Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

by Natasha Walter

  As we see in the work of those writers, academic and popular, who support biological explanations for all sex differences, their constant refrain is: ‘Girls do … Boys do … Women are … Men are …’ We hear from them these unqualified statements: ‘Girls prefer a human face … Women talk three times as much as men … Females are better empathisers … Men really do listen with only half their brains.’ They may nod to the possibility of variability by conceding that some, anomalous women will be engineers and some, anomalous men will be carers. The concession will be made briefly and then the writer will return to his or her sweeping statements.

  This is typical of the way that many of us tend to generalise about male and female differences in everyday life. When boys or girls act out of their pink or blue moulds, it’s easy for parents and others to skim over those moments, which are seen as untypical and easily forgettable. Yet when girls and boys fall in with expectations, the stereotypes are reinforced and strengthened. Every aggressive boy feeds the stereotypes that are given to us by traditions and by the new biological determinism; every aggressive girl is a forgettable anomaly. Even if many aspects of the new narrative of biological determinism are shaky, they resonate with such deeply held myths about boys and girls that it is hard for us not to be influenced by them.

  But even where average differences can be observed between men and women in cognition and emotional aptitudes, these average differences are tiny compared with the vast differences among individuals of the same sex. As we saw in the analysis of verbal skills, it appears that gender accounts for only 1 per cent of the differences between boys and girls. This means that, far from being able to make any generalisations about boys and girls, if all you know about someone is their sex you can make no predictions about their verbal ability. The truth is that the graphs for all these supposed intellectual differences tend to show great overlap between men and women and great variability for both men and women.

  Although there may be small average differences in the intellectual and emotional capabilities of men and women, to express these as truths about all – or even almost all – men and women is nonsense. But in so much of the work done on sex differences today, instead of a recognition of the true variability of men and women, we are presented simply with stereotypes.

  This is partly the fault of some scientists. As Melissa Hines said to me, ruefully: ‘There are a lot of pressures that result in scientists looking for a simple picture. That’s kind of what science is meant to be about; we’re meant to be able to discover some rules that let us predict things, so there’s a tendency to want to simplify things in order to discover rules and predict things, and in most fields that works fine. But it doesn’t work well in fields where people already have stereotypes, because the stereotypes become the rules.’ But this is not really a problem that can be blamed on individual scientists. As we have seen in the last chapter, there is a pervasive tendency in the wider culture to pick up these biological explanations for the differences we see around us without investigation.

  This is partly because biological explanations for sex differences are now often assumed to be the freshest ideas, bravely argued against an old guard who have tried to shut down debate. So Simon Baron-Cohen said that he delayed publishing The Essential Difference for some years, because ‘the topic was just too politically sensitive’.1 Steven Pinker has also presented himself as the daring breaker of a taboo: ‘At some point in the history of the modern women’s movement, the belief that men and women are psychologically indistinguishable became sacred … The tragedy is that this mentality of taboo needlessly puts a laudable cause on a collision course with the findings of science and the spirit of free inquiry.’2 Journalists often support this idea, that such theories must battle against some taboo. As one American journalist put it recently, ‘We’ll probably never know how great a role biology plays in gender differences, because feminists try to prevent anyone from researching it.’3 However, to an objective observer, it is rather strange that writers can claim that it is difficult to debate this subject openly, when, as the linguist Mark Liberman said in response, ‘Neuroscientists are by no means being prevented from researching the biology of sex differences. It’s hard to think of any topic that has been getting more study recently, at least among questions without direct pharmacological or clinical applications.’4

  Even if journalists don’t fall in with the idea that biological explanations have to fight for space against a taboo, these explanations are still often seen as the freshest thinking, in contrast to the outdated political correctness of an old-fashioned establishment. So one writer in the Daily Mail said that explanations from biology blow ‘a large hole in the feminist orthodoxy – and the painfully politically correct line – that holds that men and women possess interchangeable emotional, intellectual and psychological traits.’5 Or, we can read in the Economist that: ‘Biological explanations of human behaviour are making a comeback as the generation of academics that feared them as a covert way of justifying eugenics, or of thwarting Marxist utopianism, is retiring.’6

  It’s odd to see theories of biological determinism being promoted as the freshest thinking on the block, given that these theories have such a long, and not very illustrious history. Ever since the retreat of religion during the Enlightenment, explanations for sexual inequality have been sought in biology. There is nothing new about the idea that masculinity and femininity are not just seen in physical characteristics and the ability to bear children, but also in intellectual and emotional capabilities. Nineteenth-century scientists told women that they should not read serious books because certain brain activities were incompatible with their fertility, and they studied the size and shape of the human brain to explain the inferior intelligence of women. So the president of the British Medical Association told its annual meeting in 1886 that if girls studied too much, ‘Amenorrhoea and chlorosis, and development of great nervousness, are frequent results of overpressure in education at or near the important epoch – fifteen to twenty years of age.’7 While Sir Henry Maudsley, a leading Victorian psychiatrist, said in an influential article in 1874 that a woman ‘does not easily regain the vital energy that was recklessly spent on learning … if a woman attempts to achieve the educational standards of men … she will lack the energy necessary for childbearing and rearing’.8

  As Anne Fausto-Sterling documents in her classic book Myths of Gender, biological explanations for women’s inferiority have come and gone like fashions in hem length. There was a long period when it was assumed the relatively smaller size of their brains proved that women were less intelligent than men; until people pointed out that in that case, elephants should be more intelligent even than human males. So others argued that intelligence did not rest on a larger brain overall but on the greater development of certain areas of the brain. In the mid-nineteenth century there was a fashion for believing that intelligence was linked to the size of the frontal lobe of the brain. Thus it was noted that men possessed larger frontal lobes than women, and woman was ‘homo parietalis’ after the parietal lobe, which lies towards the back of the head, while man was ‘homo frontalis’. Yet after a while the relevant scientists began to think that the parietal lobe was actually the seat of the intellect, and so executed a deft turnaround. ‘The frontal region is not, as has been supposed, smaller in woman, but rather larger relatively. But the parietal lobe is somewhat smaller.’9 As Fausto-Sterling puts it, when it comes to biological explanations for sex differences: ‘The popular press fanfares each entry with brilliant brass, bright ribbons, and lots of column space, but fails to note when each one in its turn falls into disrepute.’10

  Even in the heyday of interest in social conditioning, there were many writers keen to promote the idea that human behaviour is determined as much by biology as by culture. The father of sociobiology, Edward O Wilson, was a key figure in these debates. In the 1970s he made statements such as, ‘The evidence for a genetic difference in behaviour is varied and subst
antial. In general, girls are predisposed to be more intimately sociable and less physically venturesome.’11 Such views have flourished ever since in the terrain called sociobiology or evolutionary psychology. However, in the 1970s and 1980s it is fair to say that the critics of sociobiology were heard as much as its followers.

  When the controversy over race and IQ, in which some writers argued that certain races were intellectually inferior to others, erupted in the 1990s, the determinist point of view was thoroughly challenged in the mainstream media. What we can see now, however, is that biological explanations for human behaviour are often going unchallenged in the mainstream media. Far from having to plough a lonely furrow through a field characterised by unrelenting political correctness, we have seen in the last chapter how scientists and academics who put forward biological explanations for sex differences are enthusiastically praised and widely published.

  The spread of biological determinism through the media during recent years has been linked to the rise of politically conservative views. This makes sense, since those who have lost faith with the possibility of creating egalitarian social change are obviously likely to be attracted by apparently scientific theories that back up their feelings that the unequal status quo is only natural. Researchers at Yale University have shown that American newspapers with a conservative political bent – as assessed by which presidential candidate they supported – use far more biological explanations for gender differences than the liberal newspapers, which use more explanations based on conditioning and expectations.12 Right-wing media in the UK are also keen to publish theories of biological differences. But the spread of these ideas has now gone well beyond obviously conservative realms. In the UK, these ideas are now found frequently in, for instance, the Guardian, the New Statesman and the BBC, as well as, say, in the Daily Mail and the Financial Times. These ideas have taken up residence throughout the political spectrum, and are promoted not just by people who would never call themselves feminists, but also by many people who do call themselves feminists, such as Rosie Boycott, who co-founded the feminist magazine Spare Rib,13 or Helena Cronin, the Darwinian philosopher who says, ‘in talents men are on average more mathematical, more technically minded, women more verbal; in tastes, men are more interested in things, women in people; in temperaments, men are more competitive, risk-taking, single-minded, status-conscious, women far less so.’14

  The problem is that the unquestioning dissemination of such views can itself strengthen the persistence of stereotypes about how men and women should behave in everyday life. To state this is not to suggest that therefore we should shut down discussion of such theories, but it is to argue that we should be careful that the dissenting voices are heard as well. Because the strengthening of such stereotypes matters. There is a growing and fascinating literature on how the performance of individuals in certain fields may be heavily affected by their knowledge of what is expected of the group to which they belong. The effect of what is called ‘stereotype threat’ on the sexes has been revealed in groundbreaking and intriguing psychological research over the last few years.

  One of the founding blocks of this research was published in 1999. Three psychologists, Claude Steele, Stephen Spencer and Diane Quinn, got together male and female undergraduates to take a difficult maths test in which women had previously been seen to do worse than equally qualified men. They wanted to find out if women’s underperformance in such maths tests could really be said to be down to innate differences in aptitude, or whether other forces were at work. So they split the men and women into two groups. They told the men and women in one group that when this test had been administered in the past, there had been clear gender differences in performance. But the other group was told that men and women had performed equally on this test in the past. In the group who had been primed to believe that the sexes were unequal in their attainment, women did worse than the men. In the group told that women and men had performed equally in the past, the sex difference in attainment was eliminated.

  This result was striking in and of itself, showing us that attainment in supposedly objective tests may not be a reflection of pure ability. The psychologists went further in the following test, and found that they did not even have to ‘activate’ the stereotype for women to do worse than men. If told nothing about sex differences in attainment on the test, women did worse than men; if they were told that gender differences had never been seen on the test, they performed as well as their male counterparts.15 The fact that the researchers did not even have to activate a stereotype explicitly for it to hold women back from doing as well as they could shows us that stereotype threat may be all around us, not just in maths tests, affecting our behaviour even when we are not consciously aware of it.

  Other research has suggested that this is the case. For instance, the moderate male advantage seen in some tests of spatial ability is also seen in everyday life, where certain tasks that rely on spatial awareness – such as parking and navigation – tend to be performed better by men. You can see this in the fact that men on average do better in some aspects of driving tests, and women are 40 per cent more likely to fail their driving test by fluffing their three-point turns than men are. Many writers who discuss this kind of phenomenon assume, in deference to the ideas of biological determinism, that the difference must be produced by hormones. So in one typical report about men’s higher ability in such driving skills in The Times, the journalists quoted a psychologist claiming that this is because of higher testosterone exposure in the womb.16 But the very existence of a stereotype can, it seems, affect some women’s ability to drive well. Dr Courtney von Hippel, from the University of Queensland in Australia, showed that if women given a driving test were told that the test would investigate why women are worse at driving than men, they were twice as likely to have an accident in the test than were women who were not reminded of the stereotype.17

  What’s more, there is growing evidence to suggest that this kind of stereotype threat can affect not only our apparent abilities, but also our ambitions. Shelley Correll, a professor of sociology at Stanford University, set up a random ability test in which men could not possibly outperform women – the test consisted of judging the contrasts in black and white patterns, and in fact there were no right and wrong answers. She found how quickly even our aspirations are moulded by the activation of stereotypes about men and women. One group was told that men were better at this task, and the other group was told that men and women tended to do the same. All the subjects were given the same score – 13 out of 20. Yet in the group in which participants were told that men had more ability at this task, the men not only rated their performance more highly than the women did, but were more likely to say they would go into a career in which this kind of ability was required. Correll concluded that she had shown that individuals form their ambitions by assessing their own competence, and that men and women will assess their competence partly by drawing on different cultural beliefs about male and female abilities. Again, it is probably safe to assume that this holds good even outside sociology departments in universities, and that the operation of stereotypes in the wider culture can constrain the choices we make in our real lives.18

  What effect does the popularity of false ideas of biological determinism have on the power of stereotypes in everyday life? The researchers at Yale who looked at links between political conservatism and biological determinism in the media found that when readers are exposed to biological narratives, they became more inclined themselves to endorse stereotypes about how men and women should behave. These researchers gave participants articles which explained sex differences either by reference to biology – evolutionary programming or brain structure – or by reference to society – socialisation and expectations. The effect was striking. Those participants who read the article with biological explanations went on to score more highly in a questionnaire that asked them to endorse stereotypes such as women being more nurturing and men more arrogant. It a
lso led them to answer more negatively when asked if they thought people could change their behaviour. This was the case even if the article was putting forward a sex difference in which women were ‘better’ than men.19 So even when we are told that girls have, say, ‘superior’ language skills we may be encouraged into a fatalistic view of sex differences that discourages us from seeing individuals’ – even our own – true flexibility and potential for change.

  Such research shows that poor use and reporting of science matters more than we might think; it’s not just that bad science gets things wrong, but that it can affect our beliefs and therefore our behaviour.20 What is fashionably called stereotype threat we might call social conditioning, or sexism, but whatever words we use to describe this phenomenon, it is time to become more alert to the impact the new fashion for biological determinism might have on strengthening stereotypes in everyday life and therefore on holding back the possibility of greater equality.

  Because there is still an unfinished revolution in our society. Inequality is still the reality. Men still have much more political and economic power than women, and women still do much more work that is unpaid and unrecognised at home. Although in theory glass ceilings have been broken everywhere, and women have flooded into jobs once seen as the preserve of men, the upper echelons of businesses and professions and politics are still masculine. For instance, in the law, 49 per cent of the lowest rank of judges (deputy district judges and the like) are women; but only 10 per cent of high court judges.21 In 2007, women made up just 11 per cent of directors at FTSE 100 companies, 12 per cent of senior police officers, 14 per cent of local authority council leaders, 14 per cent of editors of national newspapers and 20 per cent of MPs.22 Meanwhile, women do the bulk of unpaid domestic work, even if they are working full-time. A woman who works full-time does an average of twenty-three hours of domestic work a week; a man who works full-time does an average of eight hours of domestic work each week.23 This has a huge knock-on effect on their rewards in the workplace. When men and women become parents, the gap between their experiences looms particularly large. While childless women earn about 9 per cent less than men, women with children earn about 22 per cent less than their male colleagues, even if they work full-time.24