5 The Graham Norton Show, 23 October 2008, described in ‘The BBC fills our living rooms with more smutty and degrading obscenities’, Daily Mail, 31 October 2008
6 ‘The best of Breastminster’, Sun, 12 October 2007
7 India Knight, ‘Pity the women who come within range of Brand and Ross’, Sunday Times, 2 November 2008
8 For instance, one intriguing study showed how women’s over-preoccupation with their appearance may ‘drain their mental energy’. Barbara Fredrickson, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, asked 40 male and 42 female undergraduates to put on a sweater or swimsuit, and then take a mathematics test. Each participant tried on the swimsuit or sweater and completed the surveys and tests alone in a changing room. What concerned Fredrickson was the women’s tendency to score lower than men on the maths tests when wearing bathing suits, which she believed was because baring their bodies made them think more about how they looked than what they were doing. Men who were asked to bare their bodies did not find that their maths performance was impaired. ‘It appears that asking themselves the question, “How do I look?” becomes disruptive to women’s math performance. By comparison, men have an easier time ridding their minds of that sort of cultural baggage.’ B L Fredrickson et al, ‘That swimsuit becomes you: sex differences in self-objectification, restrained eating and math performance’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 1 (1998), 269–84; quotation retrieved 18 February 2009 from APA online, http://www.apa.org/monitor/nov98/looks.html
9 In one study published in 2005, psychologists asked groups of young men and young women to view television commercials before putting themselves forward for a leadership role or a subordinate role in a psychological test. One group viewed gender-neutral commercials, in which objects were sold impersonally, with no humans in the frame. Another saw two commercials that showed women in more stereotypically feminine and sexy roles, such as a female college student who dreams of being a homecoming queen. When the students went on to do the test in which they were asked to put themselves forward for a leadership or ‘problem solver’ role in a test, the women who had viewed the stereotypic commercial were more likely to avoid the leadership role, while the men were as likely in either group to think themselves fitted for leadership. The women who had seen only the impersonal commercials were as likely as the men to put themselves forward to be leaders. Paul G Davies, Steven J Spencer and Claude M Steele, ‘Clearing the air: identity safety moderates the effects of stereotype threat on women’s leadership aspirations’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 2 (2005), 276–87
7: Princesses
1 Retrieved 22 October 2008 from www.marksandspencer.com
2 Retrieved 21 January 2009 from www.boots.com
3 Retrieved 22 October 2008 from www.hiya4kids.co.uk
4 Retrieved 10 March 2009 from http://www.amazon.co.uk/Magnetic-Words-complement-National-Literacy/dp/B000CDFTHE/ref=pd_bxgy_k_h_b_cs_img_b
5 Hamleys catalogue, autumn/winter 2006
6 Retrieved 15 August 2007 from www.hamleys.com
7 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex ((1949), London: Vintage, 1997), p306
8 Sales of Disney Princess brand retrieved 22 October 2008 from http://www.laughingplace.com/News-ID506950.asp and 14 October 2008 from https://licensing.disney.com/Home/display.jsp?contentId=dcp_home_ourfranchises_disney_princess_uk& forPrint=false&language=en&preview=false&imageShow=0&pressRoom=UK&translationOf=null®ion=0
9 Retrieved 10 October 2008 from http://www.shareholder.com/mattel/news/20021022-93103.cfm
10 Gwyneth Rees, Fairy Dreams (London: Macmillan, 2005), p137
11 Leapfrog leaflet for parents about children’s reading habits, retrieved 18 December 2008 from http://www.welovetoread.co.uk/PDF/Booklet%20%20whole/Love%20to%20Read%20Booklet.pdf
12 Mia Kellmer Pringle, The Needs of Children (London: Hutchinson Educational, 1974), p16
13 Playgroup Pamphlet Group, Out of the Pumpkin Shell: Running a Women’s Liberation Playgroup (Birmingham Women’s Liberation, 1975), cited by Glenda MacNaughton, ‘Equal opportunities: unsettling myths’, in Tricia David ed, Promoting Evidence-Based Practice in Early Childhood Education (Oxford: Elsevier, 2001), p212
14 Eg in A Elliot, ‘Creating non-sexist daycare environments’, Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 9, 2 (1984),18–23; K Aspinwall, What are Little Girls Made of? What are Little Boys Made of? (London: National Nursery Nurses Educational Board, 1984); H Cuffaro, ‘Re-evaluating basic premises: curricula free of sexism’, Young Children (Sept 1975) 469–78; M Guttenberg and H Bray, Undoing Sex Stereotypes (McGraw Hill, 1976), cited in Glenda MacNaughton, op cit, p212
15 Sally Koblinsky and Alan Sugawara, ‘Nonsexist curricula, sex of teacher and children’s sex-role learning’, Sex Roles, 10, 5–6 (1984), pp357–67
16 Marianne Grabrucker, There’s A Good Girl: Gender Stereotyping in the First Three Years of Life: A Diary, tr Wendy Philipson (London: The Women’s Press, 1988)
17 Marianne Grabrucker, op cit, p93
18 Burkhard Strassmann, ‘Woher haben Sie das?’, Die Zeit, 28 June 2007, tr. Susan Morrissey
19 Naima Browne, Gender Equity in the Early Years (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2004), p22
20 Steve Biddulph, Raising Boys (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p3
21 Steve Biddulph, op cit, p4
22 Anya C Hurlbert and Yazhu Ling, ‘Biological components of sex differences in colour preference’, Current Biology, 17, 16 (2007), 623–5
23 Fiona MacRae, ‘Scientists uncover truth behind “pink for a girl, blue for a boy”’, Daily Mail, 20 August 2007
24 Ben Goldacre, ‘Out of the blue and in the pink’, Guardian, 25 August 2007, and retrieved 21 November 2008 with full references and graphs from http://www.badscience.net/?p=518#more-518
25 Jo Paoletti, ‘Gendering of infants and toddlers’ clothing in America’, in The Material Culture of Gender: The Gender of Material Culture, Katharine Martinez and Kenneth L Ames eds (Delaware: Henry Francis du Pont Wintherthur, 1997), p32
26 ‘A Mother’, Time, 24 October 1927, Retrieved 10 October 2008 from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,736917,00.html?promoid=googlep
27 See also: Jo Paoletti and Carol Kregloh, ‘The children’s department’, in Claudia Brush Kidwell and Valerie Steele eds, Men and Women: Dressing the Part (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989); Jo Paoletti ‘Clothing and gender in America: Children’s fashions 1890–1920’, Signs, 13, 1 (Autumn 1987), 136–43.
28 Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain (London: Allen Lane, 2003), pp53–4
29 Simon Baron-Cohen, op cit, p105
30 Simon Baron-Cohen, op cit, p1
31 Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (London: Allen Lane, 2002)
32 Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain (London: Transworld, 2006)
33 Susan Pinker, The Sexual Paradox (London: Atlantic, 2008)
34 John Gray, Why Mars and Venus Collide (London: Harper Element, 2008), p90
35 Tracey Shors, ‘The mismeasure of woman’, Economist, 3 August 2006
36 Rosie Boycott, ‘Why women don’t want top jobs, by a feminist’, Daily Mail, 22 April 2008
8: Myths
1 Lawrence H Summers, Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce, 14 January 2005, retrieved 10 October 2008 from http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html
2 Christopher Caldwell, ‘The battle lines at Harvard’, Financial Times, 25 February 2005
3 Christopher Caldwell, ‘Taboos that undid Summers’, Financial Times, 24 February 2006
4 Andrew Sullivan, ‘The truth about men and women is too hot to handle’, Sunday Times, 23 January 2005
5 Sarah Baxter, ‘Harvard’s head hit by new war of non-PC words’, Sunday Times, 20 February 2005
6 Alan Dershowitz, ‘After Larry, who dares speak out?’, Sunday Times, 27 February 2005
7 Margaret Talbot, ‘The baby lab: how Elizabeth Spelke peers into the infant mind’, New Yorker, 4 September 2006
8 The entire debate between Pinker and Spelke can be read online; retrieved 10 October 2008 from http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html
9 George F Will, ‘Harvard hysterics’, Washington Post, 27 January 2005
10 Deborah Cameron, The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do men and women really speak different languages? (Oxford University Press, 2007)
11 Melissa Hines, Brain Gender (Oxford University Press, 2004)
12 Jennifer Connellan, Simon Baron-Cohen, Sally Wheelwright, Anna Batki and Jag Ahluwalia, ‘Sex differences in human neonatal social perception’, Infant Behaviour and Development, 23, 1 (January 2000), pp113–18
13 Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference, op cit, p58
14 Simon Baron-Cohen, ‘The male condition’, New York Times, 8 August 2005; ‘They just can’t help it’, Guardian, 17 April 2003
15 ‘Time out with Nick Cohen’, New Statesman, 26 February 2007
16 Helena Cronin, ‘The vital statistics’, Guardian, 12 March 2005
17 Susan Pinker, The Sexual Paradox, op cit, p104
18 Elizabeth Spelke, ‘Sex differences in intrinsic aptitude for mathematics and science? A critical review’, American Psychologist, 60, 9 (December 2005), 950–8
19 Elizabeth Spelke, ibid, p951
20 Jerome Kagan, Barbara A Henker, Amy Hen-Tov, Janet Levine, Michael Lewis, ‘Infants’ differential reactions to familiar and distorted faces’, Child Development, 37, 3 (Sep 1966), 519–32. See also: Peggy Koopman and Elinor Ames, ‘Infants’ preferences for facial arrangements, a failure to replicate’, Child Development, 39, 2 (June 1968), 481–7, which suggests that there is no preference among two-and-a-half-month-old infants for regular as opposed to scrambled faces.
21 Jennifer Connellan et al, op cit, p116
22 Jerome Kagan et al, op cit, p520
23 H A Moss and K S Robson, ‘Maternal influences in early social visual behaviour’, Child Development, 39, 2 (June 1968), 401–8
24 Renée Baillargeon, ‘Infants’ reasoning about hidden objects: evidence for event-general and event-specific expectations’, Developmental Science, 7 (2004), 391–424; Hespos and Spelke, ‘Precursors to spatial language’, Nature, 430 (2004), 453–6; Quinn and Eimas, ‘Perceptual organization and categorisation in young infants’, in Rovee-Collier and Lipsitt eds, Advances in Infancy Research (Norwoord NJ, 1996), pp1–36, all cited by Elizabeth Spelke, ‘Sex differences in intrinsic aptitude for mathematics and science? A critical review’, American Psychologist, 60, 9 (2005), 950–8
25 As one study found, ‘Female infants looked reliably longer at the impossible than at the possible event suggesting that they … expected the box to fall in the impossible event and were surprised that it did not … In contrast with the female infants, the male infants … tended to look equally at the impossible and possible events …’ Renée Baillargeon, Laura Kotovsky, and Amy Needham, ‘The acquisition of physical knowledge in infancy’, in Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate (Oxford University Press, 1995), pp84–5
26 Elizabeth Spelke’s response to ‘The assortative mating theory’, a talk with Simon Baron-Cohen, retrieved 10 February 2008 from www.edge.org/3rd_culture/baron-cohen05/baron-cohen05_index.html
27 Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain, op cit, p15
28 Lauren Adamson and Janet Frick, ‘The still face: a history of a shared experimental paradigm’, Infancy, 4, 4 (2003), 451–73, p465
29 Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain, op cit, p18
30 Katherine Weinberg, Edward Tronick, Jeffrey Cohn, Karen Olson, ‘Gender differences in emotional expressivity and self-regulation during early infancy’, Developmental Psychology, 35, 1 (1999), 175–88, p185. Weinberg and her colleagues used other studies to suggest that: ‘Mothers and sons more carefully tracked each other’s behaviour and facial expressions than mothers and daughters’ (p185). And these researchers do not necessarily put any differences they see down to biology alone: ‘It remains unclear whether the gender differences in self-regulation and expressivity observed in this study are attributable to biological factors or socialisation forces or, as is most likely, a combination of these factors.’ (p186)
31 Richard and Judy, Channel 4, 1 October 2002, description by Ian Jones retrieved 30 October 2008 from http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/reviews/2002/richardandjudy.htm
32 John Gray, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus ((1992), London: HarperCollins, 2002), p31
33 Fiona MacRae, ‘Women talk three times as much as men, says study’, Daily Mail, 28 November 2006
34 Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain, op cit, p36
35 Brizendine cited Talk Language: How to Use Conversation for Profit and Pleasure by Allan Pease and Alan Garner, 1991. Allan Pease’s views about biological determinism can be understood from the title of his most successful book – Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps
36 Mark Liberman, ‘Sex on the Brain’, Boston Globe, 24 September 2006
37 Matthias R Mehl, Simine Vazire, Nairán Ramírez-Esparza, Richard B Slatcher, James W Pennebaker, ‘Are women really more talkative than men?’, Science, 317, 5834 (6 July 2007), 82. Mehl said that he hoped the research would lead to a fresh, less hidebound way of thinking about the ways men and women behave. He said, ‘The stereotype puts unfortunate constraints on men and women – the idea that you can only happily be a woman if you’re talkative and you can only be happy as a man if you’re reticent. The study relieves those gender constraints.’ Richard Knox, ‘Study: men talk just as much as women’, NPR, 5 July 2007, retrieved 24 October 2008 from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11762186
38 Mark Liberman, ‘Sex and speaking rate’, Language Log, 7 August 2006, retrieved 10 October 2008 from http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/003423.html
39 Girls’ Schools Association website, ‘Answers to frequently asked questions’, retrieved 13 October 2008 from http://www.gsa.uk.com/default.aspx?id=135
40 Supernanny advice on discipline for boys and girls, retrieved 30 October 2008 from http://www.supernanny.co.uk/Advice/-/Parenting-Skills/-/Discipline-and-Reward/ Boy-oh-boy-or-girl-oh-girl-~-different-ways-of-teaching-discipline.aspx
41 Janet Shibley Hyde and Nita McKinley, ‘Gender differences in cognition: results from meta-analyses’, in Paula Caplan, Mary Crawford, Janet Shibley Hyde, John T E Richardson eds, Gender Differences in Human Cognition (Oxford University Press, 1997), 30–51; see also Janet Shibley Hyde, ‘The gender similarities hypothesis’, American Psychologist 60, 6 (September 2005) 581–592
42 See also Robert Plomin and Terry T Foch, ‘Sex differences and individual differences’, Child Development, 52, 1 (March 1981), 383–5
43 Stephen Moss, ‘Do women really talk more?’, Guardian, 27 November 2006
44 Deborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (London: Virago, 1991), pp24–5
45 Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference, op cit, p62
46 How male or female is your brain?, retrieved 2 November 2008 from http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/news/page/0,12983,937443,00.html; questionnaire retrieved 2 November 2008 from http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/table/0,,937442,00.html
47 The Sex ID test, retrieved 2 November 2008 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sex/index_cookie.shtml
48 Nancy Eisenberg and Randy Lennon, ‘Sex differences in empathy and related capacities’, Psychological Bulletin, 94, 1 (1983), 100–31; see also Richard Fabes and Nancy Eisenberg, ‘Meta analyses of age and sex differences in children’s and adolescents’ prosocial behaviour’, Arizona State University (1998), retrieved 15 July 2007 from http://www.public.asu.edu/~rafabes/meta.pdf
49 Sara Snodgrass, ‘Women’s intuition: the effect of subordinate role on interpersonal sensitivity’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49 (1985), 146–55, p152; see also Sara Snodgrass, ‘Furthe
r effects of role versus gender on interpersonal sensitivity’, Journal of Personality and Social Pscyhology, 61 (1992), 154–8
50 Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, op cit, p356
51 Roger Highfield, ‘QED’, Sunday Telegraph, 18 April 2004
52 Minette Marrin, ‘This equality for women is an injustice for men’, Sunday Times, 29 June 2008
53 Janet Shibley Hyde and Nita M McKinley, ‘Gender differences in cognition: results from meta-analysis’, in Paula Caplan, Mary Crawford, Janet Shibley Hyde, John T E Richardson eds, Gender Differences in Human Cognition (Oxford University Press, 1997), p35. See also Janet Shibley Hyde, ‘The gender similarities hypothesis’, American Psychologist, 60, 6 (Sept 2005), pp581–92
54 Melissa Hines, op cit, p222
55 Jonathan E Roberts and Martha Ann Bell, ‘Sex differences on a computerised mental rotation task disappear with computer familiarisation’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 91 (2000), 1027–34
56 For instance, a test carried out in 2002 in which boys and girls were given their mental rotations tests after and before being given computer games to play found that boys outperformed girls before the groups had played the games, but their scores were the same after the girls and the boys had had the chance to play the computer games. R De Lisi and J L Wolford, ‘Improving children’s mental rotation accuracy with computer game playing’, Genetic Psychology, 163, 3 (September 2002), 272–82. One review of evidence to 2002 concluded ‘the evidence provides little reason to support nativist claims’: Nora Newcombe, ‘The nativist-empiricist controversy in the context of recent research on spatial and quantitative development’, Psychological Science, 13, 5 (September 2002), 395–401. What’s more, our very expectations can change people’s performance in such tests. When a test of mental image rotation was run with two groups of students, one group was told that success in these tests correlated well with achievement in jobs such as ‘in-flight and carrier-based aviation engineering, in-flight fighter weapons and attack/approach tactics’ while the other group was told that it correlated with success in ‘clothing and dress design, interior decoration and interior design’. In the first group, men significantly outperformed the women. M J Sharps, J L Price and J K Williams, ‘Spatial cognition and gender: instructional and stimulus influences on mental image rotation performance’, Psychology of Women Quarterly, 18 (1994), 413–25, cited in Virginia Valian, Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p157
Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism Page 26