Inferior

by Angela Saini

  Without evidence of a clear connection between the “extreme male brain” and testosterone, when their findings were published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry in 2014, Baron-Cohen and his colleagues instead claimed to see a correlation between autism and a mixture of hormones, including testosterone, but also the female sex hormones, progesterone and estrogen. He tells me the reason they did this is because “the sex steroid hormones in that pathway are not independent of each other because each is synthesized from its precursor so that the level of one hormone will directly affect the level of the next one in the pathway.”

  Hines has since run her own study of correlations between fetal testosterone levels and autistic traits on children with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which was published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry in 2016. She found no link.

  I can’t help wondering what Hines thinks is going on in her own field. She falls short of using the word sexism, but she does believe scientists haven’t always done as good a job on sex and gender differences as they could have done. “I don’t think people do it intentionally. I think these are things we deal with every day,” she says. Gender is one of those subjects that everyone has an opinion on, and of course, of which everyone has direct experience. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, there’s sometimes a lack of objectivity in the field.

  “It’s hard to separate our opinion from the data,” she warns. “I think this is something the human mind does. It wants to have things that define maleness and things that define femaleness. Now maleness, historically in psychology, has been instrumentality, so that’s kind of like systemizing, and femaleness has been nurturing, warmth, kind of like empathy. So there is a long tradition of conceptualizing this in similar ways. . . . But I’m not sure where it gets us, because there’s lots of overlap. So you can’t give someone a test and get these scores and say they’re male or female. There’s too much individual variability.”

  “I think we really have to be extraordinarily careful. . .when we talk about overlapping populations with huge variability,” agrees Brown University’s Anne Fausto-Sterling, one of the world’s leading researchers on gender.

  She believes that Simon Baron-Cohen’s theory of male and female brains makes little sense. Connecting testosterone levels before birth to behavioral sex differences later on, she says, “is just this huge explanatory leap, and it leaves me uncomfortable because I don’t think it’s much of a scientific explanation when you make such a big leap. . . . We do see the differences, and I don’t disagree with that finding. What I disagree with is leaping to the idea that that this means it is something innate or inborn,” she adds. “I do think that if you just jump to the prenatal. . .you miss a whole developmental window when something very important and very social is going on.”

  Fausto-Sterling belongs to a vanguard of biologists and psychologists who see the nature versus nurture question as old-fashioned. “There is a better way of looking at the body and how it works in the world, and understanding the body as a socially formed entity, which it is,” she explains. Men and women may be different, but only in the same way that every individual is from the next. Or, as she has also put it, “that gender differences fall on a continuum, not into two separate buckets.”

  “I think that people tend to think of this in an either-or kind of way,” agrees Teodora Gliga. Either girls and boys are born very different or they’re the same. The scientific picture emerging now is that there may be very small biological differences, but that these can be so easily reinforced by society that they appear much bigger as a child grows.

  “My opinion is that you will find differences wherever they were reinforced, because we love categories,. . .we need to have categories. And so once we’ve decided, once we’ve labeled ‘this is a girl,’ ‘this is a boy,’ then we have so many culturally strong biases that we maybe produce differences in abilities. So for example, in physical abilities, if we push boys to be more active and to deal with danger, then of course later in life when they’re children, they will look different. But that does not mean the differences were in the biology,” says Gliga.

  Instead of the binary categories we have now, Fausto-Sterling believes that every individual should be thought of as a developmental system—a unique and ever-changing product of upbringing, culture, history, and experience, as well as biology. Only this way, she argues, can we truly get to the heart of why women and men across the world appear to be so different from each other, when studies into mathematics ability, intelligence, motor skills, and almost every other measure consistently tell us they’re not.

  If toy preferences don’t emerge until at least age one and other differences reveal themselves even later, she suggests, then what else could be happening up until age one? One line of research that hasn’t been fully explored, for example, is counting exactly how many toys babies are given in the first year of life, and what kinds of toys they are. “I can say that boys see more boys’ toys and girl see more girls’ toys, but honestly there is no data to show that,” she says.

  In her most recent research project, Fausto-Sterling has tried to get closer to answers by filming mothers playing with their children. She recounts one vivid example: “You see a little three-month-old boy, just slouched on the couch. He’s not even big enough to sit up on his own, but he’s kind of propped up with pillows. His mother is trying to engage him in play, and she’s stuffing little soft footballs in his face, American footballs. . . . She’s thrusting this football at him and saying, ‘Don’t you want to hold the football? Don’t you want to play football like your daddy does?’ And he’s just sitting there like a kind of blob. He has no interest one way or the other,” she describes.

  The impact of actions like these, small as they may seem, can be long lasting. “If that kind of interaction is going on iteratively in the early months, then if at some point he does reach out and grab, when he’s big enough to do that, at four months, five months, or six months, he’s going to get a very positive reinforcing response from his mother,” Fausto-Sterling explains. This relationship between the boy and footballs is strengthened as he sees how happy they make his mother, and also because the toy is already so familiar to him. “He may see them again at an older age, when he is more capable of physically interacting with them. And just seeing them and recognizing them may give him a certain kind of pleasure.” By the end, the boy appears to love football.

  Fausto-Sterling adds that evidence is emerging from her team’s observations of mothers that boys are also handled differently from girls, which might be influencing the way they grow. “The mothers of sons in my cohort are moving them around a lot more. They’re shifting them, they’re playing with them, and they’re talking to them less. They’re more affectionate to them when they’re moving them physically.” This could simply be because boys demand more physical movement from the start, but again, it’s another element of the development process that hasn’t been fully studied.

  Work like hers, while in its early days, reinforces that countless little thumb marks are in the ball of dough that is a developing child. Hormonal effects on the brain or other deep-seated biological gaps aren’t necessarily the most powerful reason for the gaps we see between the sexes. Culture and upbringing could better explain why boys and girls grow up to seem different from each other.

  And if this is the case, a change in culture or tweaks to upbringing might reverse the differences. “If you see what you think is a disability, don’t understand how it developed in the body and where it came from. Understand that bodies are shaped by culture from the very get-go,” explains Fausto-Sterling. “If you neglect a child at birth, their brain stops developing and they’re pretty messed up. If you highly stimulate a child, if they’re within a normal developmental range, they now develop all sorts of capacities you didn’t know they had or didn’t have the potential to develop. So the question always goes back to how development works.”

  Melissa Hines agrees that there’
s no reason nature should determine a girl’s destiny, despite her studies showing that testosterone may explain some small behavioral sex differences. “I do believe that testosterone prenatally sets things in motion in a certain direction, but that doesn’t mean it’s inevitable. It’s like a river. You can change its course if you want to,” she tells me.

  Changing the river’s course is easier than it seems. It depends on society wanting to change in the first place. And this is a world in which even cold, rational scientists can’t abandon their desire to hunt for differences between women and men. The effects of testosterone on the brain are just one example. In 2013 a team from Taiwan, Cyprus, and the United Kingdom (in which, incidentally, one member was neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen) highlighted another. They got together a large number of independent studies into sex differences in brain volume and density to see what they could tell us in summary. In their paper published the following year, the team proclaimed that men’s brains were typically bigger by volume than women’s brains. The gap ranges from 8 to 13 percent.

  This isn’t news. It’s long been known that men have on average slightly bigger heads and slightly bigger brains than women. It’s a finding that’s been popping up in scientific journals for more than a century.

  But it indicates a problem that doesn’t go away, no matter how much time passes. Brain researchers have never been able to resist the urge to scour the skulls of women and men in search of variation. And the reason they persist with this endeavor is simple. Because if a man’s brain looks physically different from a woman’s, well then, perhaps this will confirm that something different is going on in their minds, too.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Missing Five Ounces of the Female Brain

  The clearness and strength of the brain of the woman prove continually the injustice of the clamorous contempt long poured upon what was scornfully called “the female mind.”

  —Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics, 1898

  On the twenty-ninth of September, 1927, a dead brain made the news. It appeared on page five of the Cornell Daily Sun.

  Before I tell you why, let me tell you about this brain’s owner. It belonged to the teacher and writer Alice Chenoweth Day, who by the time of her death was better known by the pen name Helen Hamilton Gardener. Since 1875 Gardener had lived with her husband in New York, where she was a passionate advocate for the rights of women. One of her books, Facts and Fictions of Life, railed against the way women were kept subservient by society though unequal education and marriage.

  Gardener’s work echoed that of suffragist and writer Eliza Burt Gamble, who was her contemporary. She, too, was incensed by the way scientific “facts” were being used to hold women back in their fight for equality. In 1888 Gardener gave a talk titled “Sex in Brain” at the convention of the International Council of Women in Washington, DC, complaining that scientists studying the brain claimed that women’s brains were lighter than men’s, and that by extension, they must also be less intelligent. One of the most high-profile men to suggest this was William Alexander Hammond, no less than surgeon general in the US Army and one of the founders of the American Neurological Association.

  Gardener didn’t have the education she needed to prove that Hammond was wrong. Few people, she lamented, “had the anatomical and anthropological information to risk a fight on a field which assumed to be held by those who based all of their arguments upon scientific facts, collected by microscope and scales and reduced to unanswerable statistics.” If scientists wanted to make such outrageous assertions, what could she or any other layperson do to fight them?

  “I finally, with fear and trembling, made up my mind to learn what he knew on this subject or perish in the attempt,” she announced. She ended up working alongside New York doctor Edward Spitzka, soon to become president of the American Neurological Association, in the hope of understanding the brain’s anatomy enough to be able to challenge the great William Hammond. It took her fourteen months to dissect his statistics, while corresponding with twenty anatomists and doctors across New York.

  In a beautifully clever and witty letter eventually published in Popular Science Monthly, she revealed that all her experts couldn’t distinguish between a male and female brain at birth. Even among adults, it would be a mere guess whether a given brain was male or female. The overlap between the sexes was just too big. Her sharpest observation was that the weight of a person’s brain couldn’t be a measure of intelligence, anyway. It was the ratio of body weight to brain weight or body size to brain size that was important. If that weren’t the case, she remarked, “an elephant might out-think any of us.” Indeed we should expect a creature as huge as a whale, with its correspondingly huge brain, to be a genius.

  Her arguments were compelling, but apparently not compelling enough. William Hammond replied to Gardener with a hefty five-page letter of his own (he complained that he nearly didn’t write it at all because he found the tone of hers was “so bad”). Mocking her “twenty leading brain anatomists,” he repeated his own results. He added, “Ten men who were remarkable for their intellectual development” were found to have particularly heavy brains, on average weighing more than fifty-four ounces. “Now, let Miss Gardener and the ‘twenty leading brain-anatomists,’ etc., search the records of anthropology and their own immense collections for the brain of a woman weighing as much as the least of these,” he challenged.

  A month after her letter was published, George John Romanes, an eminent evolutionary biologist and friend of Charles Darwin, also weighed in. “Seeing that the average brain-weight of women is about five ounces less than that of men, on merely anatomical grounds we should be prepared to expect a marked inferiority of intellectual power in the former,” he argued in Popular Science Monthly. “We must look the facts in the face. How long it may take the woman of the future to recover the ground which has been lost in the psychological race by the woman of the past, it is impossible to say; but we may predict with confidence that, even under the most favourable conditions as to culture, and even supposing the mind of man to remain stationary,. . .it must take many centuries for heredity to produce the missing five ounces of the female brain.”

  The fight over those missing five ounces was a bitter one, and it was never resolved in Helen Hamilton Gardener’s lifetime. Scientists like William Hammond and George John Romanes “gave a black eye to their facts in preserving a blind eye to their faith,” she warned.

  Gardener promised, fittingly, to leave her brain to science before she died. In 1925 it ended up in the Wilder Brain Collection at Cornell University (it’s still there, preserved in a jar). And this is how the Cornell Daily Sun happened to feature an article about Helen Hamilton Gardener in 1927. When it was studied, her brain weighed in at 1,150 grams (approx. 2.5 pounds), around five ounces less than the average male brain. But this didn’t mean she wasn’t vindicated. “In the structure of her own brain Mrs. Gardener has presented abundant evidence that the brain of a woman need not be inferior to that of a man of equal rank,” the newspaper report proclaimed. Hers happened to weigh the same as that of esteemed anatomy and neurology professor at Cornell, Burt Green Wilder—the very founder of the brain collection itself.

  Gardener’s point was made. Today it’s well established that brain size is related to body size. Paul Matthews, the head of brain sciences at Imperial College London, tells me, “If you correct for skull size, there are very tiny differences between the two sexes, but their brains are much more similar than they are different.” The missing five ounces are accounted for.

  But that hasn’t stopped scientists, even today, combing brains for evidence that women think differently from men.

  “Males will have an easier time seeing and doing.”

  “When did you first become interested in studying sex differences?” I ask Ruben Gur, professor of psychology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He pauses. “Since adolescence! Before that, I wasn’t
that interested,” he jokes.

  Ruben is one of two Gurs, the other being his collaborator and wife, Raquel Gur (a professor of psychiatry in the same school, who doesn’t respond to my request for an interview), who have dedicated their careers to understanding how the brains of women and men differ and what this means. Their first experiment in this niche was published in 1982, when Ruben Gur was thirty-five years old. Measuring blood flow through the brains of healthy people they found, to his surprise, that women had 15 to 20 percent higher flow rates than men. It was such an unexpected result, he tells me, that CNN was outside his lab the next morning for an interview.

  This marked the start of a long string of headline-grabbing scientific publications. And their timing was perfect. In the 1970s sex difference research had experienced a decline because gender scholars and women’s rights campaigners argued that it was sexist to look for biological gaps between women and men, just as it was racist to look for differences between black and white people. Gradually, though, it became acceptable again. Neuroscience is a field in its infancy when judged by the task it has ahead of it. The brain is as dense and complex a thing as anyone has ever studied, with billions of nerve cells and an impossibly sophisticated web of connections between them. But understanding has recently been improved thanks to new imaging technologies, which allow scientists to understand brain activity in more detail than ever. These technologies have reinvigorated the search for difference. In 2006 the Gurs were invited to appear on the Today show to use one of these scanners to spot differences between the show’s medical editor’s brain and that of her husband.