investment in relationships. ‘Baby girls are born interested in emotional expression,’ she writes. ‘They take meaning about themselves from a look, a touch, every reaction from the people they come into contact with…. Little girls do not tolerate flat faces.’
²⁷

There are a series of studies that look directly at how baby girls and baby boys react to flat faces: the ‘still face’ studies. These studies have been carried out on infants between one and twelve months old, over the last thirty years. The classic experiment was simply to watch the interaction of baby and mother, both in a normal responsive interaction and then when the mother remained completely unresponsive, with a flat expressionless face, for three minutes. The baby’s reactions, which seem to range from furious to flirtatious, are then assessed by psychologists, and shed interesting light on how babies seem to long for responsiveness and are deeply disconcerted by the lack of it. The long history of the still-face experiments shows that
people have been wondering for many years whether baby boys and girls are primed to look for different things from the faces around them, and the results show only how impossible it is to get any clear answer. Although Brizendine would like us to believe that girls will not tolerate still faces, in fact similar reactions are observed in boys and girls. Lauren Adamson and Janet Frick, at Georgia University, carried out an overview of all the forty-three still-face studies that had been published from the late 1970s to 2001. They could say only this: ‘Results related to gender effects have run the full gamut from none, to girls displaying more distress than boys, to girls appearing more positive than boys.’
²⁸

Those writers who believe that girls are born with a greater interest in people than boys also often say that from birth you can see easier relationships between baby girls and their carers than between baby boys and their carers. This is now a view that you often hear from parents in everyday life; I have lost count of the number of times that mothers of baby boys have told me that my easy relationship with my baby girl was down to her sex rather than her individual personality. Louann Brizendine sums up this view when she says, ‘This superior brain wiring for communication and emotional tones plays out early in a baby girl’s behaviour … The baby girl is able to resonate more easily with her mother and respond quickly to soothing behaviour, stopping her fussing and crying. Observations made during a study at Harvard Medical School found that baby girls do this better with their mothers than do boys.’
²⁹
But when I went to look at Brizendine’s reference for this statement, which is a study undertaken by Katherine Weinberg and colleagues at Harvard Medical School in 1999 I discovered that the picture these researchers found was more complicated than Brizendine suggested.

The male infants were indeed fussier and crosser, but they were more interested in emotional interactions with their mother than the girls were, who were more interested in their surroundings
and less bothered by what their mother was up to. Although boys showed more negative expressive behaviour than girls, they surprisingly displayed significantly more positive expressions directed to the mother as well. Boys were also more likely than girls to display facial expressions of joy, to look at the mother and to vocalise to the mother. Girls, on the other hand, were more likely than boys to look at and explore objects. As these researchers put it: ‘Boys were more socially oriented than girls. They were more likely than girls to look at their mother … Girls, in comparison with boys, spent substantially more time exploring objects.’
³⁰

When I read or listen to scientists such as these, whose work allows these nuanced pictures to emerge about babies’ behaviour, it feels to me that they are much braver in the way they will accept the complexity of individual responses among infants. As Elizabeth Spelke said to me, ‘I think there is now a tendency to focus on the finding that will reinforce a stereotype rather than the findings that challenge it.’ As anyone who has brought up a baby will attest, the behaviour of infants is not always easy to predict and to summarise; as their individuality emerges they pass through many scudding moments of unexpected responses. Yet there is now a strand of thought that is becoming more and more powerful, which is so keen to fit babies of this generation into pink and blue boxes that it seems afraid to do justice to the full richness of their emerging humanity.