Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (35 page)

10  
Gwyneth Rees,
Fairy Dreams
(London: Macmillan, 2005), p137

11  
Leapfrog leaflet for parents about children’s reading habits, retrieved 18 December 2008 from
http://www.welovetoread.co.uk/PDF/Booklet%20%20whole/Love%20to%20Read%20Booklet.pdf

12  
Mia Kellmer Pringle,
The Needs of Children
(London: Hutchinson Educational, 1974), p16

13  
Playgroup Pamphlet Group,
Out of the Pumpkin Shell: Running a Women’s Liberation Playgroup
(Birmingham Women’s Liberation, 1975), cited by Glenda MacNaughton, ‘Equal opportunities: unsettling myths’, in Tricia David ed,
Promoting Evidence-Based Practice in Early Childhood Education
(Oxford: Elsevier, 2001), p212

14  
Eg in A Elliot, ‘Creating non-sexist daycare environments’,
Australian Journal of Early Childhood
, 9, 2 (1984),18–23; K Aspinwall,
What are Little Girls Made of? What are Little Boys Made of?
(London: National Nursery Nurses Educational Board, 1984); H Cuffaro, ‘Re-evaluating basic premises: curricula free of sexism’,
Young Children
(Sept 1975) 469–78; M Guttenberg and H Bray,
Undoing Sex Stereotypes
(McGraw Hill, 1976), cited in Glenda MacNaughton, op cit, p212

15  
Sally Koblinsky and Alan Sugawara, ‘Nonsexist curricula, sex of teacher and children’s sex-role learning’,
Sex Roles
, 10, 5–6 (1984), pp357–67

16  
Marianne Grabrucker,
There’s A Good Girl: Gender Stereotyping in the First Three Years of Life: A Diary
, tr Wendy Philipson (London: The Women’s Press, 1988)

17  
Marianne Grabrucker, op cit, p93

18  
Burkhard Strassmann, ‘Woher haben Sie das?’,
Die Zeit
, 28 June 2007, tr. Susan Morrissey

19  
Naima Browne,
Gender Equity in the Early Years
(Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2004), p22

20  
Steve Biddulph,
Raising Boys
(London: HarperCollins, 1998), p3

21  
Steve Biddulph, op cit, p4

22  
Anya C Hurlbert and Yazhu Ling, ‘Biological components of sex differences in colour preference’,
Current Biology
, 17, 16 (2007), 623–5

23  
Fiona MacRae, ‘Scientists uncover truth behind “pink for a girl, blue for a boy”’,
Daily Mail
, 20 August 2007

24  
Ben Goldacre, ‘Out of the blue and in the pink’,
Guardian
, 25 August 2007, and retrieved 21 November 2008 with full references and graphs from
http://www.badscience.net/?p=518#more-518

25  
Jo Paoletti, ‘Gendering of infants and toddlers’ clothing in America’, in
The Material Culture of Gender: The Gender of Material Culture
, Katharine Martinez and Kenneth L Ames eds (Delaware: Henry Francis du Pont Wintherthur, 1997), p32

26  
‘A Mother’,
Time
, 24 October 1927, Retrieved 10 October 2008 from
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,736917,00.html?promoid=googlep

27  
See also: Jo Paoletti and Carol Kregloh, ‘The children’s department’, in Claudia Brush Kidwell and Valerie Steele eds,
Men and Women: Dressing the Part
(Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989); Jo Paoletti ‘Clothing and gender in America: Children’s fashions 1890–1920’,
Signs
, 13, 1 (Autumn 1987), 136–43.

28  
Simon Baron-Cohen,
The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain
(London: Allen Lane, 2003), pp53–4

29  
Simon Baron-Cohen, op cit, p105

30  
Simon Baron-Cohen, op cit, p1

31  
Steven Pinker,
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
(London: Allen Lane, 2002)

32  
Louann Brizendine,
The Female Brain
(London: Transworld, 2006)

33  
Susan Pinker,
The Sexual Paradox
(London: Atlantic, 2008)

34  
John Gray,
Why Mars and Venus Collide
(London: Harper Element, 2008), p90

35  
Tracey Shors, ‘The mismeasure of woman’,
Economist
, 3 August 2006

36  
Rosie Boycott, ‘Why women don’t want top jobs, by a feminist’,
Daily Mail
, 22 April 2008

8: Myths

  
1  
Lawrence H Summers, Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce, 14 January 2005, retrieved 10 October 2008 from
http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html

  
2  
Christopher Caldwell, ‘The battle lines at Harvard’,
Financial Times
, 25 February 2005

  
3  
Christopher Caldwell, ‘Taboos that undid Summers’,
Financial Times
, 24 February 2006

  
4  
Andrew Sullivan, ‘The truth about men and women is too hot to handle’,
Sunday Times
, 23 January 2005

  
5  
Sarah Baxter, ‘Harvard’s head hit by new war of non-PC words’,
Sunday Times
, 20 February 2005

  
6  
Alan Dershowitz, ‘After Larry, who dares speak out?’,
Sunday Times
, 27 February 2005

  
7  
Margaret Talbot, ‘The baby lab: how Elizabeth Spelke peers into the infant mind’,
New Yorker
, 4 September 2006

  
8  
The entire debate between Pinker and Spelke can be read online; retrieved 10 October 2008 from
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html

  
9  
George F Will, ‘Harvard hysterics’,
Washington Post
, 27 January 2005

10  
Deborah Cameron,
The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do men and women really speak different languages?
(Oxford University Press, 2007)

11  
Melissa Hines,
Brain Gender
(Oxford University Press, 2004)

12  
Jennifer Connellan, Simon Baron-Cohen, Sally Wheelwright, Anna Batki and Jag Ahluwalia, ‘Sex differences in human neonatal social perception’,
Infant Behaviour and Development
, 23, 1 (January 2000), pp113–18

13  
Simon Baron-Cohen,
The Essential Difference
, op cit, p58

14  
Simon Baron-Cohen, ‘The male condition’,
New York Times
, 8 August 2005; ‘They just can’t help it’,
Guardian
, 17 April 2003

15  
‘Time out with Nick Cohen’,
New Statesman
, 26 February 2007

16  
Helena Cronin, ‘The vital statistics’,
Guardian
, 12 March 2005

17  
Susan Pinker,
The Sexual Paradox
, op cit, p104

18  
Elizabeth Spelke, ‘Sex differences in intrinsic aptitude for mathematics and science? A critical review’,
American Psychologist
, 60, 9 (December 2005), 950–8

19  
Elizabeth Spelke, ibid, p951

20  
Jerome Kagan, Barbara A Henker, Amy Hen-Tov, Janet Levine, Michael Lewis, ‘Infants’ differential reactions to familiar and distorted faces’,
Child Development
, 37, 3 (Sep 1966), 519–32. See also: Peggy Koopman and Elinor Ames, ‘Infants’ preferences for facial arrangements, a failure to replicate’,
Child Development
, 39, 2 (June 1968), 481–7, which suggests that there is no preference among two-and-a-half-month-old infants for regular as opposed to scrambled faces.

21  
Jennifer Connellan et al, op cit, p116

22  
Jerome Kagan et al, op cit, p520

23  
H A Moss and K S Robson, ‘Maternal influences in early social visual behaviour’,
Child Development
, 39, 2 (June 1968), 401–8

24  
Renée Baillargeon, ‘Infants’ reasoning about hidden objects: evidence for event-general and event-specific expectations’,
Developmental Science
, 7 (2004), 391–424; Hespos and Spelke, ‘Precursors to spatial language’,
Nature
, 430 (2004), 453–6; Quinn and Eimas, ‘Perceptual organization
and categorisation in young infants’, in Rovee-Collier and Lipsitt eds,
Advances in Infancy Research
(Norwoord NJ, 1996), pp1–36, all cited by Elizabeth Spelke, ‘Sex differences in intrinsic aptitude for mathematics and science? A critical review’,
American Psychologist
, 60, 9 (2005), 950–8

25  
As one study found, ‘Female infants looked reliably longer at the impossible than at the possible event suggesting that they … expected the box to fall in the impossible event and were surprised that it did not … In contrast with the female infants, the male infants … tended to look equally at the impossible and possible events …’ Renée Baillargeon, Laura Kotovsky, and Amy Needham, ‘The acquisition of physical knowledge in infancy’, in
Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate
(Oxford University Press, 1995), pp84–5

26  
Elizabeth Spelke’s response to ‘The assortative mating theory’, a talk with Simon Baron-Cohen, retrieved 10 February 2008 from
www.edge.org/3rd_culture/baron-cohen05/baron-cohen05_index.html

27  
Louann Brizendine,
The Female Brain
, op cit, p15

28  
Lauren Adamson and Janet Frick, ‘The still face: a history of a shared experimental paradigm’,
Infancy
, 4, 4 (2003), 451–73, p465

29  
Louann Brizendine,
The Female Brain
, op cit, p18

30  
Katherine Weinberg, Edward Tronick, Jeffrey Cohn, Karen Olson, ‘Gender differences in emotional expressivity and self-regulation during early infancy’,
Developmental Psychology
, 35, 1 (1999), 175–88, p185. Weinberg and her colleagues used other studies to suggest that: ‘Mothers and sons more carefully tracked each other’s behaviour and facial expressions than mothers and daughters’ (p185). And these researchers do not necessarily put any differences they see down to biology alone: ‘It remains unclear whether the gender differences in self-regulation and expressivity observed in this study are attributable to biological factors or socialisation forces or, as is most likely, a combination of these factors.’ (p186)

31  
Richard and Judy
, Channel 4, 1 October 2002, description by Ian Jones retrieved 30 October 2008 from
http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/reviews/2002/richardandjudy.htm

32  
John Gray,
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus
((1992), London: HarperCollins, 2002), p31

33  
Fiona MacRae, ‘Women talk three times as much as men, says study’,
Daily Mail
, 28 November 2006

34  
Louann Brizendine,
The Female Brain
, op cit, p36

35  
Brizendine cited
Talk Language: How to Use Conversation for Profit and Pleasure
by Allan Pease and Alan Garner, 1991. Allan Pease’s views about biological determinism can be understood from the title of his most successful book –
Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps

36  
Mark Liberman, ‘Sex on the Brain’,
Boston Globe
, 24 September 2006

37  
Matthias R Mehl, Simine Vazire, Nairán Ramírez-Esparza, Richard B Slatcher, James W Pennebaker, ‘Are women really more talkative than men?’,
Science
, 317, 5834 (6 July 2007), 82. Mehl said that he hoped the
research would lead to a fresh, less hidebound way of thinking about the ways men and women behave. He said, ‘The stereotype puts unfortunate constraints on men and women – the idea that you can only happily be a woman if you’re talkative and you can only be happy as a man if you’re reticent. The study relieves those gender constraints.’ Richard Knox, ‘Study: men talk just as much as women’, NPR, 5 July 2007, retrieved 24 October 2008 from
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11762186

38  
Mark Liberman, ‘Sex and speaking rate’, Language Log, 7 August 2006, retrieved 10 October 2008 from
http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/003423.html

39  
Girls’ Schools Association website, ‘Answers to frequently asked questions’, retrieved 13 October 2008 from
http://www.gsa.uk.com/default.aspx?id=135

40  
Supernanny advice on discipline for boys and girls, retrieved 30 October 2008 from
http://www.supernanny.co.uk/Advice/-/Parenting-Skills/-/Discipline-and-Reward/ Boy-oh-boy-or-girl-oh-girl-~-different-ways-of-teaching-discipline.aspx

41  
Janet Shibley Hyde and Nita McKinley, ‘Gender differences in cognition: results from meta-analyses’, in Paula Caplan, Mary Crawford, Janet Shibley Hyde, John T E Richardson eds,
Gender Differences in Human Cognition
(Oxford University Press, 1997), 30–51; see also Janet Shibley Hyde, ‘The gender similarities hypothesis’,
American Psychologist
60, 6 (September 2005) 581–592

42  
See also Robert Plomin and Terry T Foch, ‘Sex differences and individual differences’,
Child Development
, 52, 1 (March 1981), 383–5

43  
Stephen Moss, ‘Do women really talk more?’,
Guardian
, 27 November 2006

44  
Deborah Tannen,
You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation
(London: Virago, 1991), pp24–5

45  
Simon Baron-Cohen,
The Essential Difference
, op cit, p62

46  
How male or female is your brain?, retrieved 2 November 2008 from
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/news/page/0,12983,937443,00.html;
questionnaire retrieved 2 November 2008 from
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/table/0,,937442,00.html

47  
The Sex ID test, retrieved 2 November 2008 from
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sex/index_cookie.shtml