The Delusions of Certainty

by Siri Hustvedt

  We might ask if the small size of the female brain depends exclusively on the small size of her body. Tiedemann has proposed this explanation. But we must not forget that women are, on average, a little less intelligent than men, a difference that we should not exaggerate but which is, nonetheless, real. We are therefore permitted to suppose that the relatively small size of the female brain depends in part upon her physical inferiority and in part upon her intellectual inferiority.135

  In his essay “Women’s Brains,” Stephen Jay Gould commented on Broca’s work in a parenthesis: “I have the greatest respect for Broca’s meticulous procedure. His numbers are sound. But science is an inferential exercise, not a catalog of facts. Numbers, by themselves, specify nothing. All depends upon what you do with them.”136 There’s the rub. Data is one thing. Reading data is another.

  “Of course,” Pinker writes in The Blank Slate, “just because many sex differences are rooted in biology does not mean that one sex is superior, that the differences will emerge for all people in all circumstances, that discrimination against a person based on sex is justified, or that people should be coerced into doing things typical of their sex. But neither are the differences without consequences”137 (my italics). Pinker is careful to adopt a reasonable rhetorical tone. Just because men and women are psychologically different, that difference doesn’t mean one is better or worse. In 1873, Edward H. Clarke, another professor at Harvard whose views had broad influence, wrote a book with the cheery title Sex in Education: A Fair Chance for Girls, in which he too declared that one sex was not superior to the other: “Neither is there any such thing as inferiority or superiority in this matter. Man is not superior to woman, nor woman to man. The relation of the sexes is one of equality, not of better and worse, or of higher and lower,” he wrote. “By this it is not intended to say that the sexes are the same. They are different, widely different from each other.”138 Clarke did not advance the idea that women were intellectually inferior to men.

  Indeed, he believed women could master not only the humanities but mathematics, even at the highest levels, just as well as their male counterparts. However, drawing on evolutionary biology and his medical expertise, he pointed to scientific evidence that girls who engage in heavy intellectual lifting suffer from shrunken uteruses, increased masculinization, sterility, neuralgia, hysteria, and insanity. Some, he insisted, had even died from these exertions. The physician backed up this claim with scientific studies on the subject. Clarke’s book, like Summers’s comments, created a noisy controversy. The question in Clarke’s day, when women were clamoring for entrance to universities, was: Are women biologically unfit for higher education? The question today, when the numbers of women in higher mathematics and physics are low, is: Are women biologically unfit for technology and the sciences?

  A little more than a hundred years after Clarke, Donald Symons, in his book The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979), echoed Clarke and presaged Pinker: “With respect to human sexuality, there is a female human nature and a male human nature and these natures are extraordinarily different.” He, too, is quick to add that he does not mean “a difference between human males and females inevitably indicates that one sex is inferior or defective.”139 I wonder which of the two sexes Symons might be thinking of when he uses the words “inferior” and “defective”? Things change, and they don’t change. Clarke’s ideas appear outrageous today. According to Dr. Clarke’s theory, my voracious consumption of books should have rendered me infertile shortly after I began menstruating. Pinker’s ideas, however, often slide by without comment in the press. His assertion, for example, that the fact that “more men than women have exceptional abilities in mathematical reasoning and in mentally manipulating 3-D objects is enough to explain a departure from a fifty-fifty sex ratio [between the sexes] among engineers, physicists, organic chemists, and professors in some branches of mathematics”140 was not noted in any of the many reviews of The Blank Slate I have read, despite the fact that quite a few of them were critical of the book. Not until Larry Summers restated Pinker’s views on sex difference and the sciences did the U.S. media take notice.

  Media tempests come and go, with Edward Clarke, with Larry Summers, with whomever comes along to raise political temperatures. Outside the United States, few people paid attention to either storm. No doubt, they have had their own uproars. What matters here is that a hard conception of biology and nature and specific forms of evolutionary theories have long promoted truths about psychological sex differences, which are, in fact, not truths. Furthermore, the answer to the problem of sex difference is dependent on perceptual frameworks and paradigms that inevitably skew results in one direction or another. After all, the scientists Clarke mentions must have established correlations between shriveled uteruses, insanity, sterility, and highly educated women. It is hard to believe that every study Clarke mentions was an out-and-out fraud. Data must be interpreted. Science must make inferences, and some interpretations and inferences are more intelligent and subtler than others, as anyone who spends time reading science papers knows. And subtle interpretation is the result of many factors, including the interpreter’s education, biases, and feelings.

  In a 2005 paper in American Psychologist, Janet Shibley Hyde published “The Gender Similarities Hypothesis,” a review of forty-six meta-analyses of studies on sex difference since the 1980s.141 Meta-analysis is a statistical method for bringing together the data of many studies on the same question and coming up with a combined result. Hyde found that, with a few exceptions, sex/gender had either no or a very small effect on psychological qualities. She also found that even statistically significant differences, such as aggression (men had more of it), vanished, depending on context. In one study that involved the dropping of bombs during an interactive video game, researchers found that when men knew they were being monitored, they dropped far more bombs than women. When women thought they were not being watched, they dropped more bombs than men. Is this enduring proof that men and women are equally aggressive? No, but it certainly blurs the problem.

  One can at least fantasize that the women in question, thinking no one could see them, felt freed from their day-to-day suppression of hostile impulses in the name of femininity and were suddenly able to expend a rush of pent-up aggression and indulge in some explosive fun. Hyde also cites several studies in which college students who all had the same background in mathematics were given a test. In one condition, participants were told that the test had shown gender differences in the past, and in the other condition they were told that the test was “gender fair.” Under the first condition, women did worse than men. In the latter condition, men and women performed equally well. The powers of suggestion are not limited to hypnosis or placebo.

  A more recent review of the cognitive sex-difference literature in 2014 by David Miller and Diane Halpern notes that research in the decade 1970–80 found that boys outnumbered girls “13 to 1 among American students with exceptional mathematics talent. However,” they continue, “this tail ratio has dropped to about 2–4 to 1 in recent years.”142 If exceptional mathematical reasoning and manipulating 3-D objects account for the greater numbers of men in engineering, physics, organic chemistry, and “some branches of mathematics” because they are “rooted in biology” (code for “mostly innate”), how could the numbers cited by Miller and Halpern change so dramatically in a few decades? I confess to thinking that the obsessive attention paid to manipulating 3-D objects, also known as mental rotation abilities, one of the very few differences between the sexes that has been consistently documented, begins to look a bit desperate. Furthermore, drawing a direct line between spatial rotation ability and the numbers of women in physics, mathematics, or any other field strikes me as highly suspect.

  Another sexual difference that has been consistently documented and can be found recorded in many textbooks and papers is that girls and women have superior verbal fluency, reading comprehension, and writing skills.143 In contrast, Hyde
found these differences to be minuscule. However, if one applies the same logic used to link spatial rotation to various professions, one would expect women’s greater verbal fluency to catapult them to the top of the literary world. And yet, despite this frequently observed female advantage, literary “genius” is most often applied to the male side of the sexual divide. If the success of male literary lights is not due to their superior language skills, perhaps it is rooted in the fact that they are better at rotating their 3-D characters in mental space, seeing them from every possible angle: hanging from the ceiling, suspended sideways, walking on their hands. The reasoning that animates the argument—inferior spatial rotation skills have a causal relation to the numbers of women in mathematics, physics, etc.—is seriously flawed.

  There have been countless studies on mental rotation abilities and sex. Are men really better than women at turning around a three-dimensional object in their minds, and if they are, what does it mean? It is this finding, along with now outdated evidence that showed boys outnumbered girls 13 to 1 in exceptional mathematical ability, that prop up Pinker’s explanation for why there are more men in the fields of hard science he mentions. The evolutionary argument is that men read space better than women because men were hunters back there on the savanna in days gone by and needed these skills to stalk their prey and aim their deadly weapons. Women, on the other hand, were grubbing for tubers and berries and apparently didn’t need much spatial ability for this low-to-the-ground work, although that claim, too, might be up for consideration. Stephen Jay Gould pointed out years ago that this kind of explanation has the quality of one of Kipling’s Just So stories: Let me tell you how the tiger got his stripes. Let me tell you why women can’t turn around objects in their minds. One day, long ago . . . There are studies that have found links between androgen levels in utero, during puberty, and in adulthood and these rotating spatial abilities.144 Another study concluded that in young people of both sexes, circulating testosterone has no effect on spatial aptitude.145 Still other scientists have found a link between children playing computer games and their spatial abilities.146

  And empirical studies demonstrate that women did worse on 3-D rotation tests if they were told beforehand that men were superior at the task. This dip in female scores reflects “stereotype threat.”147 The term was introduced in studies on racial bias and its effects but was soon extended to sex. There is a study that found that when the test is given, not in two dimensions with a pencil and paper, but in three dimensions in a virtual environment, the sex difference vanished.148 Another confirmed that women did just as well as men during the three-dimensional test, and under both circumstances, a brief training course increased women’s performances to the level of men’s.149

  The titles of some papers will give a flavor of the diversity: “Sex Difference in Parietal Lobe Morphology: Relationship to Mental Rotation Performance,”150 “Playing an Action Video Game Reduces Sex Differences in Spatial Cognition,”151 “Mental Rotation: Effects of Gender, Training, and Sleep Consolidation,”152 and “Nurture Affects Gender Differences in Spatial Abilities.”153 The research is vast, and after reading dozens upon dozens of papers on 3-D spatial rotation, I began to feel the Alice effect.

  “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

  “Oh you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

  “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

  “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”154

  What can one take away from the innumerable investigations into this particular question besides the fact that there is no definitive answer? Perhaps this: a confluence of factors is at work in all “cognitive” human abilities, not least context and suggestion, which include the relations a “subject” in a study has with the persons doing the study. Few scientists would disagree. Disagreements come with emphases and with the stubborn persistence of nature and nurture as oppositional poles even among those who profess to know better.

  I do not think there is any reason to shun sex differences. Many of them—beards, breasts, penises, clitorises, vulvas, voice timbre—are obvious. The question is how much difference do these differences make, and how are we to understand psychological sex differences? Pinker admits that many sex differences have “nothing to do with biology” and “current sex differences” may prove just as ephemeral as dress, hairstyles, or rates of university attendance.155 This is just before he launches into a long list of further evidence of differences he implies run deep in our “biology.” Again, the problem is how to frame the theoretical distinction between biology and culture.

  When I gave birth to my daughter in 1987, I found myself in the throes of an experience unique to women, but even this natural event does not lend itself to sharp divisions of nature and nurture, the biological and the cultural. My age at the time, thirty-two, my desires, my particular history, both conscious and unconscious, the presence of my husband in the room, the frank and serious demeanor of my obstetrician, whom I liked enormously, the woman howling down the hall on the maternity ward as if she were being tortured, the Pitocin—an artificial form of the hormone oxytocin, that turned my labor into one long contraction—cannot be lifted out of my bodily experience of birth or discussed as somehow distinct from it.

  In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir writes, “However, one might say, in the position I adopt—that of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty—that if the body is not a thing, it is a situation; it is our grasp on the world and the outline for our projects.”156 She does not write that the body is always in a situation or context. She argues that it is a situation. This is a dynamic conception of a person as body subject. In science the body is mostly a thing, an object of study to be dissected, measured, and analyzed. It is a thing seen from a third-person point of view. There is nothing wrong with this because interesting discoveries have, will, and must come from this perspective, but subjective realities and differences are necessarily eliminated, and these, too, have something to teach us. If a body is lifted out of its particular world and treated purely as a discrete object, like a dead frog, made up of a host of mechanisms that can be taken apart and put back together, a part of its reality will be lost. The body as situation is removed from the paradigm that animates the innate versus the learned or the nature/nurture binary. It is a way of thinking that doesn’t cut people in half as minds and bodies or even as subjects as opposed to the objects and others around us. It takes a strongly anti-Cartesian position.

  At the same time, the idea that my mind is not my body, that somehow I, the speaker, was witness to the strange contortions of my corporeal self, was particularly strong while I was giving birth. My internal narrator, busy forming sentences in my head, was a commentator on, not a participant in, the proceedings. This reality, too, must be accounted for in the mind-body dilemma. That baby was going to be born whether my internal narrator liked it or not. Then again, my narration of events and my understanding of them cannot be thought of as purely floating psychological phenomena, can they? I wanted that baby, had looked forward to the small person’s arrival impatiently, and, despite the agonies of Pitocin, I pushed her out of me in a paroxysm of joy. But my experience is hardly universal. It was specific to me, to my body as and in a situation. It is easy to change the story and change the experience: the twelve-year-old who gives birth in fear, the woman who was raped and gives birth, or the woman who already has five children, cannot afford another, and gives birth, not to speak of the woman who looks and feels and wants to be pregnant but carries no fetus inside her and will not give birth. What exactly is psychological and biological in these “birth” narratives?

  A Marriage of Minds: Evolutionary Psychology

  The psychology to which Pinker and others subscribe reflects a merger of sociobiology and computational theory of mind, a marriage that is now called evolutionary psychology. The two halves of this union are rather like spouses w
ho don’t appear to have all that much in common but nevertheless seem to get along quite well. Sociobiology asserts that Darwinian natural selection and its adaptations can, in part, explain animal and human behaviors, not a particularly controversial claim in scientific quarters. The book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, by the entomologist E. O. Wilson, made the term “sociobiology” famous and infamous when it was published in 1975. Although most of Wilson’s book was uncontroversial, his last chapter applied his evolutionary ideas of adaption and natural selection to human beings and created a fury of criticism, specifically that Wilson was advocating a dangerous form of biological determinism that resonated with earlier ideas in eugenics used to justify racism, sexism, and various ugly human versions of survival of the fittest. Professor Wilson, however, is not Professor Lynn. Lynn, of the “rutting stags,” describes himself as a eugenicist. Among Wilson’s most vociferous critics was the biologist and geneticist Richard Lewontin, who was profoundly aware of the ideological uses of science and the professional atmosphere that encourages preordained boxes for understanding. Although Wilson nowhere in the book advocated eugenic policies, his arguments do presuppose, as did Galton before him, that what is innately human can be separated from cultural and environmental influences and is the product of naturally selected traits.

  In an article published in the New York Times Magazine the same year the book was published, Wilson wrote, “In hunter-gatherer societies, men hunt and women stay home. This strong bias persists in most agricultural and industrial societies and, on that ground alone, appears to have genetic origin.”157 Actually, women do not “stay home” in hunter-gatherer cultures, something Wilson surely knew. They are out “gathering.” Without the daily labor of women foraging for food, the members of the group would starve because it is generally recognized that hunters do not always return with game. But there is another odd assumption here. Women in both agricultural and industrial societies have been working outside “the home” in droves for centuries. Wilson must have thought the word “women” referred to white middle-class housewives or to Victorian ladies of a certain economic status. Were the countless women working in laundries or in factories or the women out in the fields for centuries all over the world at home? It may be useful to remember that in 1975, second-wave feminism was gaining ground, and there may have been “cultural” reasons for Wilson to wish the ladies would simply shut up and go home.