Do men and women really communicate differently? From the research I've seen, the answer is a definite, yes. Some of the differences are subtle, but profound.
Men and women communicate using different language, both verbal and non-verbal, have different decision making styles, and can even have different senses of humor. I devoted a whole chapter to male vs. female communication style in my book The Soccer Mom Myth.
Melissa Read, Ph.D. of Engauge on female communication style
At the recent M2W conference, Melissa Read Ph. D., VP of Research and Innovation at Engauge, presented research about marketing to women online (obviously one of my favorite subjects). It was one of the better presentations I've seen on female communication style. One of the things I love about Dr. Read's work is that it's based in science. She shared brain differences between men and women and how what they say is not always what each other hears.
Here's what Dr. Read had to say about female communication style:
Female communication styles are more polite than male styles. Women are more relational, gentle, indirect and feelings-needs oriented. We give more compliments. We give and receive more apologies. Our polite communication customs drive our expectations for online interaction. We expect a polite brand experience. To give women a polite brand experience....
· Make sure brand representatives smile. We derive more meaning out of nonverbal gestures.
· Make sure brand representatives face us. We are more inclined to face each other while talking.
· Use greetings like "Hello" and "Welcome." We respond well to verbal and nonverbal greetings.
· Use a communication style that is similar to our own. We like brands that communicate like us.
Miscommunication is a common problem
I want to focus on that last bullet point. We all like to buy from people we believe are "like us," so it makes sense that women respond to brands who speak their language.
The other reason why communication style is so important is that we are constantly deriving meaning from our communications. In other words, we are judging intent, motivation, and meaning from what we believe is being communicated to us.
It is misunderstandings that so often plague brands, marketing efforts, and relationships between couples.
The words and language you use in your marketing efforts have a huge impact on women - both offline and online. With better word choices, Motrin might have avoided the Motrin Moms debacle.
The great thing about the Internet is that you can peruse product reviews, discussion forums, Facebook and Twitter to see what words women use and how they communicate. Listen to how they are talking about your product. Use their language and words in your marketing material.
Does your website have a female communication style?
medical examiner Slate Magazine
The Sex Difference Evangelists
The next best-seller.
By Amanda Schaffer
Updated Monday, July 7, 2008, at 10:10 AM ET
From: Amanda Schaffer
Subject: Meet the Believers
Posted Tuesday, July 1, 2008, at 7:50 AM ET
If there's one question we never tire of, it's whether men and women speak or feel or think in fundamentally different ways. Do women talk more than men? Are their brains hard-wired for empathy? Can innate differences explain men's and women's career choices? This is today's iteration of Mars and Venus, and it's everywhere.
Amanda Schaffer and Emily Bazelon examine the science behind claims about sex difference and the brain.
The preoccupation plays out in marketing to women and tips on dating, like products designed to "attract women by GETTING THEM TO TRUST YOU." It infiltrates magazine stories, TV, and radio. Grounding the trend and giving it traction are a handful of scientists and clinicians who have made themselves over into sex-difference evangelists. Two women in particular exemplify this move, and as self-described feminists, their work is often accorded special credence. Louann Brizendine, a psychiatrist at U.C.-San Francisco, hit the best-seller list in 2006 with The Female Brain, a book that could "change the conversation at any social gathering," as New York Times columnist David Brooks put it. Brizendine argues that "outstanding verbal agility" and "a nearly psychic capacity to read faces and tone of voice for emotions and states of mind" are "hardwired into the brains of women." Canadian psychologist Susan Pinker drove home similar claims this spring with The Sexual Paradox, which argues that innate psychological differences between men and women are vitally important and too often underestimated. These writers cast themselves as reluctant truth-tellers: "I have chosen to emphasize scientific truth over political correctness," Brizendine writes.
But are she and Pinker, in fact, fearlessly revealing? Do they show us a deep mental chasm between the sexes?
The bottom line from the science should really be this: Some differences between the minds of men and women exist. But in most areas, they are small and dwarfed by the variability within each gender. To be fair, Brizendine and Pinker intermittently acknowledge this point, and they translate complex material for a wide audience, which necessarily involves simplification. They get credit for trying.
But in the end they don't leave their readers with the correct, if unsensational, impression, which is that men and women's minds are highly similar.
Both authors push the science further than it really goes, often brushing past uncertainties or making confused evidence appear clear-cut. Even on the most hotly contested questions—like whether women have better verbal skills, or are hard-wired for empathy, or have cognitive differences that limit their advancement in math and science—the case for large, innate disparities is messy and, for the most part, underwhelming. This is especially true when it comes to neural and hormonal claims, which tend to be controversial. These writers offer canny caveats about culture and its role in gender difference. But they tend to imply that if a difference has innate roots, it's likely to be relatively fixed. And that's not necessarily so. In crucial ways, the mind is malleable. Ultimately, the evangelists aren't really daring to be politically incorrect. They're peddling one-sidedness, sprinkled with scientific hyperbole.
From: Amanda Schaffer
Subject: Pick a Little, Talk a Little
Posted Tuesday, July 1, 2008, at 7:50 AM ET
In analyzing the sex-difference claims of authors Susan Pinker and Louann Brizendine, let's start with language. Who hasn't heard that women are naturally more verbal than men—better at expressing themselves, better at reading and writing, chattier? These clichés crop up in various forms. In her book, for instance, Pinker emphasizes that girls speak earlier, outperform boys on various measures of verbal skill when they're young, and are less likely to be dyslexic. She notes that women have an advantage in verbal fluency. And in an interview, she told me that "huge differences in literacy" exist between college-age men and women. Meanwhile, Brizendine casts women as virtual talkaholics. The hardcover edition of her book asserts that "girls speak faster on average—250 words per minute versus 125 for typical males." It also claims that females use an average of 20,000 words per day compared to males' 7,000.
What is the scientific basis for these claims? Well-established literature suggests that girls tend to acquire language earlier than boys and are less likely to develop dyslexia (though the sex difference in dyslexia is less striking than some older research would suggest). But while adolescent girls may perform better on some tests of verbal ability, the gender gap is not large, according to meta-analyses assessed here. In the past couple of years, scores on the critical reading section of the SAT essentially show a dead heat for boys and girls: In 2007, they averaged 504 and 502, respectively. The new writing test on the SAT shows an advantage for girls, but it's small: In 2007, those male and female averages were 489 and 500. Sex differences on reading comprehension and vocabulary tests also appear to be small or close to zero, when all ages are taken into account. To some degree, differences in verbal ability in children or adolescents may reflect different paces of development that even out later on.
Some differences—for instance, on tests of verbal fluency—do appear in adults. (A typical verbal fluency test might ask people to list as many words as possible beginning, say, with the letter B.) But the differences between average men and women are small compared with the variation within each gender. For instance, if we take an average measure of verbal fluency for men, about 50 percent of men will score higher that that mark, and about 60 percent of women will. Which means that you'd do pretty badly if you tried to predict a person's gender from his or her verbal fluency score. What's more, these tests may have little to do with real-life communication. "When does any conversation call upon you to produce as many words as you can think of starting with B?" asks Deborah Cameron, a professor of language and communication at Oxford and author of The Myth of Mars and Venus. People may assume that "verbal fluency" means that women are more articulate or can find the words to express themselves better, she says, but that leap has not been substantiated.
Meanwhile, Brizendine's claim that women talk faster than men is unfounded, as linguist Mark Liberman has pointed out. Brizendine told me she omitted the two-to-one speed ratio from her paperback edition because she discovered that no primary sources verified it. Similarly, her assertion that women utter more words a day than men is bunk. Thanks in part to Liberman's provocation, last year University of Arizona psychologist Matthias Mehl conducted a new analysis of daily word budgets. He and his colleagues sampled speech from male and female college students, who wore recording devices that turned on every 12½ minutes throughout the day. The findings, published in Science, show that on average women use about 16,000 words per day. And so do men. (Brizendine says that this study convinced her to drop the 20,000-to-7,000-words-per-day claim. But her paperback still says that "on average girls speak two to three times more words per day than boys"—an assertion that is just as flimsy. Here's her explanation, and a critical response from the scientist she relies on.)
What makes the claims of a stark male-female split sexy, of course, is the appeal to neuroscience. Pinker, for instance, highlights a study of brain cell density, which suggests that female brains are more densely packed with neurons in an area called the posterior temporal cortex, which is associated with language. This "might explain the general female advantage in language fluency and spelling," among other things, she writes. Brizendine cites the same paper, asserting that in the "brain centers for language and hearing … women have eleven percent more neurons than men." But this paper looked at four men and five women—hardly a sample size to inspire grand claims. Neither Brizendine nor Pinker mentions this crucial caveat. And even if a difference in neuron density for that area were to be established, it's not at all clear what that would mean, if anything, given the complex circuitry that language involves.
These writers also home in on the structure that connects the brain's left and right hemispheres. Some research suggests that part of this structure, which is called the corpus callosum, is thicker in women than in men. This could mean that women have a "faster superhighway for neural messages" (Pinker) and therefore an advantage when it comes to language (as well as emotional processing). But that claim is tricky to make, and the significance of any purported size difference is deeply unclear.
Finally, Pinker argues that men "are simply less versatile when it comes to language." At first she seems to mean that they are more vulnerable to language-related problems like dyslexia, but in the paragraphs that follow, she slips from dyslexia to general measures like language fluency (and then back to dyslexia). So "less versatile" becomes a broader comment on ability, too. She suggests that men may rely more heavily on one brain hemisphere—the left—while women are more likely to use both. In particular, Pinker cites a 1995 study that asked men and women to answer questions about words and nonsense words, like whether they belonged to the same category or rhymed. Using fMRI images of the subjects' brains, the researchers found that men and women both relied on areas of the left hemisphere when answering questions. But women also used areas of the right hemisphere while men tended not to. According to Pinker, this means that if a problem occurred in the left hemisphere, "women would simply access the right hemisphere instead. Under normal circumstances sex differences would be subtle, but when things went wrong, sex differences would be extreme."
But since 1995 and the study that Pinker cites, a more complex picture has emerged, with some researchers finding that women are more likely to draw on both sides of the brain for certain language tasks, and others finding no sex difference. Maybe that's because of the types of tasks involved, but Pinker doesn't really discuss the controversy. Also, even if, on average, men and women used different neural strategies for playing certain word games, that doesn't necessarily mean one sex will perform better overall. This study, for instance, which asked subjects to put real and nonsense verbs in the past tense, found that women did tend to rely more on both brain hemispheres while men tended to rely more asymmetrically on the left hemisphere. But it made no difference in how quickly or accurately they performed.
Subtle differences could turn out to matter for men and women with specific clinical conditions. Pinker likes to say that the extremes tell us something about the rest of us. But the relevance is hard to see. (And, as it turns out, the connection between these gender-related brain findings and dyslexia is not well-established, either, however logical the connection seems.) All told, what's striking about the evidence on language is not so much a profound gap between the sexes, but the large gaps in our understanding of the brain.
From: Amanda Schaffer
Subject: Empathy Queens
Posted Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 6:27 AM ET
In an over-the-top riff on womanly feeling in her book on sex differences, psychiatrist Louann Brizendine introduces Sarah, an icon of female empathy: "Maneuvering like an F-15, Sarah's female brain is a high-performance emotion machine—geared to tracking, moment by moment, the nonverbal signals of the innermost feeling of others." In sussing out emotion, Sarah is "just doing what the female brain is expert at," Brizendine concludes.
Amanda Schaffer and Emily Bazelon discuss the science of empathy.
(Watch yesterday's video here.)
This is a core tenet of sex-difference evangelism. In 2003, British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen made the case that "The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy." Brizendine has run with that assertion, and author and psychologist Susan Pinker has jumped on the F-15 bandwagon as well, arguing that women have a powerful "empathy advantage." Culture may modify or amplify it, but this edge, these authors claim, is rooted in innate difference.
Take a closer look and you find that indeed some studies, which ask men and women about empathy, find higher-on-average scores for women (albeit with plenty of overlap between the sexes). But other research complicates the picture. To claim that any differences are innate is to descend into a rabbit hole of partial, flickering findings on infants and twins, hormones, and neural mechanisms. Brizendine and Pinker tend to downplay the complications. This makes the case that women are innately more empathetic than men seem stronger than it really is.
The simplest way to gather data on empathy is to get men and women to fill out questionnaires. Baron-Cohen's asks respondents whether they agree or disagree with statements like "I can easily tell if someone else wants to enter a conversation"; "I really enjoy caring for other people"; "When I was a child, I enjoyed cutting up worms to see what would happen." Baron-Cohen finds that women give themselves higher marks for empathizing. Further evidence comes from work by psychologist Alan Feingold, whose cross-cultural research Pinker cites. In the 1990s, Feingold reported that women in countries including the United States, Canada, Poland, Russia, and Germany (but not China) scored higher on average than men on questionnaires designed to measure how tender-minded and nurturing people are.
These studies get us only so far. Baron-Cohen calls the empathizing brain type E, or "the female brain," and contrasts it with systematizing brain type S, or "the male brain." But only 44 percent of women are type E—not even a majority. Which makes the labeling seem odd. When I asked him about this, Baron-Cohen admitted that he's thought twice about his male brain/female brain terminology, but he didn't disavow it.
What's most striking about Feingold's work, for its part, are the dates of the U.S. studies. When it comes to tender-mindedness, the largest differences between males and females come from work published between 1958 and 1962 and in 1968. The smallest differences appear in the most recent research listed, from 1985 and 1987. And the sex differences in the later studies are indeed small—the ones from 1987 are comparable to the difference in average height between 15- and 16-year-old girls.
Why did the gap narrow so dramatically? Feingold says that the later studies tended to omit items that were found to be " 'biased' against women." That might make comparisons among the studies tricky, but it also might mean that the recent numbers are more revealing. It's also worth noting that the male-female difference shrank over the very years in which second-wave feminism pushed for changes in traditional roles—and men began to spend more time with their children. Tender-mindedness, it would seem, is malleable.
Of course, what people say about themselves on questionnaires tells a limited story in any case. Psychologist Nancy Eisenberg made this point most dramatically in the 1980s, when she demonstrated that the empathy gap, which appeared in studies that relied on self-reporting, all but vanished when other measures like physiological responses or changes in facial expression were considered. Men and women differ in "how empathetic they would like to appear to others (and, perhaps, to themselves)," she wrote—and that's not the same thing as real underlying sex differences in empathy.
In the years since, the picture has only gotten cloudier. Some research finds associations between self-reporting and other measures, and other research suggests divergence, Eisenberg says. Other studies look at how well men and women discern emotion in photographs of faces or eyes. Sometimes they find a female advantage, and sometimes they don't, as Baron-Cohen told me.
But reading Brizendine and Pinker, you'd never know how muddled this literature is. And that's a problem, because the mess is central to the story.
From: Amanda Schaffer
Subject: Mars, Venus, Babies, and Hormones
Posted Thursday, July 3, 2008, at 7:05 AM ET
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According to sex-difference evangelist Louann Brizendine, women are like emotion-seeking F-15's, deciphering and responding to other people's feelings and needs. By contrast, it's "only when men actually see tears that they realize, viscerally, that something's wrong," she writes. Brizendine and Susan Pinker not only argue that women are more empathetic than men, a claim that is dicey to begin with. They also say that the gap springs from innate difference.
Amanda Schaffer and Emily Bazelon discuss the science of empathy.
To make that case, these authors look to studies of infants, children, and twins. Pinker writes that girls not only "show more empathy toward friends and family" but "remarkably, demonstrate signs of these skills from early infancy, well before any cultural expectations about women as nurturers can be absorbed." Newborn girls "respond more to the cries of another baby—and to human faces—than do boys," Brizendine says. Pinker also argues that newborn girls show greater interest in looking at faces. And she hangs her hat on twin research, writing: "Studies of twins show that the ability to understand social situations—which requires empathy—is largely inherited, and that there are large differences between boys and girls that are most noticeable when children are young."
What's at play here are leaps between early rudimentary behavior and complex behavior later on. It's true, for instance, that girls tend to make more eye contact and cry more easily in response to another infant's cry, according to some research. But why is it particularly clear that these measures are relevant to empathy, which emerges later in development and involves a far more sophisticated set of responses? If baby girls are, in fact, more strongly drawn to some displays of faces than to objects, is that because they have a categorical preference for people versus objects, asks Harvard psychologist Elizabeth Spelke? Or because they're responding to some other contrast between the two presentations, like "their rate of motion or distribution or color or contrast"? These data can be hard to interpret. In an interview, even Simon Baron-Cohen, another doyen of sex-difference claims, offered up some caution.
Caveats are also in order for the length of time infant girls gaze at faces and what to conclude from that. In one of his more controversial studies, Baron-Cohen found that 1-day-old girls were more inclined to look at a human face, while 1-day-old boys were more inclined to look at a mechanical mobile. But that work has not been replicated. Brizendine cites psychologist Erin McClure, but this reference is also problematic, as McClure herself pointed out to me. Meanwhile, an older body of research suggests that "male and female infants are equally interested in people and objects," as Spelke puts it.
Pinker tops the slippery charts when she buttresses the case for innate difference with twin research. She cites a study that looks at twins and suggests a difference between boys' and girls' social understandings—which includes, say, the ability to pick up on body language or not to interrupt when other people are talking. Contrary to her explicit claim of "large differences," when I calculated the gap between average measures for boys and girls, it turned out to be small—comparable, again, to the difference in average height between 15- and 16-year-old girls. Also, while the twin study Pinker likes does find that social cognition, or the ability to infer what others are feeling, is largely inherited (as Pinker correctly claims), its authors conclude that the disparity they observe between boys and girls cannot be attributed to genetic difference. Pinker, amazingly, fails to mention that the authors on whom she's relying for proof of relevant genetic difference disavow that explanation of their findings. This is precisely the sort of selective reporting that makes her book misleading.
To shore up their claims that sex difference is innate, Pinker and Brizendine also fetishize hormones like testosterone and oxytocin, which they say may underlie crucial sex differences in empathy. For instance, they rely on Baron-Cohen's argument that higher levels of prenatal testosterone diminish boys' drives to empathize later on. His team is tracking a group of children born around Cambridge, England, some from birth through early childhood, and writes that, in general, fetal testosterone "predicts how sociable a child will be," with higher levels of the hormone linked to lower scores on social measures.
But the evidence for that should be qualified. Baron-Cohen finds that at age 1, boys with higher levels of fetal testosterone appear to make less eye contact with their parents (usually their mothers). The ranges for boys and girls, however, overlapped significantly. (In the course of 20 minutes, the boys looked at the parent's face between 3.0 and 46.2 times, the girls between 3.8 and 55 times.) At age 4, children with higher testosterone tended to have lower "quality of social relationships," according to questionnaires their parents filled out. But that was only true when data for boys and girls were pooled. No relationship between fetal testosterone and the quality of social relationships was found among boys as a separate group. And none was found among girls, either.
For children between the ages of 6 and 8, the links between fetal testosterone and two measures of empathy were somewhat more convincing. Children with higher testosterone tended to score lower on a questionnaire and on a test in which they tried to discern emotion from pictures of eyes. And this association held when boys were considered alone. But, confusingly, on the eye-reading test, there was no overall difference in how well the boys and the girls performed. This work has not been replicated, either. Since Baron-Cohen's results come from a nonrepresentative sample from one geographic area, his findings should not be treated as the final word.
Then there is oxytocin, which Susan Pinker calls "the hormone that greases the wheels of attachment" and "a feel-good, nurturing drug that happens to be homegrown." Brizendine describes it rhapsodically in her "cast of neuro-hormone characters" as "fluffy, purring kitty; cuddly, nurturing, earth mother; the good witch Glinda in The Wizard of Oz; finds pleasure in helping and serving."
Here's what we actually know about oxytocin: The hormone is important to childbirth and lactation. It may also contribute to mother-child bonding and possibly to feelings of calm in breast-feeding mothers. Yet it is also linked to feelings of social distress. One theory is that the body releases oxytocin to promote social connection, and if that connection is positive, the hormone may help to reduce stress. If it's negative, however, oxytocin may actually make stress worse. In other words, the hormone's effects are apparently paradoxical—it is not simply a "feel-good" drug.
At the moment, research that includes a control group (and is therefore more rigorous) doesn't tell us much about empathy and gender. Pinker emphasizes two studies: One finds that subjects who received intranasal puffs of the hormone were more trusting of other players in an investment game; the other shows that those who got oxytocin were better able to discern emotions in photographs of faces. Crucially, though, both these studies were conducted in men, as Pinker acknowledges. So far, for the most part, women haven't been in the research pool, according to social psychologist Jennifer Bartz of Mount Sinai. This is starting to change, but the bottom line for now, she says, is that "we can't say oxytocin makes women more empathetic."
Finally, Brizendine and Pinker lean on neuroimaging studies, which compare male and female responses to stimuli like pictures of sad and happy faces or other imagery. But this kind of data is notoriously hard to interpret. Consider this meta-anlysis by psychologist Tor Wager, who looked at 65 functional MRI and PET studies of gender and emotion. Wager found some differences in the brain activity patterns of men and women in response, say, to films or pictures meant to elicit emotion. The differences were subtle, however, compared to the similarities.
And the kicker is that these studies don't tell us whether differences are innate. Brizendine moves seamlessly from references to fMRI studies to phrases like "distinct female and male brain operating systems." (She also jumps off the deep end with a claim about male and female mirror neurons.) Pinker suggests that fMRI studies can show how women's "neural hardware" gives them an edge in discerning emotion. But our brains change in response to how we use them—what we think, see, feel, and practice doing over a lifetime. This is the plasticity of the brain, demonstrated most colorfully in this famous study of London cabbies. With its potential connection to a person's response to the culture he or she lives in, plasticity could explain much—or potentially all—of the difference between brain scans of men and women responding to emotional stimuli. Pinker knows this and says she does not suggest otherwise. "You can't look at a brain scan and say therefore we know the cause," she told me. But because she and Brizendine largely devote their books to excavating innate difference, they should write that caveat in red.
From: Amanda Schaffer
Subject: The Ghost of Larry Summers
Posted Friday, July 4, 2008, at 7:18 AM ET
No discussion of how men and women think can avoid a mention of Harvard's ex-president Larry Summers. When he speculated in 2005 that intrinsic cognitive differences might partly account for women's underrepresentation in the top tiers of math and science, Summers fanned a national debate that continues to fuel sex-difference evangelism.
Amanda Schaffer and Emily Bazelon discuss men's and women's differences in variability and spatial reasoning.
Susan Pinker treads lightly in Summersville, casting herself as a baffled bystander who couldn't understand the fuss. Still, she describes Summers' critics with subtle condescension. One of Summers' most ardent defenders was Steven Pinker, Susan's brother, who championed the case that intrinsic sex differences in aptitude and motivation may play a role in women's lesser representation. In a "showdown of the sexes" at the school's Science Center, Harvard psychologist Elizabeth Spelke bested Steven Pinker, in my view, with the case that social and cultural forces are the crucial ones. Still, Susan Pinker reprises several of the arguments that swirled in the Spelke-Steven Pinker debate, and these are worth revisiting because they still linger.
Summers argued, in part, that men vary more on cognitive measures than women—they're more likely to be at the high and low points on the relevant graphs or charts. He suggested this means that more men fall at the very high end of cognitive ability, from which top researchers are likely drawn. Steven Pinker defended this argument. And Susan Pinker takes it as a given: "Males are simply more variable," she writes. And: "The bell curve simply looks different for males, with more men at the tail ends of the distribution."
But that is not the whole story. In much of the pertinent research, male scores on cognitive measures do appear to spread more than female ones. But there are counterexamples. For instance, this cross-cultural analysis from 1994 suggests that in some countries, males' math scores are more variable, while in other countries, women's are. Strikingly, a new analysis of math data from 22 countries (not yet published but presented at several conferences) finds men with the expected spread in scores in many countries—but not in Lithuania, Germany, the Netherlands, Slovenia, or Denmark. In these places, female variability is either greater, or there's little difference between the sexes.
This analysis has statistical advantages over some older work, which makes it tough to dismiss, according to psychologist Steve Ceci, who has done an exhaustive review of the literature. Differences among countries shout out the role of social and cultural forces. These vary from place to place and seem to matter a lot in terms of shaping variability in math scores. Another recent analysis, in Science, also suggests that the math gap tends to narrow, or even disappear, in countries with more equality between men and women. This is true both for average scores and top-tier ones. More evidence for the importance of culture.
In the United States, much of the debate over whether boys have a high-end edge has focused on math SAT scores. For instance, widely cited research on mathematically precocious students found that more boys than girls tended to score in the very top tiers on the math SAT. But as Spelke points out, SAT scores may underpredict girls' academic math performance later on and should be viewed more critically than Steven Pinker and others do. Girls' academic success should not be discounted, either.
Susan Pinker also revisits the claim that males tend to perform better on certain tests of spatial reasoning. But even if that were so, a growing body of evidence suggests that spatial reasoning skills are malleable: the plasticity point again.
Spatial advantage is often cast as the smoking gun of cognitive sex difference. It's true that men tend to perform better on some tests, including those on which they must mentally rotate one object in space to see whether it resembles another. This is an area with a sizeable gender gap (though, if I need to say it, plenty of women excel at mental rotation, and women tend to perform better on some tests of spatial memory). Spelke suggests that men and women tend to approach certain spatial questions in subtly different ways, meaning that differences in strategy, rather than overall aptitude, may be what's really at play.
Some evidence suggests that innate factors like testosterone levels could help explain spatial reasoning differences. But the key point is that for both men and women, these skills can improve a lot with training. Researchers from the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center, which brings together scientists from several universities, conducted a meta-analysis of more than 100 studies that have examined the effects on men and women's spatial-reasoning scores of everything from a few hours with a spatially oriented video game to weeks or months in a classroom to projects like dressmaking. Crunching numbers across the studies, the group found that training was associated with a substantial gain in spatial reasoning—comparable in size to almost a 10-point boost in IQ, according to Northwestern University researcher David Uttal.
These are not just weedy lab results—the gains may boost some women's careers. Consider a program at Michigan Tech University. Since the 1990s, incoming engineering students have taken a test of spatial reasoning during freshman orientation. Students who score poorly are encouraged to attend sessions and do sample exercises to prepare them for an introductory graphics class in which they must visualize and mentally rotate objects. According to a longitudinal study, men and women who received the extra training got better grades in graphics compared with classmates who also did badly on the diagnostic test but did not get further help. What's more, women who got the extra teaching and encouragement were more likely to remain engineering majors: more than 75 percent, compared with less than 50 percent for women who didn't do the training. (For men, for some reason, the extra teaching didn't have this retention yield.)
Of course, when it comes to the diverse precincts of high-level science, spatial reasoning only gets you so far. Rock-star academics don't necessarily spend their days turning geometric figures around in their minds. Subfields of biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering vary in terms of the skills they require. And plenty of hard problems can be solved in multiple ways. Ultimately, no one really knows what makes a successful scientist. "Sure, mathematical and spatial ability may play a role, but so may creativity, diligence, communication skills, and intellectual risk-taking," says Ceci. Teaching spatial reasoning is a good thing. But overplaying its importance sells a lot of great scientists short.
From: Amanda Schaffer
Subject: The Next Best-Seller
Posted Monday, July 7, 2008, at 10:10 AM ET
In talking about sex differences, it's easy to assume that what you see is what you get—on average, women are better listeners, men are better navigators, and those patterns of thinking and motivation are relatively fixed. But this isn't necessarily so.
Consider this famous example from the 1990s: Before taking a math exam, some women were told that the results had "shown gender differences in the past." These women performed worse on the test than other women with comparable math backgrounds. This is the famous concept of stereotype threat, introduced by psychologists Claude Steele and Joshua Aaronson and studied by scores of others. In one case, watching a set of TV ads, including one with a woman " 'drooling' with anticipation to try a new brownie mix," seemed to affect how female students answered questions about their educational and career interests. Women who saw the caricaturing ads were less likely to express interest in quantitative pursuits. The ads didn't seem to affect men, presumably because they didn't feel subtly associated with the shallow brownie maven. On the other hand, stereotype threat may kick some men in the teeth when it comes to social sensitivity—an area in which they're widely stereotyped as dolts.
Amanda Schaffer and Emily Bazelon discuss the myth of Mars and Venus:
The point is that playing up sex differences can be subtly toxic. At its worst, it risks turning stereotypes into self-fulfilling prophecies. The better news is that stereotype threat can be disarmed. One striking example is a 2007 study of a top-track calculus class, designed for science and engineering majors, at the University of Texas. This is a pool from which top math and science professionals would be drawn—"the group Larry Summers was talking about," as Aronson puts it. At the beginning of a calculus exam, he gave some of the women in the class a statement that the test had "not shown any gender differences in performance or mathematical ability." These women scored substantially higher on average than their female classmates. They also performed better on average than their male classmates.
Despite such striking findings, stereotype threat is simply missing from Susan Pinker's picture. She acknowledges that discrimination held women back in the past but thinks we've gotten largely beyond this. After "four decades of trying to stamp out gender differences," today's male prevalence among top scientists largely reflects essentialist sex differences, she thinks—in abilities and also, especially, in men and women's interests and motivations. She believes we'd be happier if we just accepted our differing tendencies and moved on. Pinker wants us to give traditionally female fields more respect. (She also sensibly urges that a "vanilla male" model of work—long hours, heavy travel, little time with family—isn't necessarily right for women. I won't tackle those structural questions here, except to say that the "male vanilla" model isn't necessarily great for men, either.) More problematically, Pinker takes unfair aim at programs to attract women to math and science, arguing that they "reinforce the cachet of fields that appeal more to men."
But how much sense does it make to downplay current discrimination to the point of sweeping by it altogether? The evidence tells us of the effects of disparities in how boys and girls are perceived and in the pressures they face throughout their lives. We can't know whether biological differences steer fewer women to the top of math and science unless we first address the myriad factors that hold them back. As Spelke puts it: "We should allow all of the evidence that men and women have equal cognitive capacity to permeate through society. We should allow people to evaluate children in relation to their actual capacities." Then we would see whether boys and girls are drawn in different directions.
Maybe they would be. Maybe Pinker has jumped the gun, and the evidence will someday bear her out. And yet if history is any guide, today's gender breakdowns are likely to keep changing. What's so magical, after all, about the current numbers? A few decades ago, most biology and math majors were men. So were most doctors. Now math undergraduate majors split close to 50/50. In 1976, only 8 percent of Ph.D.s in biology went to women; by 2004, 44 percent did. Today, half of M.D.s go to women. Even in engineering, physics, chemistry, and math, the number of women receiving doctorates tripled or quadrupled between 1976 and 2001. Why assume that we have just now reached some natural limit?
Brizendine and Pinker both avoid saying that biology is destiny, and in an interview, Pinker was adamant that she should not be read this way. She is too sophisticated to argue that cognitive differences are entirely intrinsic—she knows the old nature-versus-nurture dichotomy is dead. But her book's emphasis on developmental evidence and hormones—and her one-sided treatment of key areas of research—steers readers to the conclusion that innate differences, perhaps modified or amplified by culture, are vitally important. And to a large extent, intractable. Brizendine manipulates readers in the same way, less subtly (and to the tune of higher sales).
Why does the evangelists' vision of polarized and relatively fixed sex difference have so much traction right now? Why are they the crowd pleasers? As Deborah Cameron points out in The Myth of Mars and Venus, which reads as a helpful antidote to the evangelists: "No group of men and women in history have ever been less different, or less at the mercy of their biology, than those living in Western society today." And maybe, paradoxically, this explains the evangelists' tenacious hold. Having more women in the workplace and more men involved in child care and household work has produced a lot of friction and enormous cultural anxiety. Mars-and-Venus-style books can be hugely reassuring, telling people that their struggles and doubts are rooted in age-old biology. Cameron adds dryly: "I would argue that they displace the anxieties rather than having anything very useful to say about them."
Useful, however, isn't the only measure of success. Brizendine's book has now been translated into 21 languages. Surely that was not lost on Susan Pinker, who came next. Other writers will surely follow them. But we don't have to fall for what they're selling. It's time to stop buying the line that it's radical to speculate about innate differences. And to stop accepting, when the evidence is thin, that innate difference is the unrelenting cause of gender gaps in ability or potential or the courses our lives take. Look closely at the science, and what becomes clear is that the question worth a raft of best-sellers is not how we could be limited by traditional assumptions. It's how we could not be.
Pinker also writes that "the data reveal a handful of different catalysts for people's choices—many with neurological or hormonal roots, and others that reflect workplaces designed to fit the male standard—that mesh to create the real gender gap." Brizendine suggests that women "have been fighting to adapt to a man's world—after all, women's brains are wired to be good at changing."
Brizendine explains: "It has been my observation that, in a social setting, girls speak two or three times more words per day than boys." This observation is also "echoed," she says, by a study that found "young girls speak earlier and by the age of 20 months have double or triple the number of words in their vocabularies" compared with boys. But that study, by psychologist Janet Hyde, looks at a different age group and a different measure. "Brizendine is not careful about the scientific data," Hyde told me. A larger vocabulary at an early age could reflect an earlier maturation for girls. The evidence does not suggest that adult women have double the vocabulary of adult men, says Hyde. Rather, the data show that differences in adults are small.
A part of the corpus callosum may be thicker in women. But it also may not be, depending on how the comparison is done. (For more on the tortuous distinctions that land scientists on either side of this fence, see here.)
She does note that "there has long been resistance to the idea that … sex differences in the brain are meaningful" but doesn't explain that there has been conflicting, messy evidence on lateralization.
Baron-Cohen told me that he thought infant eye contact might be a precursor to empathy because clues found in peoples' faces, especially in the area around the eyes, could help to decode another person's emotions. But he also offered a qualification: "I think it could be too simplistic to say that the more eye contact you make the better your empathy. … If you stare at somebody that's not necessarily very empathic." As for the crying, he thought it might be evidence of girls' "higher sensitivity to another person's emotions," but he was "not 100 percent convinced that just because one baby starts another baby crying that that's necessarily anything to do with empathy."
In claiming that newborn girls respond more to human faces, Brizendine cites a meta-analysis by psychologist Erin McClure, which finds that female infants and toddlers tend to gaze longer than boys at faces showing emotional expressions. Brizendine "cited my work for a statement that girls are compelled from an early age to attend to faces, and there's just nothing in my study that points to that," McClure told me. She also objected to Brizendine's hyperbolic conclusions: "I've been misinterpreted to imply that there are huge differences in facial processing between males and females, and that's definitely not something you can draw from this."
The effect size, which relates the difference between male and female means to standard deviations, is -0.175. This falls in the "small" range, according to a standard classification discussed here.
"Mirroring" is about reading and experiencing another person's emotions as if they were her own, Brizendine says, allowing a woman to become "a human emotion detector." "Although most of the studies on this topic have been done in primates," she writes, "scientists speculate that there may be more mirror neurons in the human female brain than in the human male brain." Our old F-15 friend Sarah's brain, for instance, "will begin stimulating its own circuits as if her husband's brain were her own." The implication is that extra mirror neurons make women like Sarah innately more empathetic than their hapless husbands.
But megacaveats are in order here. For one thing, the role of mirror neurons in humans is not well-established. Some very smart people maintain that they are largely a nice metaphor or myth. Beyond that, Brizendine offers virtually no evidence for the claim that women have more mirror neurons than men do. Since her book's publication, a small amount of work has suggested some difference in mirror neuron activity in men and women. But that work is preliminary. (Click here and scroll down for details.)
Pinker writes that numerous researchers have observed and written about greater male variability, but "in Summers' case it caused a furious uproar that wouldn't abate. 'I felt I was going to be sick,' said MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins, who reported that Summers' comments upset her so much that 'my heart was pounding and my breath was shallow.' Summers went on to talk about a third factor—socialization and continuing discrimination—but few listened."
Spelke is exploring whether some disparities on spatial tests reflect differences in men and women's preferred cognitive strategies. For instance, when asked to compare two figures in space, boys may be more apt to rotate one mentally until it resembles another. Girls may be more likely to compare features of the two objects point by point. "This difference in strategies gives men an advantage on tasks in which feature-comparison strategies are ineffective and gives women an advantage on tasks in which they are critical," she writes. This is still a working hypothesis, but a good reminder that test score differences are worth unpacking.
For instance, Pinker discusses studies of girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a genetic disorder that leads girls to overproduce testosterone and other male sex hormones. These girls may perform better on average than their female peers on some spatial tests. But in his debate with Spelke, Steven Pinker conceded that research on CAH girls' spatial ability "is inconclusive." He continued, "I cannot honestly say that there are replicable demonstrations that CAH women have male-typical patterns of spatial cognition."
Amanda Schaffer is a science and medical columnist for Slate.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2194486/
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Posted by: Merle | August 29, 2009 at 10:27 PM
Readers of this essay may well ask what an academic psychologist is doing invading territory normally reserved for scholars closer to C. S. Lewis’s own field of literary criticism or for theologians
and philosophers. The short answer to that question is that Lewis had a lot to say over his lifetime about three topics of interest to me: science, social science, and gender. The longer answer to that question is more autobiographical.
In my Canadian Protestant childhood—as in C. S. Lewis’s, a generation earlier in Protestant Belfast—church was still a vehicle of respectability and upward mobility, perhaps especially for my parents,
who were schoolteachers and first-generation urban transplants from humble rural backgrounds. In such a setting, it was expected that teenagers would be confirmed in the church, but it never was made very clear how seriously—other than as a rite of social passage—they should take the professions of faith they were urged to make. Predictably, this led to resistance and accusations of hypocrisy from some adolescents, including myself, as I vacillated between thinking that church membership would demand too much of me and suspecting that it would demand too little.
But in the end, like the adolescent
C. S. Lewis, “I allowed myself to be prepared for confirmation, and to make my first Communion... eating and drinking to my own condemnation” (Lewis 1955, 130), metaphorically crossing my fingers behind my back while going through the motions of professing faith.
You will not be surprised to learn that such superficial churchianity did not survive—either intellectually
or morally—my transition from high school to an elite public university. I had wanted to study psychology ever since my middle-school days, but by the time I entered university in the early 1960s, academic psychology was suffering from what might be called a bad case of physics envy. In its eagerness to be accepted as a legitimate “science” it had embraced what philosophers call the Unity of Science thesis—namely, that there is only one method that all genuine sciences employ, and that method consists of giving causal, deterministic explanations that are empirically testable. By this standard, if psychology aspired to be a “real” science it would have to become as much like experimental physics as possible. As a methodological corrective to certain past, ill-supported pronouncements about human behavior and mental life (including many from Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis) this was not an entirely bad move, but methodological correctives seldom stay within their original limits. They more often become full-blown—but usually unacknowledged—metaphysical world views, especially in times of great social change when older belief systems are being unreflectively marginalized in the name of progress.
This is in fact what was happening during my undergraduate days. We were being taught as apprentice logical positivists to regard “facts” and “values” as quite distinct. Facts—based on input
Trinity 2007
Opposite Sexes or Neighboring Sexes?
C.S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and
the Psychology of Gender
Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen
And in that volume Lewis made both an Aristotelian and a Freudian argument for male headship in marriage.
Both Aristotle and Freud held that women were driven more by emotion and less by reason than men. For Aristotle (and his later Thomistic followers in medieval Christendom) all things exist in a hierarchical
scala naturae, or “ladder of nature,” beginning with inanimate matter and proceeding through plants, animals, humans, and ultimately the “unmoved mover” that gives all objects their purpose. But on the human part of the ladder, women occupied a lower rung: in relation to men they were deemed less rational, unequal, and passive. For Freud also, “anatomy is destiny.” He saw women even in adulthood
as having less-developed superegos than men, and hence less capable
A Residual Platonism
Years later, when I returned to Lewis’s works as a young Christian academic, I confirmed that for much of his life he did indeed promote both an essentialist and a hierarchical view of gender. He regarded stereotypical masculinity and femininity as timeless, metaphysical archetypes, deeper even than biological sex and apparently more significant for the right organization of social life than any “mere humanity” shared by women and men. Moreover, especially in his Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) and in Perelandra (1942) and That Hideous Strength (1945), the second and third novels respectively
of his space trilogy, he portrayed God as representing the highest ideal, or form, of masculinity. For the Lewis of the 1940s, humans were so inescapably gendered—in their creation, their fallenness, and the implications of their redemption—that man and woman were almost different species. They were metaphysically opposite sexes, not the “neighboring sexes” that his contemporary, Dorothy L. Sayers, proposed in one of her own essays in the 1940s (Sayers 1975, 37).
Thus in his 1945 science fiction novel, That Hideous Strength, Lewis (speaking through the trilogy’s
hero, Elwyn Ransom) asserted that:
Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others. Masculine and feminine meet us on a plane of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the contrary, the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine
(Lewis 1945, 314–315).
Lewis’s residual Platonism is very evident here. He regarded the eternal, metaphysical “forms” of masculinity and femininity as higher spiritual realities of which material maleness and femaleness are mere “shadows,” a Platonic term Lewis used often to describe the earthly in comparison to the heavenly.
And for the younger Lewis, these polarized forms were not merely Platonic opposites; they were also hierarchically ordered.
In his 1948 essay arguing against opening the Anglican priesthood to women, Lewis wrote that a woman can be a competent pastoral visitor, church administrator, or even a preacher. It is not the case that she is “necessarily or even probably stupider than a man” (Lewis 1970a, 235). What she cannot do, wearing the “feminine uniform,” is sacramentally represent the people of God at the Eucharistic altar, because God represents ultimate masculinity, beside whom everything and everyone is less masculine and more feminine by contrast. Lewis wrote:
To say that men and women are equally eligible for a certain profession is to say that for purposes of that profession their sex is irrelevant... This may be inevitable for our secular life. But in our Christian life we must return to reality... the kind of equality which implies that equals are interchangeable (like counters or identical machines) is, among humans, a legal fiction. It may be a useful legal fiction. But in the church we turn our backs on fictions. One of the ends for which sex was created was to symbolize for us the hidden things of God... [Thus] only one wearing the masculine uniform can... represent the Lord to the Church; for we are all, corporately and individually, feminine to Him. (Lewis 1970a, 237–38)
Escaping the Sword between the Sexes
Even more, “the misogyny of some of Lewis’s earlier works seems to be reversed in this novel told from a woman’s perspective” (Hannay 216). Its story is a recasting of the classical myth of Cupid and Psyche which, in Lewis’s adaptation, focuses on the strong woman ruler of a small nation. She is a person struggling against idolatry and toward belief in a way that parallels Lewis’s own faith journey and the resentment it inspired in some of his colleagues and family members.
This period also coincided with Lewis’s work on The Discarded Image (1964), an introduction to medieval and Renaissance literature. It is an engaging, detailed portrait of the medieval worldview and one that clearly illustrates its hierarchical cosmology, but with one significant difference. In a volume where one would expect Lewis, given his earlier writings, to include an exposition of gender hierarchy
in the Aristotelian ladder of nature and its descendent, the medieval “great chain of being,” there is not a word on this topic. Indeed, his only explicit mention of gender relations was a leveling one, when he challenged the modern illusion that medieval persons of both sexes led static lives. On the contrary, Lewis wrote, “Kings, armies, prelates, diplomats, merchants and wandering scholars were continually on the move. Thanks to the popularity of pilgrimages, even women, and women of the middle class, went far afield; witness the Wife of Bath [in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales] and Margery Kempe” (Lewis 1964, 143). Kempe was a fifteenth-century religious mystic who was also married and the mother of fourteen children.
Most telling is his reflection on his wife’s death, A Grief Observed (1961). It was written when Joy Davidman—an award-winning American poet and writer—died of cancer in 1960 after just four years of marriage to Lewis. The start of Lewis’s friendship with Davidman (in the early days of which he once referred to her as “our queer, Jewish, ex-Communist American convert…” In Lewis 2007, 450) coincided with his 1954 move from Oxford to a professorial chair at Cambridge. This move coincided with his first serious bout of writer’s block. It was due largely to Joy Davidman’s help and inspiration that he eventually wrote Till We Have Faces, which he then dedicated to her. Lewis’s biographer and former student, George Sayer, who knew them both well, noted that “[h]er part in the book, and there is so much that she can almost be called its joint author, put him very much in her debt. She stimulated and helped him to such an extent that he began to feel that he could hardly write without her” (Sayer 220).
“There is,” Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed, “hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them” (Lewis 1961, 40). In a pointed rejection of his earlier insistence that gender, as a spiritual ideal, is a more fundamental reality than sex, Lewis concluded:
It is arrogance in us [men] to call frankness, fairness and chivalry “masculine” when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them [women] to describe a man’s sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as “feminine.” But also what poor, warped fragments of humanity most mere men and mere women must be to make the implications of that arrogance plausible. Marriage heals this. Jointly the two become fully human. “In the image of God created he them.” Thus, by a paradox, this carnival of sexuality leads us out beyond our sexes. (Lewis 1961, 40–41).
As he struggled with his grief and reflected on what he had learned from his short-lived marriage, Lewis also reversed his earlier assumptions about gender hierarchy as well as his view that women and men could not be both friends and lovers at the same time:
A good wife contains so many persons in herself. What was [Joy] not to me? She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding these all in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow soldier. My mistress, but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have had good ones) has ever been to me... Solomon calls his bride Sister. Could a woman be a complete wife unless, for a moment, in one particular mood, a man felt almost inclined to call her Brother?
(Lewis 1961, 39–40)
Clearly Lewis’s marriage in his mid-fifties to a gifted and feisty woman helped to advance changes in his thinking about gender relations. And, in fact, Lewis was always a better man than his theories in his actual relationships with women, especially those who, like himself, were intellectuals and serious Christians. I note in passing his long association with Stella Aldwickle, pastoral advisor to the women students of Somerville College. He also corresponded for twenty-five years with an Anglo-Catholic nun, the theologian Sister Penelope Lawson (whom he referred to as his “elder sister” in the faith), and for the last fifteen years of his life had a mutually-mentoring relationship with the celebrated and much-honored English poet Ruth Pitter.
The Cresset
C. S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers
But Lewis had an equally long relationship with a woman colleague who was even closer to him in terms of age, background, education, intellectual interests, and Christian writing projects. That woman was Dorothy Leigh Sayers, whom Lewis once described as “the first person of importance who ever wrote me a fan-letter” (Lewis 2007, 1400). Sayers, like Lewis, grew up in the shadow of an Anglican rectory. By the time of their first correspondence in 1942 she was, like Lewis, an Oxford MA. Both had won scholarships to Oxford as undergraduates: Sayers to Somerville College in 1912, and Lewis to University College in 1916. She was also, like Lewis, a published poet, author of several novels in a popular new genre (detective novels in her case, science fiction in Lewis’s), and a BBC broadcaster recruited to help strengthen Christian faith in the dark days of World War Two (doing radio drama in her case, popular theological talks in Lewis’s). Sayers also had written and directed two plays for the Canterbury Cathedral arts festival, published essays on Christian doctrine and creativity, and was soon to become a distinguished translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy from Italian into English verse.
Though most of their correspondence was of a scholarly, literary-critical nature, some of it also concerned gender relations. For example, in 1948, when Lewis became exercised about the possible ordination of women in the Anglican church, he tried to persuade Sayers—a well-known Christian author of longer standing than he—to join him in protest (Lewis 2004b, 860). However, Lewis’s attempt to co-opt this famous woman writer backfired. Though Sayers was, if anything, even more Anglo-Catholic in her leanings than Lewis, she politely declined to “give tongue” in the debate over women’s ordination. She agreed that it might “erect a new and totally unnecessary barrier between [Anglicans] and the rest of Catholic Christendom,” but she pointed out that it would also decrease differences with those Protestant free churches that emphasized preaching more than the sacrament of communion (Sayers quoted in Reynolds 359).
In some ways it would be too simple to call Sayers a feminist. Like Lewis, she had too robust a view of the human capacity for sin to romanticize any class or gender group just because it had a history of marginalization. But unlike the Lewis of the 1940s, she believed gender was an incidental, not an essential trait, and that women and men’s common humanity was more fundamental than any differences
between them. Moreover, despite sharing a common background with Lewis in terms of class and intellectual brilliance, Sayers went through a species of baptism by fire at Oxford that Lewis, as a privileged male student and later an Oxford don, was quite incapable of understanding at the time. It was only two years before Sayers went to Oxford in 1912 that the university officially had recognized the presence of women in its midst. When Sayers arrived in 1912, women still could not receive Oxford degrees, even after meeting all the qualifications and (not infrequently) outperforming men in the same programs. Only in 1920, when Oxford degrees were retrospectively opened up to females, did Dorothy Sayers and several hundred other women return to the university to receive their long-denied degrees.
In 1927 the faculty and administrators at Oxford voted to limit indefinitely the number of women students who could be admitted and to prohibit the establishment of any more women’s colleges. Lewis supported this proposal (Lewis 2004a, 702–3). Though Lewis and Sayers did not know each other at this time, her reaction to Oxford’s retrograde move was pretty clear. Her most complex detective novel (and her own favorite) was Gaudy Night, which she set in a fictitious Oxford women’s college in the mid-1930s. The plot of the novel turns on the resentment that tradition-bound male academics—and their female supporters—harbor towards women scholars whose commitment to intellectual integrity will not be compromised by submission to social norms about women’s “natural calling” to support and defer to men, no matter what they do (Sayers 1935). Later, in her 1946 essay “The Human-Not-Quite-Human,” she mocked the view (going as far back as Aristotle) that women are not complete persons:
[People believe women] lie when they say they have human needs: warm and decent clothing; comfort on the bus; interests directed immediately to God and his universe, not intermediately
through any child of man. They are [either] far above man to inspire him, far beneath him to corrupt him; they have feminine minds and feminine natures, but their mind is not one with their nature like the minds of men; they have no human mind and no human nature... They are “the opposite sex”—(though why “opposite” I do not know; what is the “neighbouring sex”?). (Sayers 1975, 32)
“I do not know what women as women want,” Sayers declared in a 1938 lecture. “But as human beings they want, my good man, exactly what you want yourselves: interesting occupation, reasonable freedom for their pleasures, and a sufficient emotional outlet. What form the occupation, the pleasures,
the emotional outlet may take depends entirely on the individual. You know that this is so with yourselves—why will you not believe that it is so with us?” (Sayers 1975, 17–36, quotation 32).
Gender and Modern Social Science
C. S. Lewis was no fan of the emerging social sciences. He saw practitioners of the social sciences mainly as lackeys of technologically-minded natural scientists, bent on reducing individual freedom and moral accountability to mere epiphenomena of natural processes (See Lewis 1943 and 1970 b). And not surprisingly (given his passion for gender-essentialist archetypes), aside from a qualified appreciation
of some aspects of Freudian psychoanalysis (See Lewis 1952 (Book III, Chapter 4) and 1969). “Carl Jung was the only philosopher [sic] of the Viennese school for whose work [Lewis] had much respect” (Sayer 102).
But the social sciences concerned with the psychology of gender have since shown that Sayers was right, and Lewis and Jung were wrong: women and men are not opposite sexes but neighboring sexes—and very close neighbors indeed. There are, it turns out, virtually no large, consistent sex differences in any psychological traits and behaviors, even when we consider the usual stereotypical suspects: that men are more aggressive, or just, or rational than women, and women are more empathic, verbal, or nurturing than men. When differences are found, they are always average—not absolute—differences. And in virtually all cases the small, average—and often decreasing—difference between the sexes is greatly exceeded by the amount of variability on that trait within members of each sex. Most of the “bell curves” for women and men (showing the distribution of a given psychological trait or behavior) overlap almost completely. So it is naïve at best (and deceptive at worst) to make even average—let alone absolute—pronouncements about essential archetypes in either sex when there is much more variability within than between the sexes on all the trait and behavior measures for which we have abundant data.
This criticism applies as much to C. S. Lewis and Carl Jung as it does to their currently most visible descendent, John Gray, who continues to claim (with no systematic empirical warrant) that men are from Mars and women are from Venus (Gray 1992).
And what about Lewis’s claims about the overriding masculinity of God? Even the late Carl Henry (a theologian with impeccable credentials as a conservative evangelical) noted a quarter of a century ago that:
Masculine and feminine elements are excluded from both the Old Testament and New Testament doctrine of deity. The God of the Bible is a sexless God. When Scripture speaks of God as “he” the pronoun is primarily personal (generic) rather than masculine (specific); it emphasizes God’s personal nature—and, in turn, that of the Father, Son and Spirit as Trinitarian distinctions in contrast to impersonal entities... Biblical religion is quite uninterested in any discussion of God’s masculinity or femininity... Scripture does not depict God either as ontologically
masculine or feminine. (Henry 1982, 159–60)
However well-intentioned, attempts to read a kind of mystical gendering into God—whether stereotypically
masculine, feminine, or both—reflect not so much careful biblical theology as “the long
arm of Paganism” (Martin 11). For it is pagan worldviews, the Jewish commentator Nahum Sarna reminds us, that are “unable to conceive of any primal creative force other than in terms of sex... [In Paganism] the sex element existed before the cosmos came into being and all the gods themselves were creatures of sex. On the other hand, the Creator in Genesis is uniquely without any female counterpart, and the very association of sex with God is utterly alien to the religion of the Bible” (Sarna 76).
And if the God of creation does not privilege maleness or stereotypical masculinity, neither did the Lord of redemption. Sayers’s response to the cultural assumption that women were human-not-quite-human has become rightly famous:
Perhaps it is no wonder that women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man—there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as “The women, God help us!” or “The ladies, God bless them!; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being
female; who had no axe to grind or no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious. There is not act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel which borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything “funny” about women’s nature. (Sayers 1975, 46)
It is quite likely that Lewis’s changing views on gender owed something to the intellectual and Christian ties that he forged with Dorothy L. Sayers. And indeed, in 1955—two years before her death, Lewis confessed to Sayers that he had only “dimly realised that the old-fashioned way... of talking to all young women was v[ery] like an adult way of talking to young boys. It explains,” he wrote, “not only why some women grew up vapid, but also why others grew us (if we may coin the word) viricidal [i.e., wanting to kill men]” (Lewis 2007, 676; Lewis’s emphasis). The Lewis who in his younger years so adamantly had defended the doctrine of gender essentialism was beginning to acknowledge the extent to which gendered behavior is socially conditioned. In another letter that same year, he expressed a concern to Sayers that some of the first illustrations for the Narnia Chronicles were a bit too effeminate. “I don’t like either the ultra feminine or the ultra masculine,” he added. “I prefer people” (Lewis 2007, 639; Lewis’s emphasis).
Dorothy Sayers surely must have rejoiced to read this declaration. Many of Lewis’s later readers, including myself, wish that his shift on this issue had occurred earlier and found its way into his better-selling apologetic works and his novels for children and adults. But better late than never. And it would be better still if those who keep trying to turn C. S. Lewis into an icon for traditionalist views on gender essentialism and gender hierarchy would stop mining his earlier works for isolated proof-texts and instead read what he wrote at every stage of his life.
Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen is Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at Eastern University, St. Davids, Pennsylvania.
This essay originally was presented as the Tenth Annual Warren Rubel Lecture on Christianity and Higher Learning at Valparaiso University on 1 February 2007.
The Cresset
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Copyright © 2007 Valparaiso University Press www.valpo.edu/cresset
Posted by: Merle | August 29, 2009 at 10:29 PM
http://ec.europa.eu/research/research-eu/women/article_women16_en.h
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Special issue – April 2009
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NEUROBIOLOGY
The brain, caught between science and ideology
Catherine Vidal, neurobiologist and Research Director at the Institut Pasteur (FR), does not limit her activities to her fundamental work, in particular on pain, memory and neurodegenerative ailments. This brain specialist also devotes her time to popularising science and to the relations between science and society.
Catherine Vidal – “As it develops, the brain integrates outside elements associated with its owner’s personal history.” © CNRS
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Let’s start with a very direct question: is the brain sexed?
The scientific answer is, paradoxically, yes and no. Yes, because the brain controls the reproductive functions. Male and female brains are not identical, in every species, including our own, because sexual reproduction involves different hormone systems and sexual behaviours, which are controlled by the brain.
But the answer is also no, because when we look at the cognitive functions, it is cerebral diversity which reigns, independently of gender. For thought to emerge, the brain needs to be stimulated by its environment. At birth, just 10 % of our 100 billion neurons are inter-connected. The 90 % of remaining connections will be constructed progressively depending on the influence of the family, education, culture and society. In this way, during its development, the brain integrates external elements associated with its owner’s personal history. We call this cerebral plasticity; which is why we all have different brains. And the differences between individuals of one and the same gender are so great as to outweigh any differences between the genders.
In fact, behind your question is the fundamental problem of the degree to which behaviour is innate and to which it is acquired – an essential question that philosophers and scientists have been debating for centuries. This remains an ideologically-charged subject, which the media adore.
Absolutely. The media often echo works that argue that cerebral specialisation differs between male and female. They say, for example, that language functions are undertaken by both hemispheres only in women’s brains. What do you say?
The theories on the hemispheric differences between the sexes in language appeared over thirty years ago. They have not been confirmed by recent brain imaging studies which allow us to see the living brain at work. These theories are often based on observations carried out on very small samples – often a dozen people. People continue to quote these studies whereas contemporary scientific reality is very different. Meta-analyses, which draw conclusions from all the experiments published in scientific literature and cover several hundred men and women, show that there is no statistically significant difference between the sexes in the hemispheric distribution of language zones. This is explained by the fact that the location of these language zones differs considerably from one individual to the next, with this variability being more important than a possible variability between the sexes.
Another proposed idea is that the male brain is more suited to abstract reasoning, in particular mathematics.
These conceptions have no biological foundation. This is illustrated by two major studies that were published last year in Science. A first investigation took place in 1990 in the United States, involving a sample of 10 million pupils. Statistically speaking, boys did better than girls in maths tests. Certain people interpreted this as a sign of the inaptitude of the female brain in this field. The same study, commissioned in 2008 (1), this time shows girls scoring as well as boys. It’s hard to imagine that in less than two decades there has been a genetic mutation to increase their aptitude in maths! These results are due simply to the development of the teaching of science and the growing gender mix of scientific fields. Another study (2) carried out in 2008 on 300 000 adolescents, in 40 countries, has shown that the more the socio-cultural environment is favourable to male-female equality, the better the girls score in maths tests. In Norway and Sweden, the results are comparable. In Iceland the girls beat the boys, while the boys outperform the girls in Turkey and Korea.
One argument that is frequently advanced to explain unequal performances in maths is that men succeed better in three-dimensional geometric-type tasks. What is this idea based on?
Experimental psychology does indeed show that men often perform better on tests on the mental representation of three-dimensional objects. But one forgets to mention the influence of the context in which these performance differences take place. If, before carrying out this test in a classroom, pupils are told that this is a geometry exercise, the boys will generally get better results. But if the same group is told that this is a drawing test, the girls will perform as well as the boys. These experiments clearly show that self-esteem and the internalisation of gender stereotypes play a decisive role in the scores obtained in this type of test.
In the end, what are the challenges for research on the differences between men’s and women’s brains?
It is fascinating to look for the origins of these differences beyond the simple description of them. These origins are to be found in biology, but in particular in history, culture and society. One major advance of neurobiological research has been a revaluation of the extraordinary plastic capacity of the brain. It is not justifiable to invoke biological differences between the sexes to justify the different distribution between men and women in society.
But this ‘biologising’ vision continues to satisfy people as providing a sort of scientific justification for the existence of manifest inequalities. In this way people use the theory of evolution to explain that men find their bearings better in space because, in prehistoric times, they went hunting mammoths while the women remained in the cave looking after the children. This scenario is totally speculative – no one was there to see whether it really happened like that. Any prehistory specialists will tell you that no document – fossils, cave paintings, graves, or the like – reveals any details of the kind on the social organisation and division of labour among our ancestors.
How do you explain the renewed interest in these questions over the past 20 or so years?
First of all by the fact that these studies are easily taken up by the media – an aspect to which the publishers of scientific journals, including the most prestigious, are unfortunately sensitive. Second, by the development of cerebral imaging technologies which initially gave new life to the old theories on the inequality between men and women explained by the differences in their brains. But the more cerebral imagery progresses the more we observe, as I said, the major role of the plasticity of the brain and the variability of its functioning from one individual to another, independent of gender.
I find it regrettable that studies of doubtful scientific value continue to be so widely echoed. But other things are there to make me optimistic. The fact that the 2008 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine rewarding the discovery of the AIDS virus was awarded jointly to Luc Montagnier and his main female collaborator, Françoise Barré-Sionoussi shows that mentalities are changing. Formerly only the head of the laboratory was rewarded… Think back here to Rosalind Franklin, the British biophysicist who played a key role in elucidating the double-helix structure of DNA and whose work was taken over by James Watson and Francis Crick, the winners of the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1962. We are seeing a real awareness of women’s role in research. But this evolution is slow. And belief in change is, alas, stronger than change itself…
Interview by Mikhaïl Stein
C.Guiso et al., Culture, Gender and Math, Science (2008), 320: 1164-1165.
J.S. Hude et al., Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance, Science (2008), 321 : 494-495.
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Find out more
Selected publications by Catherine Vidal
Sexe et pouvoir, with Dorothée Benoit-Browaeys, Paris, Belin, 2005. Translated into Italian, Japanese and Portuguese.
Féminin/Masculin: mythes et idéologie, Paris, Belin, 2006.
Hommes, femmes: avons-nous le même cerveau?, Paris, Le Pommier, 2007.
Cerveau, sexe et liberté, DVD Gallimard/ CNRS, col. «La recherche nous est contée», Paris, 2007.
Posted by: Merle | August 29, 2009 at 10:32 PM
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Think Again: Men and Women Share Cognitive Skills
Research debunks myths about cognitive difference
What the Research Shows
Are boys better at math? Are girls better at language? If fewer women than men work as scientists and engineers, is that aptitude or culture? Psychologists have gathered solid evidence that boys and girls or men and women differ in very few significant ways -- differences that would matter in school or at work -- in how, and how well, they think.
At the University of Wisconsin, Janet Shibley Hyde has compiled meta-analytical studies on this topic for more than 10 years. By using this approach, which aggregates research findings from many studies, Hyde has boiled down hundreds of inquiries into one simple conclusion: The sexes are more the same than they are different.
In a 2005 report, Hyde compiled meta-analyses on sex differences not only in cognition but also communication style, social or personality variables, motor behaviors and moral reasoning. In half the studies, sex differences were small; in another third they were almost non-existent. Thus, 78 percent of gender differences are small or close to zero. What's more, most of the analyses addressed differences that were presumed to be reliable, as in math or verbal ability.
At the end of 2005, Harvard University's Elizabeth Spelke reviewed 111 studies and papers and found that most suggest that men's and women's abilities for math and science have a genetic basis in cognitive systems that emerge in early childhood but give men and women on the whole equal aptitude for math and science. In fact, boy and girl infants were found to perform equally well as young as six months on tasks such as addition and subtraction (babies can do this, but not with pencil and paper!).
The evidence has piled up for years. In 1990, Hyde and her colleagues published a groundbreaking meta-analysis of 100 studies of math performance. Synthesizing data collected on more than three million participants between 1967 and 1987, researchers found no large, overall differences between boys and girls in math performance. Girls were slightly better at computation in elementary and middle school; in high school only, boys showed a slight edge in problem solving, perhaps because they took more science, which stresses problem solving. Boys and girls understood math concepts equally well and any gender differences narrowed over the years, belying the notion of a fixed or biological differentiating factor.
As for verbal ability, in 1988, Hyde and two colleagues reported that data from 165 studies revealed a female superiority so slight as to be meaningless, despite previous assertions that “girls are better verbally.” What's more, the authors found no evidence of substantial gender differences in any component of verbal processing. There were even no changes with age.
What the Research Means
The research shows not that males and females are – cognitively speaking -- separate but equal, but rather suggests that social and cultural factors influence perceived or actual performance differences. For example, in 1990, Hyde et al. concluded that there is little support for saying boys are better at math, instead revealing complex patterns in math performance that defy easy generalization. The researchers said that to explain why fewer women take college-level math courses and work in math-related occupations, “We must look to other factors, such as internalized belief systems about mathematics, external factors such as sex discrimination in education and in employment, and the mathematics curriculum at the precollege level.”
Where the sexes have differed on tests, researchers believe social context plays a role. Spelke believes that later-developing differences in career choices are due not to differing abilities but rather cultural factors, such as subtle but pervasive gender expectations that really kick in during high school and college.
In a 1999 study, Steven Spencer and colleagues reported that merely telling women that a math test usually shows gender differences hurt their performance. This phenomenon of “stereotype threat” occurs when people believe they will be evaluated based on societal stereotypes about their particular group. In the study, the researchers gave a math test to men and women after telling half the women that the test had shown gender differences, and telling the rest that it found none. Women who expected gender differences did significantly worse than men. Those who were told there was no gender disparity performed equally to men. What's more, the experiment was conducted with women who were top performers in math.
Because “stereotype threat” affected women even when the researchers said the test showed no gender differences – still flagging the possibility -- Spencer et al. believe that people may be sensitized even when a stereotype is mentioned in a benign context.
How We Use the Research
If males and females are truly understood to be very much the same, things might change in schools, colleges and universities, industry and the workplace in general. As Hyde and her colleagues noted in 1990, “Where gender differences do exist, they are in critical areas. Problem solving is critical for success in many mathematics-related fields, such as engineering and physics.” They believe that well before high school, children should be taught essential problem-solving skills in conjunction with computation. They also refer to boys having more access to problem-solving experiences outside math class. The researchers also point to the quantitative portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), which may tap problem-solving skills that favor boys; resulting scores are used in college admissions and scholarship decisions. Hyde is concerned about the costs of scientifically unsound gender stereotyping to individuals and to society as a whole.
Sources & Further Reading
Hyde, J. S., & Linn, M. C. (1988). Gender differences in verbal ability: A meta- analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 104, 53-69.
Hyde, J.S., Fennema, E., & Lamon, S. (1990). Gender differences in mathematics performance: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 107, 139-155.
Hyde, J.S. (2005) The gender similarities hypothesis. American Psychologist, 60(6), 581-592.
Spelke, Elizabeth S. (2005). Sex differences in intrinsic aptitude for mathematics and science?: A critical review. American Psychologist, 60(9), 950-958.
Spencer, S.J., Steele, C.M., & Quinn, D.M. (1999) Stereotype threat and women's math performance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 4-28.
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