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No ard wired differences between sexes?
it seems like the latest research shows that there is little difference between the cognitive/thinking skills of males and females (from the observer, via sydney morning herald):
Forget those who say men and women are fundamentally different, writes Robin McKie.
It’s the mainstay of countless media articles. Differences between male and female abilities – from map reading to multi-tasking and from parking to expressing emotion – can be traced to variations in the hard-wiring of their brains at birth, it is claimed.
Men instinctively like the colour blue and are bad at coping with pain, we are told, while women cannot tell jokes but are innately superior at empathising with others. Key evolutionary differences separate the intellects of men and women, and it is all down to our ancient hunter-gatherer genes that program our brains.
The belief has become widespread, particularly in the wake of the publication of international bestsellers such as John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus which stress the innate differences between the minds of men and women.
Delusions of Gender author Cordelia Fine.But now a growing number of scientists are challenging the pseudo-science of ”neurosexism”, as they call it, and are raising concerns about its implications. These researchers argue that by telling parents that boys have poor chances of acquiring good verbal skills and girls have little prospect of developing mathematical prowess, serious and unjustified obstacles are being placed in the paths of children’s education.
In fact, there are no major neurological differences between the sexes, says Cordelia Fine in her book Delusions of Gender, to be published by Icon next month. There may be slight variations in the brains of women and men, says Fine, a researcher at Melbourne University, but the wiring is soft, not hard. ”It is flexible, malleable and changeable,” she says.
In short, our intellects are not prisoners of our genders or our genes, and those who claim otherwise are merely coating old-fashioned stereotypes with a veneer of scientific credibility.
It is a case backed by Lise Eliot, an associate professor based at the Chicago Medical School. ”All the mounting evidence indicates these ideas about hard-wired differences between male and female brains are wrong,” she says.
”Yes, there are basic behavioural differences between the sexes, but we should note that these differences increase with age because our children’s intellectual biases are being exaggerated and intensified by our gendered culture. Children don’t inherit intellectual differences. They learn them. They are a result of what we expect a boy or a girl to be.”
Thus boys develop improved spatial skills not because of an innate superiority but because they are expected and are encouraged to be strong at sport, which requires expertise at catching and throwing. Similarly, it is anticipated that girls will be more emotional and talkative, and so their verbal skills are emphasised by teachers and parents.
The latter example, on the issue of verbal skills, is particularly revealing, neuroscientists argue. Girls do begin to speak earlier than boys, by about a month on average, a fact that is seized upon by supporters of the Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus school of intellectual differences.
However, this gap is really a tiny difference compared to the vast range of linguistic abilities that differentiate people, Robert Plomin, a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, says. His studies have found that a mere 3 per cent of the variation in young children’s verbal development is due to their gender.
”If you map the distribution of scores for verbal skills of boys and of girls, you get two graphs that overlap so much, you would need a very fine pencil indeed to show the difference between them. Yet people ignore this huge similarity between boys and girls, and instead exaggerate wildly the tiny difference between them. It drives me wild,” Plomin says.
This point is backed by Eliot. ”Yes, boys and girls, men and women, are different,” she states in a recent paper in New Scientist. ”But most of those differences are far smaller than the Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus stereotypes suggest.
”Nor are the reasoning, speaking, computing, emphasising, navigating and other cognitive differences fixed in the genetic architecture of our brains. All such skills are learned, and neuro-plasticity – the modifications of neurons and their connections in response experience – trumps hard-wiring every time.”
The present popular stress on innate intellectual differences between the sexes is, in part, a response to psychologists’ emphasis of the environment’s importance in the development of skills and personality in the 1970s and early 1980s, Eliot says. This led to a reaction against nurture as the principal factor in the development of human characteristics and to an exaggeration of the influence of genes and inherited abilities. This view is also popular because it propagates the status quo, she says.
”We are being told there is nothing we can do to improve our potential because it is innate. That is wrong. Boys can develop powerful linguistic skills and girls can acquire deep spatial skills.”
In short, women can read maps despite claims that they lack the spatial skills for such efforts, while men can learn to empathise and need not be isolated like Mel Gibson’s Nick Marshall, the emotionally retarded male lead of the film What Women Want and a classic stereotype of the unfeeling male that is perpetuated by the supporters of the hard-wired school of intellectual differences.
This point was also stressed by Fine. ”Many of the studies that claim to highlight differences between the brains of males and females are spurious. They are based on tests carried out on only a small number of individuals and their results are often not repeated by other scientists. However, their results are published, and are accepted by teachers and others as proof of basic differences between boys and girls.
”All sorts of ridiculous conclusions about very important issues are then made. Already sexism disguised in neuroscientific finery is changing the way children are taught.”
So should we abandon our search for the ”real” differences between the sexes and give up this ”pernicious pinkification of little girls”, as one scientist has put it? Yes, Eliot insists. ”There is almost nothing we do with our brains that is hard-wired. Every skill, attribute and personality trait is moulded by experience.”
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/lifematters/the-gender-myth-20100908-151d3.html
is that your experience? what are your thoughts? what implications does this theory have on the transgender community?
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10 Replies
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Without reading the article I can say that I would agree with what is written here. I’ll read the article in the next few days when time permits but in the meantime I know from my own thoughts and feelings that I not only like things nowadays that are “feminine” but I still am quite happy to have things in my life from previous times. I’m not ashamed of that at all and I will point out also that throughout my whole life I’ve always connected better with female conversations rather than male even though I can hold a conversation with anyone, whether that is a hard wiring issue is anyones’ guess! Maybe I’m a bit of a “tomboy” but I don’t know or care, what I do know is that transition has made a much better person in many ways, regardless of what I like and feel.
I’ll put another post here after I click on the link and read the SMH. article, maybe I might change my views after that??? In the meantime consider this point in relation to the posting above, how many women out there do their work and live as well in places that are normally male orientated? The more that you think about it, the more that you seem to think that it’s not a “hard wiring” issue.
Peta A.
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I have long believed that the bias in gender abilities are culturally based.
For example, in Australia, mathematics is typically considered a male domain. Fewer girls do advanced maths at high school or university. However, when I visited some Eastern European ex-Soviet countries, I found that the ratio of girls and boys doing maths is pretty much 50/50. A friend from Latvia who visited Australia was very surprised to find that Australia has such a gender-biased view of education. Incidentally, she was an excellent map reader
There is also a difference in careers in the Soviet Union. In engineering positions, there are as many women as men. A bus or truck driver was just as likely to be a woman as a man (in contrast to Australia).
That’s not to say that women over there are not “feminine”; they certainly are! They also partake of all the Western “typically” feminine things such as fashion, makeup and having long deep and meaningful chats.
As the article suggests, gender roles and abilities are reinforced from a young age in our society. From personal experience, I can confirm that gender roles and abilities are often different in different cultures.
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I think that this an interesting point. I have long observed just how strongly parents gender their kids, mostly without knowing. Big boys don’t cry, getting the girls to do more housework, more rough and tumble with boys etc. Research has been done showing that male babies are stimulated more and girls are left to be more passive even when children were misidentified to the onlooker. they treated the sexes differently. It is such a subtle and established thing that it becomes the default and like a fish does not know water, we think that it is the only way to see gender. It is at the heart of the difficulties that transgender folk have in being recognized and accepted in society IMO. Basically women are seen as inferior thinkers and practitioners by men and are often coerced into playing along with this myth.
Things are rapidly changing in gender roles but the fact is that for centuries women were not allowed or at best discouraged from entering into male realms of life, no wonder that they often fear to try ” male” skills and are often judged harshly if they do not match up or are ridiculed and put down if they excel in a male world. If a businessperson is successful and a male then he may be seen as a “hardheaded man” but if she is a woman she may be seen as a ball breaker!
I really think that a lot of women are encouraged to dumb down and hide their skills in order to stroke the egos of the men around them, I have seen it often enough how subtly men can put down women( and visa versa I guess.) -
Of course the brain of a woman fires off differently to that of a man.
It is true that woman think spontaneous and men are planners.
Men are hunters, planners and when the catch is returned the woman act spontaneously by preparing the catch for consumption.Im not sure if our brains are all universal, that is, the change can be a reconfiguration of the wiring, i rather think that the male side just gets canceled out.
I think we all start out as female but the male extras are added.
It seems to be mtf has a higher success than the reverse.
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Maddy , the point of the article seems to be not that men and women may think differently , rather that the differences are hard wired and therefore fixed.
I just think that the gendering of children is so subtle and pervasive at times that it is hard to differentiate between nurture and nature.
The other factor is that the attitudes and gender bias of the judger of these differences will always affect the outcome. I don’t believe that we can ever be totally objective in our viewing of others or ourselves for that matter. -
Hi Everyone…
I guess I agree fundamentally. But there must be some major differences that are hardwired because the feotal brain is the first thing ‘Masculinised’ by the woman’s own testosterone. What does this testosterone do then if not some hardwiring? Othewise we would all have the same gender-neutral brains that are simply ‘trained’ what to be.
However, more people nowadays see gender as a spectrum rather than pink on one side of the fence and blue on the other.
I know that very many women are excellent at science…cosmology, physics, etc. I must admit, however, that I cannot recall seeing any women at the top of these fields that I would call ‘overly feminine’ to say the least …(No offense to them….just an observation). Perhaps they are ‘gender-advantaged’ somehow? What about those University tests too. They relate to spacial vision and memory…can these be taught?
I dont know, I am just throwing some observations into the ring.Monique
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This is a great discussion – Thanks Virginia. The other posts are great too.
I agree with Julie (?) that gender conditioning is very subtle. I know that although I have always had a strong feminine side I have also played with my son Rory in a male way. Rough and tumble, cars and trains etc. I have tried to consciously show him that whatever he wants to do is OK. He had a doll for a while which he loved. It was his baby and we loved seeing him play in that way.
But even so I have felt that subtly I turn him towards male stuff even when i havent particularly been conscious of it. It is indeed pervasive and very subtle.
That I think is the hard wired part. That if one has a male child then there is a lean towards playing with them and doing things that let them know subtly what is male and what is not. And vice versa for a girl child. So then one day (although i abhor violence) he is playing guns and killing. Where did that come from? But then he went to childcare too. More subtle conditioning. And peer experience of male gender bias stuff.
So….I dont think that there is certainly as much hard wiring as the likes of “Men are from mars and Women from Venus” suggests. And like Virginia and others I think that people believing it is deleterious to kids and themselves.
But how does one change that part of the brain (parents brains in particular) that encourages gender biased ways in everyday life when one isnt always fully aware of what is going on?? I dont know.
Certainly my boy has a whole new take on what it is to be male now
And thankfully he has taken it in his stride.But I digress: the sooner this gender based bias of hard wiring is exploded the better for everyone.
Love Roisin.[img][/img]
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Well I must have had a “moment” and wasn’t thinking as a result. The SMH. article is what Virginia posted so I can’t say anymore than what I said previously. In retrospect though, I still think that more often than not we are brought up to be different as either males or females, nothing more and nothing less. If you want to change then you can if you put your mind to it, as I said before the hard wiring isn’t there so sit down and really work it out and you’ll see.
Peta A.
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Peta, the way I see it ( and have posted so before I think) is that we are born male or female ( or some mix between the two “poles”) but the terms man and woman are social constructs and we are taught how to behave ” like” one or the other. These constructs differ between societies and groups within them and so the outcomes are diverse in detail but tend to follow general trends ie men don’t generally wear makeup, women do. I am constantly puzzled why men’s clothes are usually bland and practical and women’s have more flair and style nowadays, it was not always so and this proves my point, society changes. In 30 years of hairdressing I have never been asked to perm or colour a ( straight ) mans hair , though I once set a transsexual woman’s hair as the ” girls” at the salon were too scared of her and though I was in the closet I envied her courage, this was the 70’s! The gender lines are too rigid .These things have nothing to do with biology but are markers to ones gender. This is where we come in because we cross those boundaries in our behaviour and so threaten the general ( should I say it? ) paradigm.
This a simplification of the issue I know but is how I observe the world. -
Ooooh, I think this topic is gonna be a goodie. I know my own opinion on who I am and why I am this way have changed just in the three and a bit years I have been on TR. My current feelings are that how gender presents itself is a social construct and that most of the character and ability traits that we see in others are familial more than gender related.
That said I do believe that how we respond to societal expectations is to a certain extent ( and for want of a better phrase) hard-wired. given that I believe that we inherit our fundamental id and all that it comprises, It follows to me that there ought to be some degree of inherited gender, sexuality et al. It would seem illogical if that were not the case.
I don’t have any real theories as to where the root cause of all this lies but I’m keen to see what other ideas and beliefs exist out there.
