Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (26 page)

For instance, a Canadian psychologist, Jo-Anne Finegan, measured testosterone in amniotic fluid and outcomes in children at the age of four years. She found that for the girls in the study, the more testosterone they were exposed to, the worse they were at counting and sorting, number questions, and block building. That result is in the opposite direction to the one you would expect if you assumed a link between testosterone and systemising skills. She also found that there was a relationship between higher levels of testosterone in girls and higher language comprehension, which was also against the direction predicted. For the boys in the study, no relationships were found.
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When four Dutch psychologists set out to test whether higher prenatal testosterone was associated with more masculine play behaviour in toddlers, they found no significant relationship between maternal sex-hormone levels and masculine or feminine play behaviour in either boys or girls. The only correlation those psychologists found was between progesterone and masculine play for boys, which was hardly predicted.
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There is much other evidence on the record that shows how the predicted relationships between testosterone and masculinity have been hard to find.
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When I looked through the studies that fall on one side and those that fall on the other I could not judge which of them were right, as obviously I am not qualified to do
that, but I could see, very clearly indeed, that the consensus some commentators assume is there does not, in fact, exist. Where consensus does exist in the academy about testosterone, it often works against the traditional narrative. One of the links that is always made most strongly in the popular imagination is, of course, the link between testosterone and aggression. The reason why women are so much more cooperative and gentler than men, it is thought, is simply because they don’t get the necessary injection of testosterone. In animals, the relationship is very clear. Melissa Hines, who started her career more than thirty years ago by looking at aggression and the correlation with testosterone, laughs when she says how simple it is in rats. ‘If you give rats more testosterone they become more aggressive; take it away and they become less aggressive. But in humans? People have been trying to find the same pattern in humans for years. But it’s much, much harder to find. We do have to ask if it’s really there.’

What we may think is evidence of the effects of testosterone may in fact be evidence of the effects of social expectations. Take this famous Californian experiment as an example. It was a double-blind experiment – an experiment in which neither the subjects nor the administrators know who is receiving the real drug – in which forty-three healthy men were given either a high dose of testosterone or a placebo for ten weeks. Those who received testosterone, but did not know it, did not experience increased anger, according to self-reports, and ratings by observers including parents and spouses suggested no changes in angry or aggressive moods or behaviour. On the other hand, in a second study those men given a placebo and told it was testosterone did report greater anger, irritation and impulsivity. This shows that when we are talking about what we think are the results of men’s higher testosterone we may be talking about something else altogether.
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Our belief that there must be a direct, one-way link between
hormones and typically masculine behaviour may blind us to the part that social expectations play in keeping women and men within stereotyped roles. I was very taken by the description of one intriguing study, which seemed to dramatise the way that women mask their own aggressiveness – even from themselves. Two Princeton psychologists asked eighty-four men and women to play a video game in which they would be bombed by an opponent and then would have the chance to bomb that opponent. Half the study participants were told that their identities were known to the researchers; the other half were told they were anonymous. What was so interesting was that women became as aggressive as men when they thought they were anonymous, but held back when they thought they were being watched. What’s more, when, after the game, participants were asked to describe their own aggressiveness and the number of bombs they dropped, the men accurately described themselves as aggressive. But the women reported that they had behaved less aggressively than they really had. The failure of women’s self-reports to reflect their own high levels of aggression in the anonymous condition was striking, given the evidence that they were at least as aggressive as males. The researchers concluded, ‘We consider the findings to be evidence that people do not accurately perceive their own behaviour, but instead assume it to be in accordance with established norms and expectations.’
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Such research alerts us to the possibility that even though we are so eager to look for biological reasons behind masculine and feminine behaviour, other factors could be equally, if not more, important.

E: Brains

Alongside the theory that the differences in feminine and masculine behaviour are produced by the action of certain
hormones, is the theory that the proof that we are destined for such different roles can be seen in physical differences in men’s and women’s brains. This theory has really taken off in this generation, since recently developed techniques such as positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging make it possible to look into the workings of the living brain, and these techniques have spawned much research that shows differences between male and female brains. Month after month, broadcast media and broadsheet and tabloid newspapers make excited statements such as: ‘Do men really listen with just half a brain? Research sheds some light’
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or ‘Men may as well be from Mars and women from Venus for all the sexes have in common emotionally; brain scans showed major differences in the ways in which men and women responded to emotional stimuli.’
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One of the most commonly expressed ideas about men’s and women’s brains is that women use the left brain more, and men use the right brain more, and that the right hemisphere processes space and systems while the left processes words and emotions. As one commentator in
The Times
put it when writing about her sons, ‘With their greater muscle bulk and
right-brain development
, they are less likely to sit around threading beads, making subtle, nuanced,
left-brainy
conversation [my italics].’
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Neuroscientists over the years have examined whether this difference can be seen in a physically larger right hemisphere in men’s brains. And much of the media have now assumed that this is the case, so a recent study of the relative sizes of brain hemispheres among gay and straight men and women was reported as though there was a simple consensus that straight men’s brains show greater rightward asymmetry. ‘Scans reveal homosexual men and heterosexual women have symmetrical brains, with the right and left hemispheres almost exactly the same size. Conversely, lesbians and straight men have asymmetrical brains, with the right hemisphere significantly larger than
the left,’ was how this study was reported in the
Guardian
in a huge and lavishly illustrated article.
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Funnily enough, there is dissent even about the basic proposition that rightward asymmetry exists in the physical structure of the male brain. When the results of this particular study were scrutinised by Mark Liberman, he found that not only was the sample studied extremely small, there was also a great overlap between the men and the women.
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Other studies, what’s more, have found different patterns. While some studies of the human brain have found that ‘cerebral volume for males was larger on the right than on the left’,
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others have found that ‘leftward asymmetry was more pronounced’ in males,
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or that ‘males exhibited a leftward and females a rightward asymmetry for grey matter and females exhibited greater rightward asymmetry than males for total matter’,
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or that ‘In human male foetuses a larger right hemisphere volume has been identified, but so far no equivalent pattern has been reported in adults.’
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This is one example of the current gap between what is seen as a consensus about men’s and women’s brains, and the range of evidence that actually exists. Although so many differences between the male and female brain have been found in recent research, many of these findings have come under intense questioning, either for their reliability or for their significance. The reality is that there is no proof that femininity is laid down for women in the structure of their brains. Another example of the gap between a purported consensus and the range of evidence which I found very intriguing is the debate about the size of the corpus callosum, which is the area of the brain that contains millions of nerve fibres connecting the two hemispheres. The fashionable idea is that this area is bigger in women than in men. This idea first gained prominence in 1982, when an article was published in
Science
which claimed to be the first report of a reliable sex difference in the arrangement of the human brain, noting that the
splenium of the corpus callosum was larger and more bulbous in women’s brains.
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Since then, it has been constantly repeated that this larger corpus callosum is linked to women’s greater empathy, or intuition, or ability to multi-task. One American journalist wrote in 2005: ‘Women’s brains have a larger corpus callosum – the connective tissue between the right and left sides of the brain – whose job it is to transfer data back and forth. Consequently, women integrate incoming data faster than men do. Women’s intuitive “sixth sense” about when the baby in the nursery is going to start squawking, or the boss is about to blow a gasket, or what someone else’s response will be before it’s stated probably has its origins not in the netherworld, but right there in the highly active corpus callosum of the female brain.’
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This journalist was along the same lines as the scientific writers who lean towards biological determinism. As Susan Pinker puts it: ‘Previous studies had shown that women have a thicker corpus callosum, the bundle of nerves that connects the two hemispheres … Scientists infer that this allows women to process emotions with dispatch.’
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,
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This theme has also filtered into self-help books in a highly exaggerated way, as we see in John Gray’s
Why Mars and Venus Collide:
‘A woman’s brain has a larger corpus callosum, the bundle of nerves that connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain. This link, which produces cross-talk between the hemispheres, is 25 per cent smaller in men.’
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,
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Yet there is no solid evidence for these sweeping claims. That first article in 1982 which found that the corpus callosum is larger in women was followed by many more studies, some of which backed it up, and some of which found the opposite. In 1997 two scientists conducted a thorough review of the forty-nine studies of the subject that were published between 1982 and 1994. These scientists, Katherine Bishop and Douglas Wahlsten, had already noted the poor methodology
and shaky conclusions of the famous 1982 study, noting that this article did not meet ‘conventional scientific standards’ for demonstrating a sex difference in the size of the splenium of the corpus callosum. They were concerned to see that it had been so uncritically taken up and promoted by the popular press as the source of supposed sex differences in cognition. It was because of the stark contrast, as they saw it, between opinion among popular writers and opinion among most neuroscientists, that they undertook their review, and their results were conclusive. ‘Our review of a substantial literature on the human corpus callosum does not support any sex-related difference in the size or shape of the splenium, whether or not adjustments are made for whole brain or cortex size.’
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The gulf between the evidence that is available and the way the story has been generally told clearly yawns widely here, but the corpus callosum is hardly the only area in which one can see this gulf. The popular view of the differences between men’s and women’s brains is that women’s brains are not only more symmetrical in structure, but that they also work in a more balanced way than men’s brains when processing certain tasks, particularly those to do with language.
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This is then tied into the stereotype of feminine superiority in language skills. Some research by neuroscientists has backed up this point of view; for instance, in 2000, men and women were asked to lie down in a room and listen to a John Grisham story being read. The men showed more activity on their left side, the women showed activity spread across their brains.
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The BBC chose to put it in this way: ‘Why men don’t listen: there may be a ring of truth in the female complaint that men never seem to listen to a word they say.’
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The
Daily Mail
stated: ‘It’s the news Sybil Fawlty knew all along. New research suggests men really do listen with only half their brains. In a study of men and women, brain scans showed that, when listening, men mostly used the left sides of their brains, the region long associated
with understanding language. Women in the study, however, used both sides.’
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