Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

Studies intended to test for differences between “male” and “female” brains are often loaded with implicit biases and design flaws, Fine argues. One prominent study, conducted by Simon Baron-Cohen (whose work on “empathetic” versus “systematizing” brains Fine criticized in earlier chapters), sought to prove the hypothesis that “higher amniotic testosterone should bring about worse empathizing skills” (109). The results in no way supported this hypothesis. Further, Baron-Cohen’s distinction between the “empathizing” and “systematizing” brain fails to draw a supportable definition of these functions: Imagining science as a “systematizing” profession to which the male brain is more suited overlooks the necessity of intuition and sympathy in making scientific leaps—as described by no lesser authority than Albert Einstein (109). Further studies that sought correlations between amniotic testosterone and variations in cognitive performance found none.

Baron-Cohen and his colleagues also sought gender differences in newborns, testing to see whether male and female babies preferred to look at a face or a mobile. Male and female babies spent equal amounts of time looking at the face, but males looked longer at the mobile than females did, and females looked longer at the face than they did the mobile (112). While many have been eager to draw conclusions about innate gender differences from these data, the study itself was flawed in its conception: The face and the mobile were presented one after the other, rather than simultaneously, making it difficult to judge which truly drew more of the baby’s attention; the babies’ positioning was not standardized; and most crucially, the experimenters were aware of the babies’ sex and thus primed both to see and to prompt the very differences they expected (114). Fine writes: “There’s something a little shocking about the weakness of the scientific data on the one hand and the strength of the popular claims on the other” (117). 

People with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) are exposed to unusually high levels of testosterone in the womb. Girls with CAH develop male external genitalia while retaining female internal reproductive organs. This rare condition offers scientists an opportunity to study the effects of testosterone without male socialization. (However, it’s important to recall that even in these cases, testosterone isn’t the only variable in the mix: CAH also affects other hormones, and the parents of a girl with CAH may feel ambivalence about their child’s gender, leading to potentially non-standard implicit gender assumptions.)

In studies of girls and women with CAH, the evidence doesn’t suggest a clear stereotypical picture of what testosterone is “supposed” to do—for instance, high testosterone in these people doesn’t seem to improve mathematical performance. Girls with CAH can be seen in experimental conditions to play more with “boyish” toys. However, as Fine points out:

[N]o attempt seems to have been made to work out whether girls with CAH are drawn to some particular quality in boyish toys and activities or whether they are drawn to them simply by virtue of the fact that they are associated with males (121).

Again, Fine argues that the conditions under which these studies have been conducted are flawed in their inception: Researchers’ ideas of gender underlie both the toys and activities they offer and their interpretation of those toys and activities.

A counterhypothesis offered by primatologist Frances Burton is that “the effect of fetal hormones in primates is to predispose them to be receptive to whatever behaviors happen to go with their sex in the particular society into which they are born” (123). Studies of primates reveal societies that work much like human ones in relation to sex difference: Individual primate groups have gender norms, but those norms vary widely across and within species. For instance, in Japan, macaque males of the same species have been shown to be intimately involved in caring for young in some troops and utterly uninvolved in others. This variation can’t be attributed to hormonal difference. However, primate troops do seem to have ideas of sex-linked behavior and take an interest in the sex of newborns.

As Fine writes, “higher fetal testosterone in nonclinical populations has not been convincingly linked with better mental rotation ability, systemizing ability, mathematical ability, scientific ability, or worse mind reading,” and studies that purport to support such hypotheses have been badly flawed (130). Yet pop psychology has pounced on fetal testosterone as an explanation for gender inequality.

The history of neuroscience abounds with sexist foregone conclusions. Victorian scientists argued that white male superiority could be proven by the “cephalic index”—the ratio of skull length to skull breadth—but “when it became clear that the head shapes of ‘inferior’ social groups, including women, did not segregate neatly from those of ‘superior’ groups,” this measure was discarded (132). In seeking to study differences between male and female brains, modern scientists do not always avoid similar traps.

Part of the dilemma of such research is that, as the brain scientist Hines puts it, “[B]ecause it is more interesting to find a difference than to find no difference, the 19 failures to observe a difference between men and women go unreported, whereas the 1 in 20 finding of a difference is likely to be published” (134). Moreover, popular interpretations of brain studies tend to gloss over the complexity of brain activity and to misunderstand both the meaning and the interpretability of fMRI scans (which, rather than providing a literal picture of brain activity, map statistically significant differences between blood flow in the brain during a task and blood flow in the brain at rest). Furthermore, due to their expense and difficulty, fMRI studies tend to look at small sample sizes and are therefore more susceptible to error.

One place where these errors of interpretation show clearly is in studies of brain lateralization. An old theory, founded on small-sample studies, suggests that male brains focus activity in one hemisphere, whereas female brains use both sides. This theory, used to justify stereotypes about male visuospatial capacity and female verbal skills, has been demonstrated in large-scale meta-analyses of brain scans to be uncertain at best (137). Despite the lack of empirical proof, however, researchers return to this hypothesis over and over, using it to justify why men “can’t” cook dinner and women “can’t” read maps.

Yet again, the pressure of cultural assumption overrides and distorts scientific data. As Fine points out at the end of the chapter, there’s also a major unanswered question in these arguments from physiology: “Why should a localized brain create a spotlight mind good at certain masculine tasks? And why should a global, interconnected brain create a floodlight mind better at feminine activities?” (140).

Contemporary scientists often seek to link the physicality of the brain to the operations of the mind. Fine, however, encourages us to consider the counterhypothesis that differences in the brain may actually serve to prevent sex difference by compensating for physiological variation—as in male and female voles, who exhibit nearly identical parenting behavior not in spite of but because of brain difference (143).

What physiological differences there are between male and female brains have been shown to be more to do with the size of the body than with sex (144), and examining sex differences in the wild complexity of the human brain is not a straightforward process. As ever, scientists who seek reasons for psychological difference in brain structure fall prey to their gender assumptions: “[T]he obscurity of the relationship between brain structure and psychological function means that just-so stories can be all too easily written and rewritten” (145). Fine surveys studies that purport to pinpoint neurological sex difference and finds design error and overinflated conclusions. One study that claimed to map emotion in male and female brains using “emotionally-charged images” to spur brain activity founded some of its conclusions on data taken from corpses—not the most emotive subjects (148).

Fine also joins a wider call to question the very methodology of brain scans. A study in which a dead salmon demonstrated significant brain responses to emotional images strongly suggested “that the threshold commonly set for declaring that a difference is ‘significant’ just isn’t high enough” (150). Many brain studies also produce counterintuitive and surprising results that call into question the use of “activation” as an indication of brain activity: In one instance, a stroke patient who had sustained brain damage in “pretty much all of the brain regions that have been reliably activated in literally dozens of functional imaging studies of mind reading” had no difficulty in performing mind-reading tasks (152).

Brain specialization itself isn’t easy to judge. The same zone of neurons in the brain may function differently in different contexts; their action depends on the information they’re taking in from the outside world and the information they’re receiving from other brain activity.

Our understanding of brain activity is partial, incomplete, and often contradictory—and attempts to draw distinctions between male and female thought based on our half-understood observations of blood flow are both unreliable and susceptible to implicit gender bias.

Some studies of gendered brain difference actively misrepresent the facts. Fine examines the work of a scientist named Louann Brizendine, whose book The Female Brain appears to the popular eye to be well-researched and reliable. However, as the respected journal Nature’s scathing review and Fine’s own fact-checking reveal, the book is founded on numerous false claims. Besides the same kinds of biased interpretive leaps Fine has discussed in previous chapters (like unsubstantiated interpretations of lateralization), Brizendine’s claims that studies demonstrate a gender difference are often unfounded—for instance, they draw their conclusions from studies that only included women, which provide no basis for the gender comparison that Brizendine claims she’s making (160).

This kind of misleading “science” is most disturbing when it begins to find its way into education. Spurious claims about gender differences in brains are often invoked in arguments for the separate education of boys and girls, and that segregation strengthens bias. Even if one wanted to separate students by brain type—and, as Fine reminds us, most physiological differences in brains have a lot more to do with body size than sex—“there is no reliable way to translate these brain differences into educational strategies,” simply because we do not know enough about how what we see in studies of the brain translates to behavior or capacity (166). 

The popular habit of overinterpreting (and misinterpreting) brain research is perhaps founded on stereotypes of what “science” looks like. Though, as has been amply demonstrated in previous chapters, researchers’ capacity to interpret what’s really happening in the brain from the evidence they can presently gather is limited at best, the fact that a brain scan looks impressively technical means that the general public is more likely to give conclusions founded on one unwarranted credence (170). Those who wish to prove a pet point about gender difference may also look to brain scans for evidence of innate “hardwiring,” when in fact they can prove no such thing: “Nurture” affects the brain as much as “nature,” and evidence of a response in the brain is not evidence of that response’s innateness (171).

The trappings of brain science, however, remain unhelpfully persuasive: Studies have demonstrated that adding a sentence of neuroscientific jargon to a sexist circular argument about women’s poor spatial reasoning skills makes subjects more likely to accept that argument—even when they’ve rejected the circular argument previously (172). The mere gloss of science is thus an effective cover for sexist attitudes. This fact, Fine argues, calls for much greater care and caution in scientific reporting around gender difference studies for both scientists and journalists: Misreported or misinterpreted gender difference studies have wide-ranging and deleterious social effects.

The popular notion of brain “hardwiring” is founded on the idea that the newborn brain comes with an inbuilt structure to which new capacities are gradually tacked on. This attitude, however, is outdated. The contemporary “neuroconstructivist” theory of brain development “emphasizes the sheer exhilarating tangle of a continuous interaction among genes, brain, and environment” (177). While an individual’s genes are what they are, environment and behavior alter how they’re expressed—whether they turn on or off. The mechanical metaphor of hardwiring or “innateness” simply doesn’t track to the organic reality of a human brain.

Fine examines the enduring notion that males are more “variable” than females—more likely to be outliers, either as “prodigies” or “idiots”—as an example of a just-so story often linked, without good evidence, to the “hardwiring” model (180). Unsurprisingly, the likelihood that a girl will fall into exceptionally gifted “outlier” categories in the International Mathematical Olympiad, a prestigious worldwide competition, has a lot more to do with the beliefs of the culture she comes from than her gender (182). Fine also notes the effects of racial stereotypes on the same competition: In the US, “if you’re Hispanic, African American, or Native American, it matters not whether you have two X chromosomes or one—you might as well give up now on any dreams of sweating for nine hours over some proofs” (183). Stereotypes determine how exceptional talent is identified, and thus, how it’s nurtured. The spurious notion of “hardwiring,” especially as it’s linked to gender and race, might be one of the most harmful just-so stories out there.