Delusions of Gender

This is very helpful book. Cordelia Fine has made a clear riposte to ... well a quote will give an idea: "from the seeds of scientific speculation grow the monstrous fictions of popular writers" and in particular, as the title would hint, she's exposing the delusions of popular 'scientific' books on gender and neuroscience particularly using fMRI brain research. These books of the 'Men are from Mars, women are from Venus' ilk. Basically the book argues that the big hole in interpreting the brain-scan evidence and similar gender-related neuroscientific research is that so many of the popular gender-deluded popularisations fail to properly address the big issue: which came first? -the chicken of gender-related biological brain formation or the egg of gender-related culture which in turn forms the brain in gender-distinct ways. Fine makes the case for treating the latter hypothesis far more seriously. ("the critical idea that the psyche is ‘not a discrete entity packed in the brain. Rather, it is a structure of psychological processes that are shaped by and thus closely attuned to the culture that surrounds them")

The important thing to note, looking at research relating to brains and gender (either together or apart) is that one of the more assured results is that brains are 'plastic' that is they continue to change and to 're-wire' through our lives, so this gives a big question mark to the idea of biological determinism where the brain is concerned. The other thing that our attention is brought to (quite extensively) is research which shows how extensive is our ability to unconsciously take in and internalise clues and cues from our social environment and then have them informing attitudes and behaviours without us being really aware of where they've come from (so they 'feel' natural, somehow). Relatedly, much research shows how early the learning machines known as infants and young children take such things in.

She also shows how gender-marked is much of our daily life and language which would add to the unconscious incentive for young children to master the identity and social interactive behaviours that depend on gender. in other words, it is very likely that culture forms brains in regard to gender far more thoroughly and extensively than we are usually aware.

One of the other things this book does is to show how much of the popular gender-difference brain science is actually badly informed and/or running way ahead of the actual evidence which (when looked at more closely) is far less supportive of the men/women: Mars/Venus approach ("There’s something a little shocking about the discrepancy between the weakness of the scientific data on the one hand and the strength of the popular claims on the other"). And, where there are physiological differences between male and female brains, there is considerable overlap between the genders, meaning lots of men and women are actually pretty indistinguishable brainwise with only extreme outliers being clearly differentiated. Furthermore even where there are these statistical probabilities relating to (eg) brain size, the hypothesised effects of such differences as well as being inapplicable to very high proportions of the human population of both genders (because they are not 'outliers'), the effects of neuroplasticity seem well able to 'compensate' for whatever physical effects this might plausibly have -and that there is some evidence to suggest just such a thing happens.

The book goes through the most salient evidences in reasonable but not mind-numbing detail and is written with a lightness of touch and bigger-picture scope to keep a non-specialist engaged but with sufficient referencing to allow return to sources of research and primary interpretation.

I found it challenging to be shown just how much psychological priming and social framing goes on which feeds in to individuals unconsciously giving us quite extensive gender-scripting which we are barely aware of and which communicates to children in a myriad of subtle ways. None of the little primings are much in themselves, but so pervasive are they that every day they weave a tapestry of inference which builds a picture of difference which is based overwhelmingly on cultural attitudes rather than actual biology or innate psychology.

One of the other things that comes out of this book, though not a main strand, is also a bit of history about gender difference in western culture. This has the effect of supporting the main thesis by showing just how contingent some of the 'givens' about gender difference really are and just how viciously circular popular 'scientific' rationalisations about gender roles and biology and psychology have been and, by implication, are. For example: "Dresses for boys older than two years old began to fall out of favour towards the end of the nineteenth century. This was not mere whim, but seemed to be in response to concerns that masculinity and femininity might not, after all, inevitably unfurl from deep biological roots. At the same time that girls were being extended more parental licence to be physically active, child psychologists were warning that ‘gender distinctions could be taught and must be’. Some pants, please, for the boys. After the turn of the century, psychologists became more aware of just how sensitive even infants are to their environments. As a result, ‘[t] he same forces that had altered the clothing styles of preschoolers – anxiety about shifting gender roles and the emerging belief that gender could be taught – also transformed infantswear."

In short, a must-read book for anyone concerned with debates on gender where science, particularly neuroscience, is being called to the bar.

I also found some interesting passages that raise a missional issue for Christians in relation to gender, but I'll pick those up in another post, hopefully in the next day or two.

Some quotes with notes ...
talking about the pervasiveness of unconscious cues for attitudes: "Unlike explicitly held knowledge, where you can be reflective and picky about what you believe, associative memory seems to be fairly indiscriminate in what it takes on board. Most likely, it picks up and responds to cultural patterns in society, media and advertising, which may well be reinforcing implicit associations you don’t consciously endorse"
I found this interesting as it chimes with semiotics and connotative meanings.

On the same theme but relating it to our 'social outputs': "people socially ‘tune’ their self-evaluations to blend with the opinion of the self held by others. With a particular person in mind, or in anticipation of interacting with them, self-conception adjusts to create a shared reality"
And, of course, this is important to gender-based attitudes and behaviours: "we find that what is being chalked up to hardwiring on closer inspection starts to look more like the sensitive tuning of the self to the expectations lurking..."

And a lot of differences that we think we see between the sexes may actually be about attention and perception (including self-perception, upon which a lot of studies rely): "no gender difference was found for studies using unobtrusive physiological or facial/gestural measures as an index of empathy.) In other words, women and men may differ not so much in actual empathy but in ‘how empathetic they would like to appear to others (and, perhaps, to themselves)"

There've been quite a lot of studies into priming and the way this affects reported attitudes and behaviours. For Example: "[it is] remarkably easy to adjust the shine of a career path for one sex. A few words to the effect that a Y chromosome will serve in your favour, or a sprucing up of the interior design, is all that it takes to bring about surprisingly substantial changes in career interest" and even more sharply: "one study found that women given a journal article to read that claimed that men are better at maths because of innate, biological and genetic differences performed worse on a GRE-like maths test than women shown an essay saying that men’s greater effort underlies their superior performance" And slightly more generally (and with an educationalist implication): "Carol Dweck and her colleagues have discovered that what you believe about intellectual ability – whether you think it’s a fixed gift, or an earned quality that can be developed – makes a difference to your behaviour, persistence and performance. Students who see ability as fixed – a gift – are more vulnerable to setbacks and difficulties. And stereotypes, as Dweck rightly points out, ‘are stories about gifts – about who has them and who doesn’t."

And intriguing are studies that show that we often judge performance by who performs (and their characteristics) rather than their actual performance: "insights from the experiences of people who have lived on both sides of the gender divide offer an intriguing glimpse into the possibility that a person’s talents in the workplace are easier to recognise when that person is male"

Sometimes it is experimental design that is not well-enough thought-through and Fine passes on some instances when this has been addressed: "when the researchers divided up their stimuli in a different way – comparing amount of play with animate toys (the dog and the doll) with object toys (the pan, ball, car, and book) – they found no differences between the sexes"

And there is -outrageously- quite some doubt related to the interpretation of brain-imaging. I had to read this several times, it's written tongue-in-cheek: "some researchers recently scanned an Atlantic salmon while showing it emotionally charged photographs. The salmon – which, by the way, ‘was not alive at the time of scanning’ – was ‘asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.’ Using standard statistical procedures, they found significant brain activity in one small region of the dead fish’s brain while it performed the empathising task, compared with brain activity during ‘rest’. The researchers conclude not that this particular region of the brain is involved in postmortem piscine empathising, but that the kind of statistical thresholds commonly used in neuroimaging studies (including Witelson’s emotion-matching study) are inadequate because they allow too many spurious results through the net"



Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences eBook: Cordelia Fine: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store