{"id":419,"date":"2018-02-05T16:58:29","date_gmt":"2018-02-05T21:58:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/?p=419"},"modified":"2018-02-05T16:58:53","modified_gmt":"2018-02-05T21:58:53","slug":"delusions-of-gender","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/?p=419","title":{"rendered":"Delusions of Gender"},"content":{"rendered":"

I kind of forgot to have kids. When my body told me with finality that I was never going to be a mom, I was surprised by a rush of regret.\u00a0 Coincidentally, I read Louanne Brizendine\u2019s book, The Female Brain.<\/em>*\u00a0 It was a relief to be told that the tumult in my mind wasn\u2019t my intellectual self or even my emotional self.\u00a0 It was my hormonal self.<\/p>\n

Brizendine, a neuropsychiatrist on the faculty of\u00a0 the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, tracks the waves of hormones that we produce \u2014 from birth through childhood, teen years, adulthood, into aging \u2014 and the behavior patterns that result.\u00a0 Females, she writes, have always needed to be highly tuned to the feelings and actions of others.\u00a0 Carrying and raising a baby was dangerous in early social groups.\u00a0 A woman had to insure that she and her children were safe.\u00a0 Her hormones hard-wired her to prioritize relationships over wants.<\/p>\n

An Australian feminist I met while teaching at Harvard\u2019s Kennedy School of Government took me to task for being seduced by Brizendine\u2019s theories.\u00a0 She gave me a new book to read, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences<\/em>, by cognitive neuroscientist Cordelia Fine.** Fine sets out to debunk Brizendine\u2019s work, which she calls \u201cneurosexism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fine is pushing back against the idea that our brains are hard-wired for male or female behaviors. Her premise is that our culture permeates our minds to create behavior, and that behavior then becomes part of the social context. She doesn\u2019t deny that there are sex differences in the brain. She points out, though, that the popular use of neuroscience to explain gender inequality simply reinforces old-fashioned beliefs about the position of men and women in society.<\/p>\n

She begins with a litany of quotes: \u201cWomen are incapable of penetrating to truths that are slightly difficult to discover,\u201d Nicholas Malebranche, 17th century French philosopher; \u201cThe female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy; the male brain is predominantly wired for understanding and building systems,\u201d Simon Baron-Cohen, 21st century Cambridge University psychologist.\u00a0 Not very different from the statement of former Harvard president Lawrence Summers that women can\u2019t succeed in math careers because they are biologically less capable than men.<\/p>\n

She describes a set of \u201cstereotype threat\u201d experiments. When women subjects were presented with subtle information that they weren\u2019t as good at math as men, they performed more poorly than men on math tests.\u00a0 When the subjects were told the opposite, they exceeded male performance. \u201cHaving seen what effect on career interests a simple, brief manipulation in the lab can have, one can\u2019t help wonder at the cumulative influence of\u2026life,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n

Fine takes on the Catch-22 that women in leadership roles endure.\u00a0 She notes that Hilary Clinton was described in 2006 as \u201ctoo angry to be elected president.\u201d\u00a0 This handcuffed her, as Maureen Down wrote in the New York Times:\u00a0 \u201cIf she doesn\u2019t speak out strongly, she\u2019s timid and girlie. If she does, she\u2019s a witch and a shrew.\u201d\u00a0 Sending out resumes for stereotypically male jobs, experimenters found that male candidates were preferred no matter what their qualifications.\u00a0 The female candidates were considered less qualified for the job, even if on paper they were identical.\u00a0 If a candidate was perceived to be a mother, the discrimination was even stronger.<\/p>\n

A large portion of her book examines various experiments which \u201cproved\u201d that male brains are spatial and systems oriented, while female brains are geared toward feelings.\u00a0 One by one, she reveals how flaws in the research were caused by subconscious bias.\u00a0 She posits that neuroscientists are \u201cunwittingly projecting assumptions about gender onto the vast unknown that is the brain.\u201d<\/p>\n

The most intriguing section was about how children acquire their beliefs about gender roles.\u00a0 Even in the womb, a fetus receives gendered information: a mother speaks to her unborn daughter with a softer tone of voice and gentler vocabulary than to a son. Infants see people around them performing gendered activities.\u00a0 Toddlers are assaulted with advertising that is highly gendered creating the \u201cpink princess\u201d phenomenon.\u00a0 Even children\u2019s literature, which should have a higher standard, favors boys\u2019 adventures over girls\u2019, mothers who are at home wearing an apron, and fathers who bring home the bacon.<\/p>\n

Fine ends with a chapter on the plasticity of the brain.\u00a0 Biology does not beget behavior; it\u2019s the other way around.\u00a0 She writes, \u201cThe circuits of the brain are a product of your physical, social and cultural environment, as well as your behavior and thoughts.\u00a0 What we experience and do creates neural activity that can alter the brain.\u201d\u00a0 And not just the brain: our genes and hormones are affected, too.\u00a0 What we do then touches others\u2019 actions and attitudes. The cycle is reinforced \u2014 and pretty soon we are said to be hard-wired.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019m thinking is this: we are in the midst of a tumultuous turning point in society\u2019s beliefs about women\u2019s capabilities, desires, and roles. We aren\u2019t hard-wired to be from Venus while men are from Mars. \u201cTime\u2019s Up\u201d isn\u2019t just about calling out sexual harassment, it\u2019s about claiming our equality.\u00a0 Women\u2019s marches all over the country aren\u2019t just about protesting our current administration.\u00a0 They are about saying, \u201cWe are powerful, too!\u201d\u00a0 And the new push for women to storm the male political bastion isn\u2019t just so we can affect legislation.\u00a0 It\u2019s to say that women are, and always have been, exceptionally capable of running the show.<\/p>\n

* Brizendine, Louanne, THE FEMALE BRAIN (New York:\u00a0 Three Rivers Press, 2006).<\/p>\n

** Fine, Cordelia, DELUSIONS OF GENDER: THE REAL SCIENCE BEHIND SEX DIFFERENCES (London: Icon Books, 2010).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I kind of forgot to have kids. When my body told me with finality that I was never going to be a mom, I was surprised by a rush of regret.\u00a0 Coincidentally, I read Louanne Brizendine\u2019s book, The Female Brain.*\u00a0 It was a relief to be told that the tumult in my mind wasn\u2019t my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=419"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":420,"href":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419\/revisions\/420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}