Delusions of Gender

by Cordelia Fine

  Recently, Christine Logel and her colleagues found evidence that the mind struggles to suppress the negative stereotype-based thoughts activated by the situation.21 She found that women interrupted just as they began a challenging maths test were actually slower than men to respond to words like illogical, intuitive and irrational. This was a sign that worried thoughts about being femininely illogical, intuitive, and irrational were being suppressed. A quirk of suppressed thoughts is that, afterwards, they become hyperaccessible. Sure enough, women tested immediately after the test was over were especially fast at responding to the stereotypical words. (By contrast, no such turmoil appeared to be taking place in the minds of the men.) Although you might think that suppressing negative stereotypical thoughts would help women, it doesn’t. Logel found that the more women suppressed irrational-woman concepts, the worse they performed. The reason for this seems to be because suppressing unwanted thoughts and anxieties uses up mental resources that could be put to better use elsewhere. To perform well in a demanding mental task you have to remain focused. This involves keeping accessible the information you need for your computations, as well as keeping out of consciousness anything that is irrelevant or distracting. This mental housekeeping is the duty of what is known as working memory or executive control. Most people facing a difficult and important intellectual challenge are likely to have a few intrusive self-doubts and anxieties. But as we’ve seen, people performing under stereotype threat have more. This places an extra load on working memory – to the detriment of the cognitive feat you are trying to achieve.22 Women (and others) under stereotype threat may also try to control the anxious emotions that accompany their negative thoughts, which, unfortunately, can further deplete working memory resources.23

  As you will begin to appreciate, a mind that is struggling with negative stereotypes and anxious thoughts is not in a psychologically optimal state for doing taxing intellectual tasks. And it’s important to bear in mind that these jittery, self-defeating mechanisms are not characteristic of the female mind – they’re characteristic of the mind under threat. Similar effects have been seen in other social groups put under stereotype threat (including white men).24 And when researchers make the test-taking situation less threatening to women – that is, attempt to create for them the kind of situation in which men usually take maths tests – they don’t see these negative effects on working memory and performance.25

  In addition to clogging up working memory, stereotype threat can also handicap the mind with a failure-prevention mindset. The mind turns from a focus on seeking success (being bold and creative) to a focus on avoiding failure, which involves being cautious, careful, and conservative (referred to as promotion focus and prevention focus, respectively). For example, when men and women took a task described either as measuring the ‘verbal skills of men and women’ or simply measuring ‘verbal abilities’ the men changed their approach to the task depending on how the task was framed, that is, whether they were working under the threat of reinforcing the stereotype of male verbal inferiority.26 Under stereotype threat, they tried harder to avoid doing badly (as opposed to trying to do well); they were slower and made fewer errors. The same researchers also showed the benefits for thinking of being positively, rather than negatively, stereotyped on a task. In the brick task, the participants have to think up as many creative uses for a brick as they can. Answers are rated for creativity, from original answers such as ‘to show that I am just another brick in the wall’ to distinctly less creative ones like ‘to build a house’. Students told that people from their discipline tend to do very well on this task got significantly higher creativity ratings than students given the opposite stereotype about their discipline. It’s not hard to see what a boost it could be in the real world, for prevailing cultural beliefs to push you towards a more open, imaginative, thinking style. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell compares two very high-IQ students’ responses on the brick test. One student offered several creative examples (such as ‘To use in smash-and-grab raids’). The other student, despite having an extraordinarily high IQ, came up with only two mundane ideas: ‘Building things, throwing.’ Gladwell rhetorically asks, ‘Now which of these two students do you think is better suited to do the kind of brilliant, imaginative work that wins Nobel Prizes?’27

  With horrible irony, the harder women try to succeed in quantitative domains, the greater the mental obstacles become, for several reasons. Stereotype threat hits hardest those who actually care about their maths skills and how they do on tests, and thus have the most to lose by doing badly, compared with women who don’t much identify with maths.28 Also, the more difficult and nonroutine the work, the more vulnerable its performance will be to the sapping of working memory, and possibly the switch to a more cautious problem-solving strategy.29 There is also the problem that, as she proceeds up the career ladder, the mathematically minded woman will become increasingly outnumbered by men. In the United States, by 2001 women were earning about half of bachelor’s degrees in mathematics, but only 29 percent of PhDs, and their numbers continue to diminish the further up the ladder you get.30 This can compound her problem in more than one way. Her sex will become more and more salient, which in itself can trigger stereotype threat processes. One study even found that the more men there are taking a maths test in the same room as a solo woman, the lower women’s performance becomes.31 And, surrounded by men, she herself may come to grudgingly believe that women are indeed naturally inferior in maths – and women who endorse gender stereotypes about maths seem to be especially vulnerable to stereotype threat.32

  But even in the absence of conscious endorsement of the stereotype, the maths-equals-male link will become ever more entrenched in her mind. With yet more dreadful irony, it may be women who are the most dedicated to maths who have the strongest maths-equals-male implicit associations. Amy Kiefer and Denise Sekaquaptewa at the University of Michigan used the Implicit Association Test described earlier to see how strongly female college students implicitly associated maths with males. Overall, the women were quicker to pair words like calculate, compute, and maths with male words (like he, him, and male) than with female words. Interestingly though, the harder the maths class a woman had most recently taken, the stronger her maths-equals-male tendency. The researchers suggest that this is because harder classes are more male dominated, and so the link between maths and male gets reinforced in the mind. Unfortunately, women with especially strong maths-equals-male implicit associations seem to be at risk of being in a state of perpetual stereotype threat. Students with lower levels of implicit maths-equals-male associations showed the usual boost in performance when a hard maths test was presented in a nonthreatening way. But for women with very strong maths-equals-male associations, the dispersal of stereotype threat in the situation didn’t help. The researchers suggest that this is because the stereotype is so firmly entrenched in the mind that it is resistant to alleviation.33

  As our mathematical woman moves up the ranks, she will also progressively lose one very effective protection against stereotype threat: a female role model to look up to. People’s self-evaluations, aspirations and performance are all enhanced by encountering the success of similar role models – and the more similar, the better.34 In line with this, it’s been found that the presence – real or symbolic – of a woman who excels in maths somehow serves to alleviate stereotype threat.35 But of course the higher up the ladder a woman climbs, the harder she will have to look to find someone successful above her – either contemporary or historical – who is like her.

  Finally, some intriguing research now hints that negative stereotypes about women may be particularly harmful to precisely the sort of woman who is disposed to struggle hardest to climb the career ladder. Some researchers speculate that higher testosterone levels are associated with a drive to gain and maintain status, in both men and women. Robert Josephs and his colleagues have been exploring the idea that high-T (high-testosterone, relative to others of the same se
x) men and women are cognitively at their best when they are in situations that fit their testosterone-based drive to attain and maintain high status. By contrast, low status, or a threat to status, creates a mismatch for the high-T individual that has detrimental cognitive effects. (The basic theory behind this idea is that while the cognitive, emotional, and physiological reactions of the high-T person to a loss of status may be unproblematic when status can be restored by way of a fistfight, they are less helpful when status must be gained through a clever move of the bishop on the chessboard, a brilliant closing argument in court, or a publication in Nature.) In line with this idea, Josephs and his team found that high-T men and women, when put in a low-status position in the lab, underperformed on cognitive tests like the analytic and quantitative portions of the GRE and mental rotation.36 By contrast, high testosterone works to their advantage when the situation yields an opportunity to enhance status. Josephs and colleagues found that high- and low-T men given a maths test described as identifying weak maths ability performed equivalently. But when the same test supposedly identified exceptional talent, the high-testosterone men rose to the challenge to enhance their maths status, and outperformed both the low-T and the other high-T men given the ‘weak’ maths test.

  Although it may seem strange to think of women as being high T, it’s important to bear in mind that when researchers measure testosterone levels in the saliva they are not directly indexing the amount of testosterone acting on the brain. All sorts of other factors are important, such as the number of receptors for that hormone in the brain, the sensitivity of those receptors, and the amount of bound versus free hormone in the blood (only free hormone molecules can bind to receptors).37 It’s even been suggested that women are more sensitive, neurally, to testosterone, or changes in its levels.38 ‘These complications raise the question of how we would measure the effective concentration of a sex hormone’, points out University of New England neurobiologist Lesley Rogers.39

  In any case, the interaction between testosterone level and status, and its effect on cognitive performance, seems to apply to women and men alike. But gender stereotypes add an extra layer of complexity to the situation. As Josephs and his colleagues point out, ‘through its hierarchical ordering of two or more groups, a stereotype is essentially a statement about dominance or status.’ 40 When the stereotype of women’s inferiority in maths is made salient, a woman doing a maths test is at risk of confirming her lower status in the hierarchy of numeracy. Josephs and his colleagues predicted that because women with high testosterone are more concerned with their status, they will be particularly vulnerable to stereotype threat. In line with this, Josephs and his colleagues found that stereotype threat only impaired the performance of high-, but not low-, testosterone women. What does this imply for the world beyond the laboratory? It suggests that a talented, high-testosterone man is perfectly placed to rise to the challenge of opportunities that can enhance his status. Yet the situation is completely different for the equally talented high-T woman. Negative stereotypes about her group’s ability create a cognition-impairing mismatch between her desire for high status and the low status that the stereotype ascribes to her. She’s dancing backwards in high heels.

  Imagine, just for a moment, that we could reverse the gender imbalance in maths and the maths-intensive sciences with a snap of our fingers, fill people’s minds with assumptions and associations linking maths with natural female superiority, and then raise a generation of children in this topsy-turvy environment. Now it is males whose confidence is rattled, whose working memory resources are strained, whose mental strategies become nitpicky and defensive, and who look in vain for someone similar to inspire them. It’s the boys in the classroom, not the girls, in whom researchers discover evidence that stereotype threat is already at work.41 It is women who can now concentrate on the task with ease, whose alleged superiority brings creativity and boldness to their approach, who need only glance around the corridors of the department, the keynote speaker lineup, or the history books to see someone whose successes can seep into the very fabric of their own minds. What, we have to ask ourselves, would happen? Would male ‘inherent’ superiority reassert itself, would we quickly settle into some kind of equality, or – is it possible? – would the invisible hand of stereotype threat maintain the new status quo for decades to come?

  The point of this armchair experiment is not to try to deny the many other factors that, no doubt, contribute in complex ways to gender inequality in scientific domains. But this body of research reminds us, again, that everything we do – be it maths, chess, child care, or driving – we do with a mind that is exquisitely sensitive to the social environment around it. Social psychologist Brian Nosek and his colleagues recently collected more than 500,000 scores from around the world on the gender-science Implicit Association Test (which measures how much easier it is to pair masculine words with science words and feminine words with liberal arts words, relative to the opposite female-science/male-arts pairing). They then compared this with data from the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) that measured maths and science achievement in eighth graders in thirty-four countries. Intriguingly, they found that across countries, over and above the effect of consciously reported stereotypes, the more strongly males are implicitly associated with science and females with liberal arts, the greater boys’ advantage in science and maths in the eighth grade. (In some countries, it’s worth saying, girls outscore boys.) Pointing out that ‘social realities … shape minds’, the researchers suggest that implicit gender stereotypes and the gender gap in science and maths achievement may be ‘mutually reinforcing’ – each feeding the other.42

  The scalp serves as no barrier at all to the psychologically draining or boosting effects of pervasive cultural beliefs. And, as we’ll see in the next chapter, social clues as to who belongs where also travel easily from environment to mind.

  In the opening of her book Brain Gender, Cambridge University psychobiologist Melissa Hines dryly reports on the experience of being, in 1969, a member of the first freshman class at Princeton University to include women. Having been assigned by the university to what was described as a ‘two-man room’, she was allocated to a precept leader who ‘called me Mr Hines for several weeks, apparently before realising that I was not male.’1 A similar confusion over sex identity surrounded Sally Haslanger, now a philosophy professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When she received a distinction in her graduate exams, ‘it seemed funny to everyone to suggest I should get a blood test to determine if I was really a woman.’2

  Mary Beard, a classics professor at Cambridge University, recalls the Roman epigraphy classes she took as an undergraduate in the 1970s, ‘where her tutor would pose “clever questions for the clever men and domestic questions for the dumb girls”.’3 At least there were questions for the ‘girls’. Mary Mullarkey, who eventually became Chief Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, was one of the few women to be enrolled at Harvard Law School in 1965. Although it had been fifteen years since the decision to admit women, she describes the change as still being, to many, ‘a raw wound’. Mullarkey and her friend Pamela (Burgy) Minzer (destined to become Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court), waited in vain to be called upon in their property class. Asking a woman to answer a question about law was an event considered by the professor of the class best limited to ‘Ladies’ Day’. The topic for that day, when it finally arrived, was marital gifts:

  Leaning over, [Professor] Casner said to me, ‘Miss Mullarkey, if you were engaged – and I notice you’re not’ – he paused for laughter – ‘would you have to return the ring if you broke the engagement?’ That was the sole question asked of me in a full-year property class.4

  Nor, Mullarkey and Burgy found, was a degree from Harvard Law School the same ticket to successful employment that it was for their male counterparts. Even though the federal Civil Rights Act, passed in 1964, prohibited employment discrimination based
on gender, strangely, the law firms seemed unaware of the legal situation. ‘It was commonplace for a law firm recruiter to tell a woman to her face that, although he would be willing to hire her, his senior partners or the firm’s clients would never agree to have a female lawyer’, Mullarkey recalls.5

  It doesn’t require any special sociological training to read the barely veiled message being communicated to these talented and ambitious women: You don’t belong here. We tend to think of this sort of outright sex discrimination as being a thing of the past in Western, industrialised nations. The Sexual Paradox author Susan Pinker, for instance, writes of barriers to women as having been ‘stripped away’.6 Her book is peopled with women who, when asked if they’ve ever experienced ill-treatment because of their sex, scratch their heads and search the memory banks in vain for some anecdote that will show how they have had to struggle against the odds stacked against women. As we’ll see in a later chapter, blatant, intentional discrimination against women is far from being something merely to be read about in history books. But here we’re going to look at the subtle, off-putting, you don’t belong messages that churn about in the privacy of one’s own mind.

  As we learned in the previous chapter, women who are invested in masculine domains often have to perform in the unpleasant and unrewarding atmosphere created by stereotype threat. Anxiety, depletion of working memory, lowered expectations, and frustration can all ensue. But there is a solution, albeit a rather radical one. As Claude Steele observed, ‘women may reduce their stereotype threat substantially by moving across the hall from math to English class’.7 Stereotype threat can do more than impair performance – it can also reduce interest in cross-gender activities.