Delusions of Gender

by Cordelia Fine

  ‘It’s not as if (my sons) haven’t been exposed to all that princess stuff … they’re around it, but they show no interest, they haven’t been clamouring for any special princess toys or Ken and Barbie stuff … I think that’s the hard-wired stuff, to even see it and for it to be prevalent, and to not be interested in it.’ (White, upper-middle class, heterosexual father, describing his three and four year old sons’ lack of interest in their six-year-old sister’s toys).

  Parents see their young children behaving in stereotypically boyish or girlish ways and, as Kane puts it, ‘assume that only something immutable could intervene between their gender-neutral efforts and the gendered outcomes they witness.’1

  They are in distinguished company. As part of his suggestions regarding women’s possible intrinsically inferior aptitude for, and interest in, high-level scientific careers, Lawrence Summers offered an opinion on the essential differences between the sexes, gleaned from the nursery hearth:

  So, I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my experience with my two and a half year old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck, tells me something. And I think it’s just something that you probably have to recognize.2

  Likewise, in a scientific debate about the reasons behind the gender gap in science, Steven Pinker joked: ‘It is said that there is a technical term for people who believe that little boys and little girls are born indistinguishable and are moulded into their natures by parental socialization. The term is “childless”.’3

  The frustration of the naively nonsexist parent has become a staple joke. An all but obligatory paragraph in contemporary books and articles about hardwired gender differences gleefully describes a parent’s valiant, but always comically hopeless, attempts at gender-neutral parenting:

  One of my [Louann Brizendine’s] patients gave her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter many unisex toys, including a bright red fire truck instead of a doll. She walked into her daughter’s room one afternoon to find her cuddling the truck in a baby blanket, rocking it back and forth saying, ‘Don’t worry, little truckie, everything will be all right.’4

  As it happens, I can match anecdote with counter anecdote. Both of my sons, as toddlers, behaved in much the same way as Lawrence Summers’s and Brizendine’s patient’s young daughters. They too, despite being male, tucked trucks into pretend beds and, yes, called them Daddy, Mummy and Baby.

  Yet parents are right when they say that young boys and girls play differently, even if the contrast isn’t nearly as black-and-white as it’s often portrayed. As the quotations with which this chapter began suggest, the received popular wisdom is that this happens despite the nonsexist, gender-neutral environment in which children are now raised: ‘Today we know that the truth is … [that] parents raise girls and boys differently because girls and boys are so different from birth. Girls and boys behave differently because their brains are wired differently’, says Leonard Sax.5

  Well, as we now know, there’s more than one loophole in the ‘wiring’ argument. And as we’ll see in this part of the book, there are many reasons, ranging from subtle to blatant, why a gender-neutral environment is not something that any parent does, could or perhaps even wants to provide.

  The obstacles to gender-neutral parenting begin well before a baby is born. When Emily Kane asked her sample of parents about their preferences for sons or daughters before they even became parents, the themes of their responses showed that they had gendered expectations of even hypothetical children. The men tended to want a son, a common reason being that they liked the idea of teaching him to play sports. ‘I always wanted a son … I think that’s just a normal thing for a guy to want. I wanted to teach my son to play basketball, I wanted to teach my son to play baseball, and so forth. Just thinking of all the things you could do with your son’ was how one father put it. (An alien researcher from outer space, reading Kane’s transcripts, might be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that human females are born without arms and legs.) Mothers in the study, too, seemed to fall in with the assumption that boys and girls are good for different things. Kane found that if mothers wanted a son, it was to provide their husbands with a companion with whom to do things, like sports, that apparently couldn’t be done with girls. Daughters, by contrast, were expected to offer very different kinds of parental experiences: ‘A girl, I wanted that more … to dress her up and to buy the dolls and you know, the dance classes … A girl was someone that you could do all the things that you like to do with more than you could a boy.’ More often, though, girls were wanted because of the emotional connection they would provide. Only a daughter would be naturally inclined to emotional intimacy and the remembering of birthdays, was the unspoken assumption. Not yet conceived, and already the sons were off the hook for remembering to call or send birthday flowers.6

  Postconception, the gendered expectations continue. Sociologist Barbara Rothman asked a group of mothers to describe the movements of their foetuses in the last three months of pregnancy. Among the women who didn’t know the sex of their baby while they were pregnant, there was no particular pattern to the way that (what turned out to be) male and female babies were described. But women who knew the sex of their unborn baby described the movements of sons and daughters differently. All were ‘active’, but male activity was more likely to be described as ‘vigorous’ and ‘strong’, including what Rothman teasingly describes as ‘the “John Wayne fetus” – “calm but strong”’. Female activity, by contrast, was described in gentler terms: ‘Not violent, not excessively energetic, not terribly active were used for females’.7

  Then, there are the intriguing experiences of Kara Smith, an educational researcher with a background in women’s studies, who kept pregnancy field notes. Throughout the entire nine months of the pregnancy, Smith noted all the words and feelings expressed to the unborn baby. And, in the sixth month of the pregnancy, an ultrasound revealed his sex:

  He was a boy. He was ‘stronger’ now than the child I had known only one minute before. He did not need to be addressed with such light and fluffy language, such as ‘little one’.… Thus, I lowered my voice to a deeper octave. It lost its tenderness. The tone in my voice was more articulate and short, whereas, before, the pitch in my voice was high and feminine. I wanted him to be ‘strong’ and ‘athletic’, therefore, I had to speak to him with a stereotypical ‘strong’, ‘masculine’ voice to encourage this ‘innate strength’.

  What startled Smith most about this exercise was that someone like herself, well-versed in the negative consequences of gender socialisation, was inadvertently drawing on stereotypes in the way she responded to the baby. ‘I was, quite honestly, shocked by the findings’, she writes. Here was a mother – and, let’s not forget, not just any old mother, but the sort of feminist mother so beloved of unisex-parenting-gone-wrong stories – finding herself socialising her child into gender roles before he was even born.8

  This is just one person’s experience. But Smith’s observation – that her behaviour was undermining her values – is backed by a large body of research. If all of our actions and judgements stemmed from reflected, consciously endorsed beliefs and values then not only would the world be a better place, but this book would be several pages shorter. Social psychologists, who have been unravelling how implicit and explicit processes interact to make up our perceptions, feelings and behaviour, stress the importance of understanding ‘what happens in minds without explicit permission.’9 And this is particularly important when implicit associations don’t match the more-modern beliefs of the conscious mind. Implicit attitudes play an important part in our psychology. They distort social perception, they leak out into our behaviour, they influence our decisions – and all without us realising.10

  Parents’ gender associations are firmly in place well before a child is even a twinkle in daddy’s eye. The scant but suggestive data of
this chapter hint that beliefs about gender – either consciously or unconsciously held – are already shaping expectations about a future child’s interests and values, already biasing the mother’s perception of the little kicking baby inside her, and are already moulding a mother’s communication with her unborn child.

  And then, the baby is born.

  It’s a Boy! ‘Rob and Kris are thrilled to announce the safe arrival of Jack Morgan Tinker. Proud grandparents are Hollis and Marilyn Clifton of Ottawa and Larry and Rosemary Tinker of Montreal. Welcome little one!’ It’s a Girl! ‘Barbara Lofton and Scott Hasler are delighted to announce the birth of their lovely daughter, Madison Evelyn Hasler. Grandparents are both joyful and overwhelmed.’

  You can learn a lot from birth announcements. In 2004, McGill University researchers analysed nearly 400 birth announcements placed by parents in two Canadian newspapers, and examined them for expressions of happiness and pride. Parents of boys, they found, expressed more pride in the news, while parents of girls expressed greater happiness. Why would parents officially report different emotional reactions to the birth of a boy versus a girl? The authors suggest that the birth of a girl more powerfully triggers the warm, fuzzy feelings relating to attachment, while the greater pride in a boy stems from an unconscious belief that a boy will enhance standing in the social world.11

  Parents may also be slightly more likely to place a birth announcement for a boy than for a girl, discovered psychologist John Jost and his colleagues. Male births make up 51 percent of live births, so one would expect the same percentage of birth announcements to be for boys. However, in their data set of thousands of Florida birth announcements, more were for male babies than one would expect: 53 percent. It’s a very small (although statistically significant) difference, it’s true. (And it only held for traditional families, in which the mother had taken on the father’s last name.) But as the authors point out, ‘[t]he fact that gender differences show up at all for a family decision that is such a clear and significant reflection of parental pride is both surprising and worrisome. We suspect that most parents would be shocked and embarrassed to learn that they might have publicly announced the birth of a son, but not a daughter, and this suggests that the effect is subtle, implicit, and yet powerful.’12 Not so long ago in Western societies, males were quite openly valued over females (and this is still the case in many developing countries). Today, we don’t think one sex better or more valuable than the other – and yet, at an implicit level, could we still be holding males in higher regard?

  A close look at the names given to the babies in this data set suggested that we might. Jost and his colleagues also analysed the thousands of birth announcements to see how often sons and daughters were given a name that began with the same letter as either the father’s or mother’s name: for example, Russell and Karen calling their son Rory versus Kevin. How, you may well wonder, does this exercise reveal anything at all about the machinations of the implicit mind? The reason is that, remarkably, not all letters of the alphabet are equal in the eye of the beholder. People unconsciously place a special value on the letter that begins their own name. With this phenomenon in mind, Jost and colleagues looked for evidence of ‘implicit paternalism’ in the names that parents chose for their children. They found that boys were more likely to be given names that began with the paternal first initial than the maternal initial, but girls were equally likely to share a first initial with their mother or father. (And this wasn’t because of sons being named after their dads; kids with exactly the same name were excluded from this analysis.) In other words, parents seemed to be unconsciously overvaluing fathers’ names and perhaps also boys, who were more often bestowed the higher-value male initial.13

  Clearly, naming a child is a highly personal, multifaceted process. It’s impossible to know for sure what is behind these surprising findings. But as Jost and colleagues point out, contemporary manifestations of sexism and racism are often ‘indirect, subtle, and (in some cases) non-conscious.’14 In modern, developed societies, males and females are legally – and no doubt also in the eyes of most parents – born with equal status and entitled to the same opportunities. Yet of course this egalitarian attitude is very new, and it’s poorly reflected in the distribution of political, social, economic and sometimes even personal power between the sexes. It’s a ‘half-changed world’, as Peggy Orenstein put it15 and here, in the naming of children and composing of birth announcements, are little strands of evidence of parents’ half-changed minds. Without meaning to, and without realising it, we may be valuing boys and girls differently, and for different qualities, within hours of birth.

  From this starting point, unequal even before conception, parenting begins.

  When psychologists run experiments in search of differences between boy babies and girl babies, they do not order in unused babies still in their shrink-wrapped packages. Even newborns show a preference for their native language, presumably from hearing, in utero, the intonation and rhythm of their mother tongue.1 Babies are button-nosed little learning machines. For example, developmental psychologist Paul Quinn and his colleagues found that babies just three to four months of age prefer to look at female, rather than male, faces.2 The researchers wondered whether this might be because the babies had spent most of their time with female caregivers and that greater familiarity with female faces was the reason they liked them more. And so they tested a small group of daddy-reared babies and found that this rare breed of baby preferred male faces. (A further experiment suggested that babies’ preference for faces of the more familiar sex stems from acquired expertise with those kinds of faces.) Likewise, although they have no preference at birth, by three months of age, babies look more at same-race faces than other-race faces.3 Babies are also, even in the first year of life, sensitive to the emotional reactions of caregivers. They use facial expressions and tone of voice as a guide to what toys, for example, should be approached and, especially, what should be avoided.4 Interestingly, infants find mixed messages – even those that include some sort of positive expression towards a toy – somewhat off-putting.5

  These sorts of discoveries mean we have to take babies’ environments and experiences seriously when we try to understand any differences between even very young boys and girls. Of course, if parents provide a truly gender-neutral environment for their babies, then this won’t matter. But do they?

  Certainly, the physical environments of baby girls and boys are not identical. Without doubt, your typical baby girl has a lot more pink in her life, and a baby boy a great deal more blue. And they may also have different levels of exposure to dolls and trucks at even a very tender age. Alison Nash and Rosemary Krawczyk inventoried the toys of more than 200 children in New York and Minnesota. They found that even among six- to twelve-month-old infants, the youngest age group they studied, boys had more ‘toys of the world’ (like transportation vehicles and machines) while girls had more ‘toys of the home’ (like dolls and housekeeping toys).6

  We can also justifiably wonder whether baby boys’ and girls’ psychological environments are the same. Psychologists often find that parents treat baby girls and boys differently, despite an absence of any discernible differences in the babies’ behaviour or abilities. One study, for example, found that mothers conversed and interacted more with girl babies and young toddlers, even when they were as young as six months old.7 This was despite the fact that boys were no less responsive to their mother’s speech and were no more likely to leave their mother’s side. As the authors suggest, this may help girls learn the higher level of social interaction expected of them, and boys the greater independence. Mothers are also more sensitive to changes in facial expressions of happiness when an unfamiliar six-month-old baby is labelled as a girl rather than a boy, suggesting that their gendered expectations affect their perception of babies’ emotions.8 Gendered expectations also seem to bias mothers’ perception of their infants’ physical abilities. Mothers were shown an adjustable slop
ing walkway, and asked to estimate the steepness of slope their crawling eleven-month-old child could manage and would attempt. Girls and boys differed in neither crawling ability nor risk taking when it came to testing them on the walkway. But mothers underestimated girls and over-estimated boys – both in crawling ability and crawling attempts – meaning that in the real world they might often wrongly think their daughters incapable of performing or attempting some motor feats, and equally erroneously think their sons capable of others.9 As infants reach the toddler and preschool years, researchers find that mothers talk more to girls than to boys, and that they talk about emotions differently to the two sexes – and in a way that’s consistent with (and sometimes helps to create the truth of) the stereotyped belief that females are the emotion experts.10

  It seems, then, that gender stereotypes, even if perhaps only implicitly held, affect parents’ behaviour towards their babies. This is hardly surprising. Implicit associations don’t, after all, remain carefully locked away in the unconscious. They can play an important part in behaviour and may tend to leak out when we aren’t thinking too much, or can’t think too much, about what we are doing – perhaps in our tone of voice, or body language. Implicit attitudes can also take the upper hand when it comes to our behaviour when we are distracted, tired or under pressure of time (conditions that, from personal experience, I would estimate are fulfilled about 99 percent of the time while parenting).11 Is it possible that parents’ implicit attitudes about gender might be subtly transmitted to their children?