Delusions of Gender

by Cordelia Fine

  However, we should not throw up our hands in defeat too quickly. Gender Equality 2.0 justifies a status quo in which politics, wealth, science, technology and artistic achievement continue to lie primarily in the hands of (white) men. This is not by any means to denigrate the importance and value of the work women traditionally do, or feminine qualities of character. But it’s worth considering philosopher Neil Levy’s argument that the idea that women are predominantly hardwired for empathising while men are hardwired for systemising ‘is no basis for equality. It is not an accident that there is no Nobel Prize for making people feel included.’2 When a child clings on to a highly desirable toy and claims that his companion ‘doesn’t want to play with it’, I have found that it is wise to be suspicious. The same scepticism can be usefully applied here.

  In a New Yorker cartoon that for many years enjoyed pride of place in my office, a rat in a business suit is at his desk, talking on the phone. On the wall behind him is a lever and a light. With his feet perched comfortably upon his desk, the rat-businessman is saying, ‘Oh, not bad. The light comes on, I press the bar, they write me a cheque. How about you?’3 The basic psychological principle that people find it rewarding to be rewarded – whether it be through sincere praise, status, money, a new opportunity, a promotion, a round of applause or a really nice review in a newspaper – should not be forgotten. Everyone, after all, knows the thrill of pride that accompanies acknowledgement of a talent or a job well done. As children we demand it. (Look at me, Mummy. Look … at … ME!). And as adults, although we’re rather more discreet about our need for appreciation, we nonetheless lap it up wherever it’s available. (I don’t think it’s just me.) On coaching mornings at my local tennis club, everyone edges towards Simon, a coach of such endless invention and generosity that he can think of something genuinely enthusiastic to say (But nice footwork, Cordelia) even as the ball sails over the fence into the windshield of a passing car.

  The general idea that ‘people’s preferences are not created ex nihilo: they are formed by the society they live in’4 is an important one to apply to our thinking about the reasons behind continuing vertical segregation, for example. Despite the great gains of the past century, men’s and women’s experiences at work and home are not the same, for reasons that often stem from either unconscious or intentional discrimination. If we rewarded one group of rats with bigger and better food pellets as they pulled a well-oiled lever in the spacious and enviable corner Skinner box, would we think them more intrinsically interested in lever-pulling than a less privileged, perhaps even harassed, group of rats? The managers who don’t get the promotions or salaries they deserve, the saleswomen and investment bankers who determinedly network at topless bars and lap-dancing clubs, and the corporate scientists who endure locker-room culture deserve proper acknowledgement of barriers that still have not fallen.

  And this includes barriers at home. Women with children who decide not to adapt their careers to family life can look forward to paying a gender deviance tax that takes the form of extra housework, extra child care, and a psychological pussyfooting around his ego. Who knows what goes on in any individual relationship. Of course, there are exceptions. But the data from a study of faculty at the University of California are telling.5 Female faculty with children report working fifty-one hours a week at their jobs and another fifty-one hours a week doing housework and child care – truly the second shift. That’s a 102-hour workweek, accounting for more than fourteen hours per day. Add to this eight hours per day for sleeping, an hour for eating and basic hygiene, and by my calculations that leaves these women the grand total of twenty-six minutes a day for themselves. Faculty fathers, by contrast, put in only thirty-two unpaid work hours a week. This substantially lighter load not only enables them to put in an extra five hours a week at work, but to also enjoy a spare two hours a day to spend doing – well, who knows – while faculty mothers continue to launder, cook, test spelling, wash grubby faces and read bedtime stories. Behind every great academic man there is a woman, but behind every great academic woman is an unpeeled potato and a child who needs some attention. And women who climb the academic ladder don’t just forfeit their leisure. They are much less likely to be married with children than male faculty (41 versus 69 percent, respectively) and, poignantly, twice as likely once in their postreproductive years to say that they would have liked more children. Put simply, the same career entails greater sacrifices for her than for him. So when a female academic who would like to have more than a few minutes for herself every day, as well as a family, jumps off the academic ladder and into a more flexible but dead-end second-tier research position, is it because she’s intrinsically less interested in a demanding academic career or because there are only twenty-four hours in a day?

  Likewise, our societies also offer a surprisingly poor test of the naturalness of horizontal segregation. Picture, if you can, a society in which men expect to find happiness not from work but from their family and friends. Imagine a place in which equal numbers of women and men, sitting attentively in the lecture halls of the computer science department, set themselves up for a financially secure future. This society is no feminist fantasy of the future. It is the Republic of Armenia. In the 1980s and ’90s, the percentage of women in the largest computer science department in the country did not fall below 75 percent. Today, thanks to its increasing popularity among men (rather than declining popularity among women), Armenian women still make up close to half of computer science majors (and, anecdotally, their numbers appear to be high in many other former Soviet Republics6) – compared to about 15 percent in America. Hasmik Gharibyan, a professor of computer science at California Polytechnic State University, attributes the disparity to important cultural differences between the two countries. In Armenia ‘[t]here is no cultural emphasis on having a job that one loves’. In every one of her interviews, the young Armenians ‘emphasized that the source of happiness for Armenians undoubtedly is their family and friendships, rather than their work’. Instead, for women and men alike, ‘there is a determination to have a profession that will guarantee a good living and financial stability.’7

  The strong representation of Armenian women in computer science is just one example of what is a rather surprising general pattern: there is more, not less, gender segregation of occupational interests in rich, advanced industrial societies than in developing or transitional ones. For example, a recent survey of forty-four countries found that as economic prosperity increases within developing and transitional countries, women are increasingly likely to turn away from degrees in engineering, maths and natural science (that lead to potentially more lucrative careers) and instead choose more feminine degrees in the humanities, social sciences and health. But in prosperous countries it is not economic prosperity that tracks sex segregation in degree choices, but differences in adolescent boys’ and girls’ attitudes towards maths and science. In richer countries, the greater the difference between boys’ and girls’ interest in science and maths, the greater the sex segregation.8 Maria Charles and Karen Bradley, the survey authors, argue that a combination of an adequate baseline of material security (for most), together with a Western cultural emphasis on individual choice and self-expression, means that self-realisation in education is a culturally legitimate goal. This is especially true for people who might reasonably anticipate that their partner will take on the primary breadwinning role – namely, heterosexual women. (In fact it is interesting that, in the absence of the luxury of a male breadwinner, the occupational decision making of lesbians looks very similar to that of heterosexual men.)9

  Susan Pinker interprets the occupational sex segregation in countries like the United States, Australia and Sweden as reflecting women’s true preferences, unforced by financial concerns, family pressure or even governmental control. But as we’ve seen, occupational interests cannot be safely carried around inside the head, impervious to outside influence. We’ve seen the cultural cues that can so readily alter yo
ung people’s interest in maths, science and other masculine pursuits. As Charles and Bradley argue, once males and females no longer have to chase the dollar as a top priority, they can ‘seek to realize and express their true “selves”’10 – but as you, I, and Charles and Bradley are aware, the boundary between the desires of that self and the gender beliefs and structure of the culture in which it develops and functions is permeable. Contrary to what you might expect, people from more gender-egalitarian countries are often less egalitarian when it comes to the gender stereotypes they typically endorse.11 Charles and Bradley suggest that we in the developed West are ‘indulging our gendered selves’, and we’ve seen here a glimpse of how those selves become gendered. Cultural realities and beliefs about females and males – represented in existing inequalities; in commercials; in conversations; in the minds, expectations or behaviour of others; or primed in our own minds by the environment – alter our self-perception, interests and behaviour. These laboratory experiments are designed to simulate, in a controlled and tidy way, the far messier influences taking place in the real world. A sociocultural environment is not some cunningly contrived thing that only exists in social psychology labs. Don’t look now, but you’re in one right this moment.

  Several researchers have suggested that the continual drip, drip, drip of gender stereotypes will, over time, really add up. For example, having observed the feminising effect of gender priming on women’s interests, Steele and Ambady wonder whether ‘our culture creates a situation of repeated priming of stereotypes and their related identities, which eventually help to define a person’s long-term attitude towards specific domains.’12 Likewise, sociologists Cecilia Ridgeway and Shelley Correll argue:

  [C]ultural beliefs about gender act like a weight on the scale that modestly but systematically differentiates the behavior and evaluations of otherwise similar men and women. While the biasing impact of gender beliefs on the outcomes of men and women in any one situation may be small, individual lives are lived through multiple, repeating, social relational contexts.… The small biasing effects accumulate over careers and lifetimes to result in substantially different behavioral paths and social outcomes for men and women who are otherwise similar in social background.13

  These gendered paths and outcomes then become part of the social world that entangles minds – gendering the very sense of self, social perception, and behaviour that will then seamlessly become once again part of the gendered social world.

  But it happens imperceptibly. And so we look for answers elsewhere.

  For two millennia, ‘impartial experts’ have given us such trenchant insights as the fact that women lack sufficient heat to boil the blood and purify the soul, that their heads are too small, their wombs too big, their hormones too debilitating, that they think with their hearts or the wrong side of the brain. The list is never-ending.

  —Beth B. Hess, sociologist (1990)1

  Twenty years later, and it’s business-as-usual for that list. And somewhere near the top of it is ‘too little foetal testosterone’. Or is it that males have too much of the stuff? At first, it might seem as though the tables have at last turned and that it’s males’ inherent deficiencies that are now under scrutiny. According to Louann Brizendine, for instance, the effect of male levels of testosterone on the foetal neural circuits is like nothing so much as the ravaging of a village by enemy soldiers:

  A huge testosterone surge beginning in the eighth week will turn this unisex brain male by killing off some cells in the communication centers and growing more cells in the sex and aggression centers. If the testosterone surge doesn’t happen, the female brain continues to grow unperturbed. The fetal girl’s brain cells sprout more connections in the communication centers and areas that process emotion.

  A consequence of this ‘fetal fork’, Brizendine explains, is that ‘[g]irls do not experience the testosterone surge in utero that shrinks the centers for communication, observation, and processing of emotion, so their potential to develop skills in these areas are [sic] better at birth than boys”.2 Girls, it seems – at least for the time being until we take a closer look at the data3 – have not so much a deficiency of foetal testosterone as a lucky escape.

  But really, this kind of portrayal is just new ‘advertising copy’ for the old stereotype of females as submissive, emotional, oversensitive gossips.4 And a different, nicer way of saying that females’ brains are designed for feminine skills rather than those necessary for excellence in masculine pursuits. Simon Baron-Cohen, willingly assisted by those who also popularise his work, has been doing a brilliant marketing campaign for foetal testosterone. It is rapidly becoming the must-have accessory for the budding hard scientist or mathematician. For example, in a recent article for BBC News, Baron-Cohen asks ‘why, in over 100 years of the existence of the Fields Medal, maths’ [equivalent of the] Nobel Prize, have none of the winners ever been a woman?’ Over the course of the article, he circles around an answer … because women don’t have the same testosterone-saturated in utero environment. So confident is Baron-Cohen about this link between foetal testosterone and mathematical ability that he expresses concern that a future, hypothetical prenatal treatment for autism that blocks the action of foetal testosterone might reduce ‘that baby’s future ability to attend to details, and to understand systematic information like maths’.5

  This foetal testosterone certainly seems to be potent, sex-segregating stuff. So let’s take a closer look, if we dare, at what it actually does.

  At the beginning of life in the womb, male and female foetuses both have the same unisex primordial gonads.6 But at around the sixth week of gestation, a gene on the male Y chromosome causes the male’s primordial gonads to become testes. In the female the transformation is to ovaries instead. Shortly after, at about week eight of gestation, the testes of the male foetus start to produce large amounts of testosterone, often referred to as gonadal testosterone, which peaks at about the sixteenth week of pregnancy. (Researchers sometimes, more accurately, use the term ‘androgens’ rather than ‘testosterone’, because testosterone is one of several very similar hormones secreted from the testes, ovaries and adrenal glands, known as androgens.) By around the twenty-sixth week of gestation, there is once again little difference in testosterone levels between the sexes until another, smaller, testosterone surge in newborn boys that lasts for about three months. No one seems to be sure what this second, postbirth surge does. But the testosterone surge in utero is essential for bringing about male genitalia.7 A genetic male without sufficient testosterone during this critical period will end up with feminised external genitalia, while genetic females with abnormally high testosterone in the same period are born with external genitalia that are masculinised – sometimes even to the extent that the baby girl is mistaken for a boy.

  Such discoveries led to a brilliantly elegant idea known as the organizational-activational hypothesis. What if the same hormone involved in building male genitalia, a gift to be enjoyed for a lifetime, also permanently ‘organises’ the brain in a masculine way? (The other, activational, part of the hypothesis proposes that after puberty the circulating sex hormones activate these circuits.) Certainly, testosterone receptors have been found in many regions of the brain, in both males and females, and research with experimental animals is exploring how testosterone acts on the brain to influence its development.8 And so, neuroendocrinologists have investigated the intriguing idea that prenatal testosterone organises the brain. They manipulate the hormonal environments of experimental animals during the critical period that brain organisation is thought to take place, and see what happens to their brains and behaviour.9

  Probably the neatest support for the organizational hypothesis comes from songbirds like the zebra finch and canary, in which often the male sings but the female doesn’t. In these species, the vocal control areas of the brain are much bigger and better in males, which makes perfect sense. What’s more, treating female zebra finches to a male hormonal environ
ment masculinises both their brains (in the vocal control areas) and their behaviour (they sing). Hormone, brain, behaviour – snap! (Actually, even here the picture can get a bit messy.)10 But, while to perch on a branch and warble a song may be the best possible way to set yourself apart from the fairer sex if you happen to be a zebra finch, the same does not apply to the human case. And so this kind of result, fascinating though it is, can only get us so far.

  When it comes to rat research, there are a few more points of contact. In rats, by the way, the surge of testosterone that appears to be involved in brain masculinisation actually takes place shortly after birth. Researchers have found that male rats castrated at birth are more similar to females in various ways, such as their propensity for aggression and how easily they become dazed and confused in a maze. Immediately, the cogs start to spin. Could prenatal testosterone in humans create permanent sex differences in the brain that lie behind gender differences in cognition and behaviour?