This view of the differences between men and women does not just assume that women have a superior ability to talk, it also assumes a superior ability to empathise, and these skills are commonly seen as inextricably linked. ‘The safest conclusion at this point is that females are both better empathisers and better in many aspects of language use,’ says Simon Baron-Cohen in The Essential Difference.45 When the new supporters of biological explanations for sex differences have argued that women are characteristically ‘empathisers’, they have received powerful support from the media. The questionnaires developed by Simon Baron-Cohen and his team at Cambridge University, which are supposed to test whether you have an empathetic or systemising brain, can be found on the Guardian’s46 website, and a related version is on the BBC’s website.47
Most people could probably agree that anecdotally we can all call to mind situations that back up the observation that women are more empathetic communicators than men, situations in which women do the work of preserving and extending relationships through their words, while men don’t bother to talk unless they want something specific communicated or discovered. Most of us have experienced these situations, both at work and at home, in our friendships and professional relationships.
However, it is a big step from observing a difference to assuming that it is rooted in biological factors that are necessarily resistant to change. The arguments of the biological determinists take the observed differences between men and women and link them to genetic and hormonal differences which were laid down for us aeons ago by evolutionary pressures, and which cannot be wiped away by social change. If you are sceptical about the narrative of biological determinism, you need not disregard the differences you can often see in the ways that men and women communicate in our society. But you could look at the way these current differences may be produced not just by innate drives but by the expectations around us. Some fascinating research has shown that our expectations about the way men and women differ will even influence our apparent ability to empathise. So women do tend to score more highly than men in many studies of adults’ empathy, whether those entail judging how people are feeling from looking at photographs of their eyes, or simply reporting how much they care about those close to them. Yet two psychologists who reviewed these studies found this striking truth: that this apparent superiority in empathising was clearly linked to the expectations that individuals knew they should be living up to. They found, looking at a number of studies, that it was only when women and men were aware of what was being assessed that significant differences were found between male and female responses. They concluded: ‘There was a large sex difference favouring women when the measure of empathy was self-report scales; moderate differences (favouring females) were found for reflexive crying and self-report measures in laboratory situations; and no sex differences were evident when the measure of empathy was either physiological or unobtrusive observations of nonverbal reactions to another’s emotional state.’ In other words, when people are aware of what they are being asked to do and can control their responses, they live up to the stereotypes about how men and women should behave. But when reactions are being observed that are less controllable or when the subjects are not sure what is being assessed, men and women are much more variable.48 This suggests that much so-called research on this subject is not actually testing innate differences, because it fails to screen out the way we try, maybe without even consciously knowing we are doing so, to conform to social norms.
If the way we communicate is not just influenced by our innate aptitudes but also by the situation around us, it is absolutely vital to remember that when we look at men and women talking, we are still not always looking at communication between equals. The effects of an imbalance of power on the way we communicate have been revealed in some telling research. For instance, Sara Snodgrass of Florida Atlantic University created studies in which she put thirty-six pairs of people together and gave one a dominant, teacher-like role and one a subordinate role for their first task, before giving them games to play. Their responsiveness to the other’s emotions and feelings was then assessed. It became clear that those given the subordinate role were more sensitive to the other person than those given the leader’s role – whatever their sex. ‘“Women’s intuition” would perhaps more accurately be referred to as “subordinate’s intuition”,’ Snodgrass concluded.49
This study and others like it suggest that the empathy and sensitivity that are celebrated as feminine traits in our society may be less down to our innate aptitudes and more down to the situations in which we find ourselves and the expectations that have been formed by the culture around us. In fact, we may all have much more potential to cross these pink and blue boundaries than the biological narrative would suggest. I think we can see this flexibility constantly in everyday life. We have all met women who are utterly chilly communicators, and men who are able to encourage others to feel immediately at ease. The simplistic view of male and female communication peddled by some writers who believe our behaviour is determined by biology denies the true complexity of how we really communicate with one another. At times most of us are capable of being empathetic, at other times authoritative, at times loving, at other times heartless. To point out that women may have no natural superiority in empathising is not to say that the association between femininity and empathy is a negative aspect of being female: on the contrary, to respond to another’s needs, to be sensitive to another’s emotions – this is an essential part of being fully human. Rather than asking women to sweep this ‘subordinate’s intuition’ out of their lives, it may be time to insist that more men learn these responses themselves. But this change will be slowed, or even blocked, if we keep telling men that ordinary empathy and sensitivity to others relies on an innate gift that only women are likely to have.
If it is wrong to believe that men and women communicate so differently, then why do so many people buy into this myth? Why do millions of people buy Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, and so (relatively) few a debunking book like Deborah Cameron’s excellent The Myth of Mars and Venus? I think that the resilience of the myth of men and women’s differing communication rests on the fact that it foregrounds something we all feel to be true: that we are often misunderstood. Many of us long for the perfect partner, who can understand everything without being told; many of us are disappointed by reality. Many of us find that we are blocked, whether in our working life or our home life, from achieving the transparent communication we desire. It is easy, therefore, to look at the communication problems described by writers such as John Gray or Deborah Tannen and to nod in agreement. If we are honest, however, we would acknowledge that the problems men and women face when they talk to one another do not always run along the lines of the grunting male and the chattering female. We are more individual, more variable, more subtle, than that narrative will ever allow.
C: Maths
Another key theme of the new biological determinism when it comes to differences between the sexes is that while women may excel at empathising, they are deficient in systemising skills, or in logic as against intuition, or reasoning as against feeling. Above all, one key theme that emerges in this new biological determinism is that despite our decades of equal opportunity, men are still so much better at certain areas of maths. The theory that men have a biological superiority at maths is now often used to explain why many fewer women go into careers that require mathematical ability. In The Blank Slate, the eminent psychologist Steven Pinker says, ‘The fact that more men than women have exceptional abilities in mathematical reasoning and in mentally manipulating 3-D objects is enough to explain a departure from a fifty-fifty sex ratio among engineers, physicists, organic chemists, and professors in some branches of mathematics.’50 And it was this argument that the then president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, picked up on when he said that ‘issues of intrinsic aptitude’ would be one of the factors that produced female under-representation on the science and engine
ering faculty at Harvard.
This view has been generally accepted by much of the mainstream media. As one science journalist put it in the Sunday Telegraph in 2004: ‘The highest ranks of mathematicians throng with male minds that are more comfortable with its abstract concepts of space, geometry and number … In recent years, various studies have concluded that sex differences are more than skin deep: the brains of men and women handle language and emotion in different ways, with differences in brain structure. This, in turn, may reflect our evolutionary past, and how men’s brains were optimised to hunt and women’s to gather.’51 Or as a commentator put it in the Sunday Times in 2008, ‘We are also recognising that across a population women’s and men’s abilities vary; you would expect women to be underrepresented in quantum mechanics or navigation; though individual women may excel in these fields, women in general are unlikely to do so, for innate reasons.’52
For all the categorical certainty that some writers bring to the discussion of this difference between men and women, many scientists question whether it is true that there are differences in aptitude for maths or science among men and women. Janet Shibley Hyde, the psychologist who has spent years on meta-analysis of studies that investigate gender differences in cognition, has found that even for maths, ‘the findings were quite surprising, given the long-held belief in a male superiority in mathematics,’53 since the differences found were all small except in a couple of narrow areas. The only area of maths that consistently throws up a moderate or large difference in favour of men is their ability for spatial visualisation. This is particularly shown in a standard test used to diagnose the ability to rotate three-dimensional objects mentally. This test involves looking at line drawings of 3-D shapes consisting of blocks in different positions, and deciding which of the shapes is identical. This does not mean that in all tests of 3-D skills men score more highly; if people are asked to pick out shapes in complex patterns or to visualise what a folded paper would look like unfolded, men and women score similarly. In fact, if you look at this one test that shows a large difference in aptitude it is extraordinary what a narrow area of intellectual ability it is testing, and many scientists question how significant it is. Melissa Hines’s book Brain Gender discusses the full panoply of sex differences in cognition, and as she says sharply, ‘Most scientific fields require numerous skills in addition to (and probably even more than) the ability to rotate a three-dimensional shape in the mind.’54
What’s more, there is a growing and fascinating literature which suggests that differences between men and women on basic tests of spatial awareness can be reduced or wiped out by practice. Not practice over years, but practice over just hours. For instance, in one study published in 2000, forty-four men and women were asked to do the standard mental rotations test. Half of the subjects were first of all given a similar test, a ‘familiarisation task’, that did not involve mental rotation, instead involving colour matching, but did involve pressing similar buttons on the computer and following similar instructions. In the group who were not given any familiarisation with the task sex differences were found, but in the group who performed the mental rotation task after the colour-matching task, sex differences were not found.55 The researchers ponder whether this is because women are more anxious and need to be warmed up to the task, or whether they simply are less used to using computers to play games and take tests. Other studies have found similar results.56 When men and women were asked to do about ten hours of playing a ‘first-person shooter action game’ called Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, it had a measurable effect on their spatial abilities. Before and after playing the game, they took two tests, one involving spatial attention and the other the standard mental rotations test. After practice, women no longer did worse than the men at the test of spatial attention, and their performance in the mental rotation test was also improved. The researchers concluded – maybe tongue in cheek – ‘we can only imagine the benefits that might be realised after weeks, months, or even years of action-video-gaming experience.’57
When men and women are enrolled on identical maths courses, it is hard to see any differences in the way the sexes perform. For instance, although fewer girls than boys do maths A level in the UK, the girls now get higher grades. Similarly, in the US a recent study looked at the results from seven million students in ten states, and found that: ‘Now that enrollment in advanced math courses is equalized, we don’t see gender differences in test performance.’58 Since the expected gaps in many tests are closing, those writers who would still prefer to believe that sex differences in mathematical ability are innate and unchanging tend to cite one test that still tends to show boys outperforming girls, the mathematics section of the SAT that is taken by students in the US prior to college entry. Even British writers such as Simon Baron-Cohen cite the results from the American mathematics SAT rather than results from British exams.59 Yet the results even of this test are showing a shrinking gap. Steven Pinker said in The Blank Slate, published in 2002, that the ratio of boys to girls getting the highest scores was thirteen to one.60 This figure was drawn from tests administered in the 1980s. But by the 1990s this ratio had dropped substantially, to just 2.8 to one.61 The continued gap in the SAT-M results can in fact be explained by the reality that many more girls take it than boys do, since more girls now try for college, and therefore the pool of girl entrants is less highly selected than the pool of boys.62
Melissa Hines is American, a graduate of Princeton and UCLA, and she now works at the University of Cambridge in the UK. She has seen the way the debate on boys’ and girls’ maths performance is handled differently in the US and the UK, so that two different situations can be interpreted in a way that still backs up the fatalistic view that girls should do worse than boys. As Hines said to me when we met in London: ‘In the US where the girls are doing not as well as boys in some tests, the information seems to be interpreted as showing that girls just aren’t as good at these things so we can’t expect them to be mathematicians. But here in the UK people are reacting to boys not doing as well as girls in maths exams by saying, what can we do about that, we need to fix that … This difference is telling.’ It is indeed.
Evidence that the gap is closing between men and women in many maths tests has begun to make some writers rather wary about citing ‘intrinsic aptitude’ when explaining the lack of women in certain occupations. We have therefore seen a shift in the argument, from the idea that there are innate differences in aptitudes, to the idea that there are innate differences in aspirations. To put it most simply, the argument goes, men are born to like maths, and women are not. To put it more subtly, as Susan Pinker does in The Sexual Paradox: ‘Biological differences may underlie aspects of women’s occupational choices – the type of work they find appealing and how many hours they want to commit to it. Even with dramatic changes in customs, laws and social expectations … there are aspects of women’s work preferences that are likely to stay the same.’63
In this narrative, it doesn’t matter how much you encourage women to do maths, they will never choose to be scientists or engineers or computer programmers in the same numbers as men. And it’s true that at the moment more men than women clearly do aspire to these fields: women do not go into higher level maths courses, do science degrees or take up work in science, engineering and maths at the same rate as men, and this is not just about raw ability. Women who do well in the mathematics section of the SATs are only half as likely to pursue such careers as men who have the same test scores as they do.64 So there is something else that pushes women away from such careers, other than pure ability.
But it is way too early for commentators to go from there to the conclusion that men’s greater preference for and performance in careers involving maths and science is innate and unchanging. We still live in a society in which women are not being encouraged into these areas in the same way that boys are; not just by school and university teachers, but by peer and parental expectations, and by the culture a
round them. For instance, studies have shown that mothers overestimate the maths abilities of their sons and underestimate the maths abilities of their daughters, and that male high-school students in the US are aware that their teachers, mothers and fathers have more favourable views of their maths abilities than those of female high-school students. Psychologists have also found that mothers’ perceptions of their children’s abilities influence those children’s beliefs about their abilities even more than the children’s own grades, and that parents’ low expectations for their daughters are related both to the girls’ lower expectations of their own performance, and to their intentions not to do so much maths at school.65
Although some of this research was carried out in the 1980s and 1990s, I think we should not underestimate the fact that in some ways things are moving backwards, and this is a culture in which women are now frequently told, by bestselling writers and the media that often follow them uncritically, that women who have typical feminine brains and normal levels of feminine hormones may be naturally unsuited to mathematical and scientific careers. When we assume that our sons will be more interested in systems, from chess to mathematics, and that our daughters will be more interested in relationships, are we letting their choices lead us, or are we moulding their choices? The next chapter will look in much more detail at the way that stereotypes influence even women’s performance in supposedly objective tests and even their choices in apparently unconstrained situations.
It seems far too early, to me, to make assumptions about what girls on average and boys on average would be interested in if they were growing up free from these expectations. Far from being in a position yet to judge whether men and women would have equal aspirations to work involving maths and science in an equal world, we are still living with attitudes that make it surprising women are making the strides that we can see. In the US, women were 8 per cent of the science and engineering workforce in 1973; in 1999 they were 24 per cent.66 So it is clear that those who would see our working patterns as biologically determined have their work cut out in stating that women’s minds are unsuited to working in scientific careers. In order not to trammel the dreams of the next generation, perhaps it is better not to peddle ideas of what women are naturally suited for before they have shown us what they can actually do.
Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism Page 18
