Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (28 page)

Although there may be small average differences in the intellectual and emotional capabilities of men and women, to express these as truths about all – or even almost all – men and women is nonsense. But in so much of the work done on sex differences
today, instead of a recognition of the true variability of men and women, we are presented simply with stereotypes.

This is partly the fault of some scientists. As Melissa Hines said to me, ruefully: ‘There are a lot of pressures that result in scientists looking for a simple picture. That’s kind of what science is meant to be about; we’re meant to be able to discover some rules that let us predict things, so there’s a tendency to want to simplify things in order to discover rules and predict things, and in most fields that works fine. But it doesn’t work well in fields where people already have stereotypes, because the stereotypes become the rules.’ But this is not really a problem that can be blamed on individual scientists. As we have seen in the last chapter, there is a pervasive tendency in the wider culture to pick up these biological explanations for the differences we see around us without investigation.

This is partly because biological explanations for sex differences are now often assumed to be the freshest ideas, bravely argued against an old guard who have tried to shut down debate. So Simon Baron-Cohen said that he delayed publishing
The Essential Difference
for some years, because ‘the topic was just too politically sensitive’.
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Steven Pinker has also presented himself as the daring breaker of a taboo: ‘At some point in the history of the modern women’s movement, the belief that men and women are psychologically indistinguishable became sacred … The tragedy is that this mentality of taboo needlessly puts a laudable cause on a collision course with the findings of science and the spirit of free inquiry.’
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Journalists often support this idea, that such theories must battle against some taboo. As one American journalist put it recently, ‘We’ll probably never know how great a role biology plays in gender differences, because feminists try to prevent anyone from researching it.’
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However, to an objective observer, it is rather strange that writers can claim that it is difficult to debate this subject openly, when, as the linguist Mark Liberman said in response,
‘Neuroscientists are by no means being prevented from researching the biology of sex differences. It’s hard to think of any topic that has been getting more study recently, at least among questions without direct pharmacological or clinical applications.’
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Even if journalists don’t fall in with the idea that biological explanations have to fight for space against a taboo, these explanations are still often seen as the freshest thinking, in contrast to the outdated political correctness of an old-fashioned establishment. So one writer in the
Daily Mail
said that explanations from biology blow ‘a large hole in the feminist orthodoxy – and the painfully politically correct line – that holds that men and women possess interchangeable emotional, intellectual and psychological traits.’
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Or, we can read in the
Economist
that: ‘Biological explanations of human behaviour are making a comeback as the generation of academics that feared them as a covert way of justifying eugenics, or of thwarting Marxist utopianism, is retiring.’
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It’s odd to see theories of biological determinism being promoted as the freshest thinking on the block, given that these theories have such a long, and not very illustrious history. Ever since the retreat of religion during the Enlightenment, explanations for sexual inequality have been sought in biology. There is nothing new about the idea that masculinity and femininity are not just seen in physical characteristics and the ability to bear children, but also in intellectual and emotional capabilities. Nineteenth-century scientists told women that they should not read serious books because certain brain activities were incompatible with their fertility, and they studied the size and shape of the human brain to explain the inferior intelligence of women. So the president of the British Medical Association told its annual meeting in 1886 that if girls studied too much, ‘Amenorrhoea and chlorosis, and development of great nervousness, are frequent results of overpressure in education at or near the important epoch – fifteen to twenty years of age.’
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While Sir Henry Maudsley, a leading Victorian psychiatrist, said in an influential article in 1874 that a woman ‘does not easily regain the vital energy that was recklessly spent on learning … if a woman attempts to achieve the educational standards of men … she will lack the energy necessary for childbearing and rearing’.
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As Anne Fausto-Sterling documents in her classic book
Myths of Gender
, biological explanations for women’s inferiority have come and gone like fashions in hem length. There was a long period when it was assumed the relatively smaller size of their brains proved that women were less intelligent than men; until people pointed out that in that case, elephants should be more intelligent even than human males. So others argued that intelligence did not rest on a larger brain overall but on the greater development of certain areas of the brain. In the mid-nineteenth century there was a fashion for believing that intelligence was linked to the size of the frontal lobe of the brain. Thus it was noted that men possessed larger frontal lobes than women, and woman was ‘homo parietalis’ after the parietal lobe, which lies towards the back of the head, while man was ‘homo frontalis’. Yet after a while the relevant scientists began to think that the parietal lobe was actually the seat of the intellect, and so executed a deft turnaround. ‘The frontal region is not, as has been supposed, smaller in woman, but rather larger relatively. But the parietal lobe is somewhat smaller.’
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As Fausto-Sterling puts it, when it comes to biological explanations for sex differences: ‘The popular press fanfares each entry with brilliant brass, bright ribbons, and lots of column space, but fails to note when each one in its turn falls into disrepute.’
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Even in the heyday of interest in social conditioning, there were many writers keen to promote the idea that human behaviour is determined as much by biology as by culture. The father of sociobiology, Edward O Wilson, was a key figure in these debates. In the 1970s he made statements such as, ‘The evidence
for a genetic difference in behaviour is varied and substantial. In general, girls are predisposed to be more intimately sociable and less physically venturesome.’
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Such views have flourished ever since in the terrain called sociobiology or evolutionary psychology. However, in the 1970s and 1980s it is fair to say that the critics of sociobiology were heard as much as its followers.

When the controversy over race and IQ, in which some writers argued that certain races were intellectually inferior to others, erupted in the 1990s, the determinist point of view was thoroughly challenged in the mainstream media. What we can see now, however, is that biological explanations for human behaviour are often going unchallenged in the mainstream media. Far from having to plough a lonely furrow through a field characterised by unrelenting political correctness, we have seen in the last chapter how scientists and academics who put forward biological explanations for sex differences are enthusiastically praised and widely published.

The spread of biological determinism through the media during recent years has been linked to the rise of politically conservative views. This makes sense, since those who have lost faith with the possibility of creating egalitarian social change are obviously likely to be attracted by apparently scientific theories that back up their feelings that the unequal status quo is only natural. Researchers at Yale University have shown that American newspapers with a conservative political bent – as assessed by which presidential candidate they supported – use far more biological explanations for gender differences than the liberal newspapers, which use more explanations based on conditioning and expectations.
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Right-wing media in the UK are also keen to publish theories of biological differences. But the spread of these ideas has now gone well beyond obviously conservative realms. In the UK, these ideas are now found frequently in, for instance, the
Guardian
, the
New Statesman
and the BBC, as well as, say, in the
Daily Mail
and the
Financial Times
. These ideas have taken up residence throughout the political spectrum, and are promoted not just by people who would never call themselves feminists, but also by many people who do call themselves feminists, such as Rosie Boycott, who co-founded the feminist magazine
Spare Rib
,
¹³
or Helena Cronin, the Darwinian philosopher who says, ‘in talents men are on average more mathematical, more technically minded, women more verbal; in tastes, men are more interested in things, women in people; in temperaments, men are more competitive, risk-taking, single-minded, status-conscious, women far less so.’
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The problem is that the unquestioning dissemination of such views can itself strengthen the persistence of stereotypes about how men and women should behave in everyday life. To state this is not to suggest that therefore we should shut down discussion of such theories, but it is to argue that we should be careful that the dissenting voices are heard as well. Because the strengthening of such stereotypes matters. There is a growing and fascinating literature on how the performance of individuals in certain fields may be heavily affected by their knowledge of what is expected of the group to which they belong. The effect of what is called ‘stereotype threat’ on the sexes has been revealed in groundbreaking and intriguing psychological research over the last few years.

One of the founding blocks of this research was published in 1999. Three psychologists, Claude Steele, Stephen Spencer and Diane Quinn, got together male and female undergraduates to take a difficult maths test in which women had previously been seen to do worse than equally qualified men. They wanted to find out if women’s underperformance in such maths tests could really be said to be down to innate differences in aptitude, or whether other forces were at work. So they split the men and women into two groups. They told the men and women in one group that when this test had been administered in the past,
there had been clear gender differences in performance. But the other group was told that men and women had performed equally on this test in the past. In the group who had been primed to believe that the sexes were unequal in their attainment, women did worse than the men. In the group told that women and men had performed equally in the past, the sex difference in attainment was eliminated.

This result was striking in and of itself, showing us that attainment in supposedly objective tests may not be a reflection of pure ability. The psychologists went further in the following test, and found that they did not even have to ‘activate’ the stereotype for women to do worse than men. If told nothing about sex differences in attainment on the test, women did worse than men; if they were told that gender differences had never been seen on the test, they performed as well as their male counterparts.
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The fact that the researchers did not even have to activate a stereotype explicitly for it to hold women back from doing as well as they could shows us that stereotype threat may be all around us, not just in maths tests, affecting our behaviour even when we are not consciously aware of it.

Other research has suggested that this is the case. For instance, the moderate male advantage seen in some tests of spatial ability is also seen in everyday life, where certain tasks that rely on spatial awareness – such as parking and navigation – tend to be performed better by men. You can see this in the fact that men on average do better in some aspects of driving tests, and women are 40 per cent more likely to fail their driving test by fluffing their three-point turns than men are. Many writers who discuss this kind of phenomenon assume, in deference to the ideas of biological determinism, that the difference must be produced by hormones. So in one typical report about men’s higher ability in such driving skills in
The Times
, the journalists quoted a psychologist claiming that this is because of higher testosterone exposure in the womb.
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But the very existence of a
stereotype can, it seems, affect some women’s ability to drive well. Dr Courtney von Hippel, from the University of Queensland in Australia, showed that if women given a driving test were told that the test would investigate why women are worse at driving than men, they were twice as likely to have an accident in the test than were women who were not reminded of the stereotype.
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What’s more, there is growing evidence to suggest that this kind of stereotype threat can affect not only our apparent abilities, but also our ambitions. Shelley Correll, a professor of sociology at Stanford University, set up a random ability test in which men could not possibly outperform women – the test consisted of judging the contrasts in black and white patterns, and in fact there were no right and wrong answers. She found how quickly even our aspirations are moulded by the activation of stereotypes about men and women. One group was told that men were better at this task, and the other group was told that men and women tended to do the same. All the subjects were given the same score – 13 out of 20. Yet in the group in which participants were told that men had more ability at this task, the men not only rated their performance more highly than the women did, but were more likely to say they would go into a career in which this kind of ability was required. Correll concluded that she had shown that individuals form their ambitions by assessing their own competence, and that men and women will assess their competence partly by drawing on different cultural beliefs about male and female abilities. Again, it is probably safe to assume that this holds good even outside sociology departments in universities, and that the operation of stereotypes in the wider culture can constrain the choices we make in our real lives.
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