Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

by Natasha Walter

  Reading through the article that describes this experiment, I was struck by another distinct difference. Connellan and Baron-Cohen took as given that longer gaze from babies on a particular object showed ‘preference’ for that object. So when the boy babies looked longer at what they called a mechanical mobile (though it was less a machine than a piece of abstract art), they called it ‘mobile preference’, and proof of ‘stronger interest in mechanical objects’, while female gaze at the face shows ‘a stronger interest in the face’.21 But the earlier researchers, Kagan, Henker, Hen-Tov, Levine and Lewis, have a much more intriguing view of what a longer gaze on the part of a pre-verbal baby might mean. It might mean liking, but it might mean being disconcerted. A baby does not have the luxury of speech to explain why it is gazing. We should be careful how we interpret their glances. As the earlier researchers stated, ‘Adults gaze at colourful, graceful birds out of preference’ but ‘they stare at wingless flying objects because they wish to categorize them and reduce the uncertainty created by violation of a familiar schema. A long fixation, without additional information from other response modes, does not allow one to determine which of these two incentives is eliciting the sustained attention’.22 In other words, if a baby looked longer at a scrambled face, one could have said that he or she was disconcerted that it didn’t look as they expected and hoped a face should look, and was gazing at it out of anxiety. The greater subtlety and nuance expressed by researchers forty years ago when looking at infants’ behaviour is telling.

  Other researchers tell similar stories about the similarities among boys and girls and the ways they respond to faces. In 1968, two researchers called Howard Moss and Kenneth Robson set up an experiment which investigated how much boy and girl infants at one and three months of age looked at their mothers, how much they looked at geometric patterns, and how much they looked at regular and scrambled images of faces.23 The study was primarily concerned to test the correlation between maternal anxiety and the behaviour of the infant, so it is coming from a rather different angle. Yet again, unlike Connellan and Baron-Cohen, they found no preference for the geometric over the picture of the face among the boys. It’s particularly striking to note that the amount of time the babies spent gazing at their mothers’ faces was similar for males and for females.

  If boys were more drawn to objects than girls are, then it would follow that baby boys would be better than girls at assessing objects’ properties and behaviour. This is where there is even more available research, none of which shows any such differences among infants.24 Some find that girls were better ‘systemisers’ than boys. For instance, psychologists have found that babies look for longer when shown impossible physical events, such as boxes being suspended in mid-air, than at possible events, such as the box falling, but girls sometimes show this awareness of the difference between certain impossible and possible events at a younger age than boys do.25 Given this long history of study of boy and girl infants over the years, Elizabeth Spelke has said this with confidence: ‘Hundreds of well-controlled experiments reveal no male advantage for perceiving objects or learning about mechanical systems.’26 The male and female babies in the three decades of research before Jennifer Connellan and Simon Baron-Cohen’s experiment have engaged equally with objects and people. When I spoke to Spelke by telephone, she was damning about the way that the one study that did show a difference in the hoped-for direction between male and female babies had been allowed, by the media, to drown out this long history of research on infants’ development. ‘Thirty to forty years of experiments in the field of cognitive development in young children have shown no consistent evidence for cognitive sex differences favouring males. If anything, young girls often seem to outperform boys in tests of early spatial awareness.’

  Another popular writer who has promoted the theory that biology lies behind all observable differences between boys and girls is Louann Brizendine, whose book The Female Brain was published in 2006, and was covered numerous times in the British press, including extracts, interviews and commentaries in the Daily Mail, Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph. She believes that in contrast to boys, who have no interest in social interaction, girls are born with an automatic investment in relationships. ‘Baby girls are born interested in emotional expression,’ she writes. ‘They take meaning about themselves from a look, a touch, every reaction from the people they come into contact with…. Little girls do not tolerate flat faces.’27

  There are a series of studies that look directly at how baby girls and baby boys react to flat faces: the ‘still face’ studies. These studies have been carried out on infants between one and twelve months old, over the last thirty years. The classic experiment was simply to watch the interaction of baby and mother, both in a normal responsive interaction and then when the mother remained completely unresponsive, with a flat expressionless face, for three minutes. The baby’s reactions, which seem to range from furious to flirtatious, are then assessed by psychologists, and shed interesting light on how babies seem to long for responsiveness and are deeply disconcerted by the lack of it. The long history of the still-face experiments shows that people have been wondering for many years whether baby boys and girls are primed to look for different things from the faces around them, and the results show only how impossible it is to get any clear answer. Although Brizendine would like us to believe that girls will not tolerate still faces, in fact similar reactions are observed in boys and girls. Lauren Adamson and Janet Frick, at Georgia University, carried out an overview of all the forty-three still-face studies that had been published from the late 1970s to 2001. They could say only this: ‘Results related to gender effects have run the full gamut from none, to girls displaying more distress than boys, to girls appearing more positive than boys.’28

  Those writers who believe that girls are born with a greater interest in people than boys also often say that from birth you can see easier relationships between baby girls and their carers than between baby boys and their carers. This is now a view that you often hear from parents in everyday life; I have lost count of the number of times that mothers of baby boys have told me that my easy relationship with my baby girl was down to her sex rather than her individual personality. Louann Brizendine sums up this view when she says, ‘This superior brain wiring for communication and emotional tones plays out early in a baby girl’s behaviour … The baby girl is able to resonate more easily with her mother and respond quickly to soothing behaviour, stopping her fussing and crying. Observations made during a study at Harvard Medical School found that baby girls do this better with their mothers than do boys.’29 But when I went to look at Brizendine’s reference for this statement, which is a study undertaken by Katherine Weinberg and colleagues at Harvard Medical School in 1999 I discovered that the picture these researchers found was more complicated than Brizendine suggested.

  The male infants were indeed fussier and crosser, but they were more interested in emotional interactions with their mother than the girls were, who were more interested in their surroundings and less bothered by what their mother was up to. Although boys showed more negative expressive behaviour than girls, they surprisingly displayed significantly more positive expressions directed to the mother as well. Boys were also more likely than girls to display facial expressions of joy, to look at the mother and to vocalise to the mother. Girls, on the other hand, were more likely than boys to look at and explore objects. As these researchers put it: ‘Boys were more socially oriented than girls. They were more likely than girls to look at their mother … Girls, in comparison with boys, spent substantially more time exploring objects.’30

  When I read or listen to scientists such as these, whose work allows these nuanced pictures to emerge about babies’ behaviour, it feels to me that they are much braver in the way they will accept the complexity of individual responses among infants. As Elizabeth Spelke said to me, ‘I think there is now a tendency to focus on the finding that will reinforce a stereotype rather than th
e findings that challenge it.’ As anyone who has brought up a baby will attest, the behaviour of infants is not always easy to predict and to summarise; as their individuality emerges they pass through many scudding moments of unexpected responses. Yet there is now a strand of thought that is becoming more and more powerful, which is so keen to fit babies of this generation into pink and blue boxes that it seems afraid to do justice to the full richness of their emerging humanity.

  B: Words

  For a long time there has been a general assumption that women talk more than men and are better at talking than men are. As Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan joked on their popular daytime television show: ‘Women may talk more than men,’ Judy announced, ‘but they’ve got twice as big a vocabulary.’ Richard retorted, ‘I don’t know what you, erm, what you, erm …’ ‘Mean, Richard?’ cooed Judy.31 John Gray rests much of his case about the vast differences between men and women on the apparent differences in the way that they talk. One chapter in his classic book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, is called, ‘Men go into their caves and women talk’. Here he puts forward the example: ‘When Tom comes home, he wants to relax and unwind by quietly reading the news. He is stressed by the unsolved problems of the day and finds relief through forgetting them. His wife, Mary, also wants to relax from her stressful day. She, however, wants to find relief by talking about the problems of her day.’32

  This assumption that femininity is based on a greater ease with language is often presented as fact in the media, as when the Daily Mail stated categorically in a headline, ‘Women talk three times as much as men, says study.’33 This article was based on statements made by Louann Brizendine in her book The Female Brain. In this book, Brizendine stated that girls speak two to three times more words per day than boys, and that on average girls speak twice as fast as boys.34 One expert in particular was nonplussed by her claims. Mark Liberman is a professor of phonetics who contributes to a wry, witty blog (the Language Log). When Brizendine’s book was first published, he saw a copy in a bookshop. ‘The impressive list of bullet points on the dust jacket caught my attention,’ he told me. One of these bullet points was: ‘A woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000.’ Liberman was intrigued, as he had never heard of such a figure. ‘I figured that this must refer to a new study that I hadn’t heard about. I read the book and checked the references. I was surprised – the book has copious references to the scientific literature, and yet in the cases that I checked, the cited references offered little or no support for the controversial claims in the text.’ The citation that she gave for this claim for women speaking more than men was to a self-help book,35 rather than to any research evidence. In an article in the Boston Globe, Liberman commented, ‘Unfortunately, this is just one of several cases in recent books on sex and neuroscience where striking numbers turn out to be without apparent empirical support.’36

  Scientists at Arizona University then decided to try to prove or disprove the claim by studying the daily utterances of nearly four hundred people. Matthias Mehl, the lead researcher, commented that the claims that women speak three times as much as men appeared to have achieved the status of a cultural myth, having been so widely reported in so many different media. Yet this study showed conclusively that there was no statistically significant difference between men and women in the amount they talked. Women used a little more than 16,000 words a day, on average, and men a little less, but the difference was insignificant.37

  Mark Liberman also investigated Brizendine’s claim that girls speak more quickly than boys. He found that the only evidence she cited in support of the claim that girls speak at 250 words per minute as against 125 words per minute for boys was a paper that had no findings in it at all about speech rates broken down by gender. The only research that has been carried out into different speech rates among men and women has found small differences in the opposite direction, finding that men speak slightly faster than women. One paper that Liberman and his colleagues presented in 2006 found that: ‘Males tend to speak faster than females … The difference between them is, however, very small, only about 4 to 5 words or characters per minute (2%), though it is statistically significant.’38

  The idea has also taken hold that the typical woman does not only talk more, and more quickly, than men do, but she is simply better at talking than the men around her. This assumption is seen throughout our culture, particularly tellingly among those involved in children’s education and upbringing. For instance, the Girls’ Schools Association explains the importance of single-sex education because of: ‘The tendencies of girls to be more contemplative, collaborative, intuitive and verbal, and boys to be more physically active, aggressive, and independent in their learning style.’39 On the Supernanny website, which is a spinoff from an extremely popular television programme both in the UK and the US, advice on how to discipline your child tells parents they will need to use different strategies for their boys, ‘Because boys aren’t as good at expressing themselves verbally.’40

  Funnily enough, there is no solid evidence for the idea that women’s verbal skills are so much better than men’s, although it has become such a touchstone of our current culture. On average, girls do develop language skills slightly earlier than boys, and so differences can be seen within age cohorts at school, but boys can catch up. Even if boys do not, on average, now perform as well as girls in some exams in the UK, there is no evidence that this is a biological and unchanging difference rather than one produced by a particular culture at a particular time when many boys are encouraged to believe that reading and homework are not cool.

  Dr Janet Shibley Hyde is a psychologist who has specialised in meta-analysis – a way of combining results from many published studies – of gender differences in cognition. She started doing massive meta-analyses of studies of language skills in the 1980s and has consistently found that the differences are far smaller than are usually believed. In 1988 Dr Hyde carried out a meta-analysis of 165 studies that assessed differences in verbal abilities between girls and boys, including abilities in vocabulary, analogies, reading comprehension, essay writing, anagrams and general verbal ability. All the differences did favour girls – boys did a little better on analogies, but otherwise the girls came out better. But the telling point of her analyses is the size of the differences. They were tiny. There is a huge range in the verbal abilities within each sex, but hardly any difference between each sex.41 Overall, she concluded that ‘gender differences accounted for only about one per cent of the variance in verbal ability’. So you are just as likely, as a woman, to bump into a woman who is very different from you in verbal skills as you are to find a man who is very different from you. This means that to talk of a ‘female brain’ that is ‘wired for communication’, as some writers do, is nonsense, since male brains seem to be working in exactly the same way.42

  Why is it, then, that we seem to return so frequently to the idea that women are better at talking than men are? In an interview with the Guardian, Liberman said that Louann Brizendine’s claim about women speaking more than men was simply an urban myth, and commented that: ‘Urban legends come about because they concern things that resonate with people’s experiences in some way. They are factually untrue but mythically resonant.’43 It is hard not to agree with Liberman’s assessment here, and although this legend is often characterised by a nod towards female superiority – as with the Richard and Judy joke at the beginning of this section – it can also feel very constraining. The idea that women talk so much more than men seems to grow from the idea that women talk too much, that their words are surplus to requirements. Even when this myth is voiced positively, it can be restrictive. It has long been a tradition of Western culture that women like to gossip with friends at home, while men are out working, often in a solitary and single-minded way. Although men and women are now beginning to cross into each other’s roles at work and at home, it is clearly highly reassuring for many people to believe that the
re is one sex-based division of labour, the work that women do to preserve relationships through their greater verbal skills, which will continue. And so even when this assumption is clothed in rhetoric about women’s superiority, it still reinforces traditional stereotypes about a woman’s place in society.

  Even if we could shrug off the myths that women talk better than men or talk more than men, we are likely to be left with the persistent view that women talk differently from men. This is the most recalcitrant belief of all when it comes to words: that women are good at cooperative, supportive talk, while men are good at point-scoring and logical argument. For instance, Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics, writes bestselling books that promote this view of how men and women differ. In her world, a typical man engages with the world, ‘as an individual in a hierarchical social order in which he was either one-up or one-down. In this world, conversations are negotiations in which people try to achieve and maintain the upper hand if they can.’ A typical woman, on the other hand, approaches the world ‘as an individual in a network of connections. In this world, conversations are negotiations for closeness in which people try to seek and give confirmation and support, and to reach consensus.’44