Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

by Natasha Walter

  It is intriguing to note that just as women are taking on more varied and powerful roles in the wider world, and just as men are being encouraged to take on what were once seen as feminine roles at home, there is this strand of our culture that so intently insists there are biological constraints to male and female equality that will never be overridden. If these biological explanations for the differences between men and women rested on the best evidence, then it would be futile to question them. But as I saw when I looked more closely at the science that is supposed to underpin this narrative, it is far more complicated, nuanced and subtle than we are often led to believe.

  8: Myths

  In order to see more clearly how we are often presented with a skewed picture of the real state of debate about sex differences, we can look at a controversy that erupted a few years ago. In 2005 Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, got into a much publicised spat about the innate differences between men and women. He had been asked to speak about the under-representation of women on the science and engineering faculty at Harvard. When he came to give his talk at the National Bureau of Economic Research to a group of about fifty academics, he argued that because women naturally see the world in terms of family and human relationships, they will not be as happy as men in high-intensity careers.1 He also argued that women do not have the same propensity as men to excel in scientific thought, which he called ‘different availability of aptitude at the high end’. He said that such innate differences between men and women were more important than any social factors in creating inequality in certain occupations. ‘So my best guess,’ he said, ‘… of what’s behind this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people’s legitimate family desires and employers’ current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.’

  As we have seen, these views have become pretty commonplace today. Many writers, teachers and parents now downgrade the influence of socialisation in favour of biological differences, and assume that women will naturally be more focused on relationships than working life, and less suited to logical and scientific thought. Although this view has now moved into the mainstream, it was very telling that if you look at the way the debate was covered in the British media, it was constantly suggested that Summers was actually breaking down some kind of taboo.

  For instance, alongside its news reports the Financial Times ran two feature articles about the Summers dispute. In the first article the writer, Christopher Caldwell, stated that ‘there is no clear evidence contradicting what Summers said. What there is, instead, is a taboo.’ He went on to refer to Summers’s ‘easy erudition’ and the fact that he was a ‘first-rate scholar’; his critics, on the other hand, were characterised as ‘resolutely obscurantist’ and ‘anti-intellectual’.2 In a second article the same writer argued that there were no good arguments against what Summers said, but only the ‘taboos that protect professorial privilege and self-regard’, and damned the ‘political correctness’ of Harvard’s faculty for arguing with him.3

  Other newspapers also considered the debate in the same light. The Sunday Times covered the debate three times. Once, the conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote, ‘Summers is the best thing to happen to American higher education in a very long time…. For all the offence he has created, Summers has revealed one important fact: the truth sometimes is controversial.’4 Next, in a news piece, the reporter said that the problem lay in the fact that ‘American academics are renowned for political correctness,’ and quoted the views of Steven Pinker, who stated that Lawrence Summers’s words were ‘masterly’ and ‘supported in the scientific literature’.5 Then, editors chose Alan Dershowitz to defend Summers as a new Galileo, suffering from attack by the establishment. ‘What if Summers were to be fired and in 10 years genetic research were to prove him correct? … It would not be shocking to discover that women, as a statistical matter, may have somewhat different aptitudes than men. We know that girls test higher in certain verbal skills than boys. Galileo, you will recall, was forced to recant the heliocentric theory, to apologise and to promise not to repeat his blasphemy. So, too, with Summers.’6

  Much of this coverage suggested that Summers’s views were controversial, but well supported by the evidence. This made it seem completely baffling when Summers backed down, apologised and put in place a taskforce to look at women’s under-representation on the science and engineering faculty at Harvard. Was this really just the result of political correctness gone mad? Or was there a substantial body of opinion that was not being heard in the media, that had convinced him to retract? Summers’s critics were hardly heard in the British media, although they were eager to find a public platform for their dissent.

  Nancy Hopkins, a biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was the first and one of the leading critics of Lawrence Summers. She had been present at his talk and had left the room during it. When I contacted her soon after the speech I found she was not the kind to try to silence debate. She was happy to speak to journalists who contacted her about the issue, and, along with other academics who had been present at the meeting, was keen to see publication of Lawrence Summers’s speech so that it could be debated fully in public rather than worried over behind closed doors. ‘I felt that this speech was off the chart, it was so inappropriate, and I wanted to let the public know that,’ she told me. ‘We have solid evidence that discrimination is real. But despite all the work that is done on biological factors, we still have no solid concept of the genetic factors behind mathematical achievement, for instance, so to say that the brains of women are unsuited to math isn’t science, it’s just pure bias, it’s so unscientific.’

  Another of Summers’s critics was Elizabeth Spelke, one of the world’s leading experts in child cognition, professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and director of the Laboratory for Developmental Studies. Over the last thirty years she has designed a series of experiments that study the innate abilities of young babies to assess their surroundings, to perceive objects and to make inferences about how objects behave. Other academics see Spelke as the prime mover in this field, as Karen Wynn, a Yale psychologist, told the New Yorker magazine in 2006. ‘Spelke has done more to shape our understanding of how the human mind initially grasps the world than anyone else.’7 Spelke was categorically critical of Summers’s speech, calling it ‘wrong, point for point’. And in the aftermath of the furore over his words she took up the challenge of a public debate with Steven Pinker in which she trenchantly argued that there are no differences in intrinsic aptitude for science among men and women.8 This debate can be read online, and her reasoned arguments, with their constant appeal to the best evidence, contrast forcefully with the press’s caricature of Summers’s critics.

  These scientists still feel frustrated by the way this debate was reported. When I spoke to Nancy Hopkins in 2008, she said that looking back she felt that much of the reportage had been extremely biased. In the Washington Post, Hopkins was branded a ‘hysteric’ who was ‘theatrically flurried by an unwelcome idea and, like a Victorian maiden exposed to male coarseness, suffers the vapors and collapses on the drawing room carpet in a heap of crinolines until revived by smelling salts and the offending brute’s contrition’.9 Hopkins feels that these attacks obscured the real debate. ‘It was said that we just didn’t want to know the truth – I reject that characterisation of my views. I’m a scientist and I have spent my life in pursuit of the truth, and Lawrence Summers was not telling the truth. My fear is that many people have picked up this view, that he spoke out against politically correct women, rather than that we criticised him fairly, for putting forward inaccurate and biased views.’

  This skewed coverage by the m
edia when it comes to the science of sex difference is not a one-off occurrence. As we have seen in the last chapter, the work of writers who seem to support the narrative of biological determinism can be sure of a wide airing throughout the media. But when I talked to other scientists and academics who have put forward differing views, I found much dissent which is heard less clearly and less frequently. Deborah Cameron is professor of language and communication at the University of Oxford. She was recently moved to write a general interest book, The Myth of Mars and Venus,10 rather than her usual academic papers, because she was incensed by the way the debate was going in the media. What was missing from the current debate, I asked her. ‘Evidence!’ she said furiously. ‘There is a real debate about some of these issues in the academy. But the popular writers are picking and choosing the evidence that suits them. In all the science around gender difference the findings are very mixed. For instance, if you can find one study that shows differences in the male and female brain you can find another study that fails to find the same differences or that finds differences in the other direction. But these popular writers will only cite the evidence that suits them. And the media follow them.’

  Melissa Hines is a professor of psychology at Cambridge, whose nuanced book Brain Gender11 examines whether there are any innate sex differences in cognition and behaviour in humans. Journalists often get in touch with her when they have been commissioned to write stories in support of the popular narrative of biological determinism. When they hear her views, which do not discount the contribution of biology entirely, but look carefully at the full spectrum of evidence and the interplay between innate and environmental factors, sometimes they stop writing the piece, sometimes they ignore the dissenting evidence, and very occasionally they struggle with their editors to get these more nuanced views into print. One journalist from a respected weekly magazine contacted Hines and decided to try to get some of the dissenting evidence into the article she had been commissioned to write about the differences between men and women. I spoke to the journalist after publication. ‘I was stunned by what Hines told me,’ said the journalist, who wanted to stay anonymous. ‘I kept on asking her, but what about this or that, and each time she’d demolish the so-called facts I’d been accumulating.’ But when the journalist went back to her editors she found they were seriously reluctant to believe her research. ‘I took a real beating from all of my colleagues,’ she said, ‘because this is a subject that everyone thinks they know a lot about. So everyone was arguing with me. And I just had to keep saying that the science didn’t bear it out.’ This article was then published next to an editorial by a senior member of staff, which pulled the argument towards the determinist point of view.

  When I went to talk to Melissa Hines myself about her work I found a scientist who was becoming more and more frustrated with the way these issues are being reported in the media. ‘In the media there is now this trend towards seeing sex differences as biologically determined,’ she said, decisively. ‘The way it is being conducted makes me uncomfortable, because we scientists are not really managing to have an honest and accurate conversation with people. Newspapers and magazines are trying to sell one point of view.’ Having heard these scientists saying that they felt the media were often misrepresenting the state of the debate within the academy, I realised how important it has become to look more closely at these possible misrepresentations. If we are only hearing one side of the story when it comes to differences between men and women, it is time to ask what the story would sound like if we were able to hear the dissenting voices as well.

  A: Babies

  If we are going to look more closely at whether the current fashion for biological determinism rests on the best evidence, we should start at the very beginning. As we saw in the last chapter, the theory that there are innate differences in behaviour and cognition between men and women is held to apply to children. You can see why those who are convinced that biology forms our behaviour would want to find these differences present even at birth; otherwise, it might turn out to be possible to put these differences down to experience. It is unsurprising then that these writers have argued that even as babies, girls are more responsive to people than boys are. And it is this, they suggest, that lies behind all kinds of other differences between men and women, such as that men are more interested in systems such as cars, football scores and higher mathematics, while women are more interested in friends, families and relationships, which also plays out in men’s dominance of the corridors of power and women’s greater investment in domestic life.

  One famous study suggests that this basic difference between boys and girls can be observed even in newborn babies. In an experiment published in 2000, a psychologist who worked with Simon Baron-Cohen, Jennifer Connellan, leant over day-old babies so that they could see her smiling face, and also showed them what was termed a ‘mechanical mobile’ (a hanging ball painted with human eyes in the wrong position). Boys looked for longer at the mobile, and girls looked for longer at the face.12 When Simon Baron-Cohen published his book The Essential Difference in 2003, he took this study as one of the key pieces of evidence for the argument that the female brain is hardwired to relate to others, while the male brain is hardwired to work with systems rather than people.

  In his book Baron-Cohen described this experiment at length, and concluded from it, ‘The fact that this difference is present at birth strongly suggests that biology plays a role.’13 The study has been frequently retold, sometimes in articles by Simon Baron-Cohen himself, in the New York Times and the Guardian,14 and also by other writers. For instance, in the New Statesman the journalist Nick Cohen wrote that men are more likely than women to systemise the outside world, and quicker to see patterns, while women are better at empathising with others and producing a sympathetic response. As evidence he mentioned this experiment: ‘Simon Baron-Cohen found that newborn boys, untouched by culture, were more likely than girls to look at a mobile than a human face.’15 In the Guardian, the philosopher Helena Cronin wrote that there was a wealth of evidence that men and women differed in this way, ‘even at one day old, girls prefer a human face, boys a mechanical mobile’.16 In her book The Sexual Paradox, Susan Pinker argued that the differences we see in working patterns among men and women arise partly because women are more empathetic, and that this is seen from early infancy, well before any cultural expectations about women as nurturers can be absorbed. ‘Just a few days after birth, the majority of newborn girls show more interest in looking at a human face than at a mechanical mobile,’ she said.17

  If a single study is given this much weight, we might expect that it would be taken seriously by the scientists’ peers. Yet some of these peers are much less than respectful. They are scathing. When I talked to Elizabeth Spelke, this is what she had to say about this famous experiment. ‘This is one single isolated experiment. Its findings fly in the face of dozens of studies on similar aspects of cognition carried out on young babies over decades. It is astonishing how much this one study has been cited, when the many studies that show no difference between the sexes, or a difference in the other direction, are ignored.’ In a published article, Spelke pulled the experiment to pieces, arguing that it was unsatisfactory in three respects.18 First, because it stands alone. It is usual, in infant research, to replicate key findings and assemble multiple experiments in support of any claim, in order to ensure that the result wasn’t down to pure chance – chance will always produce a few rogue results. Yet no replication of this particular experiment has been published. This lack of replication is particularly telling because the other, numerous studies in this field, ‘provide no evidence that male infants are more focused on objects and female infants are more focused on people from birth onwards’.19 Second, because no attempt was made to break down the raw finding into something more precise – what was it that the male infants preferred about the mobile? Would their preference for an inanimate object remain if it was something other than this particular ob
ject that was chosen? And lastly, she feels that the study was not protected against experimenter’s bias; it is rare for one person to devise and also carry out a study of this nature, as it is too easy in those situations for the researcher to bring her expectations to bear on the material.

  Of all these criticisms, it is obviously the first, that this is an isolated result and that the other numerous studies in this field have failed to find similar results, that stands out. The history of such experiments, as Elizabeth Spelke states, goes back a long way. No one else has done a study identical to that carried out by Connellan, but other scientists have carried out studies that should, if the grand claims for innate gender differences are correct, show similar results. For instance, way back in 1966 five researchers – Jerome Kagan, Barbara Henker, Amy Hen-Tov, Janet Levine and Michael Lewis – chose to study four-month-old infants and see how they reacted to four different three-dimensional objects: a regular face, a face in which the eyes, nose and mouth were rearranged, a face with no eyes, and a blank face (a face shape with the features removed). It seemed pretty clear that infants preferred the regular face – they smiled more at it. The only difference to emerge between the boys and girls was that the boys looked more at all the faces and smiled more at all the faces than the girls did; a difference that goes in the opposite direction to the observations of Connellan and Baron-Cohen.20