57 Jing Feng, Ian Spence and Jay Pratt, ‘Playing an action video game reduces gender differences in spatial cognition’, Psychological Science, 18, 10 (October 2007) 850–5, p854
58 Quoted in Tamar Lewin, ‘Math scores show no gap for girls, study finds’, New York Times, 25 July 2008
59 Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference, op cit, pp74–5
60 Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, op cit, p345
61 D Goldstein and V B Stocking, ‘TIP studies of gender differences in talented adolescents’, in K A Heller and E A Hany eds, Competence and Responsibility 2 (Ashland, OH: Hofgreve, 1994), pp190–203, cited in Elizabeth Spelke, ‘Sex differences in intrinsic aptitude for mathematics and science?’, op cit
62 Elizabeth Spelke, ‘Sex differences in intrinsic aptitude for mathematics and science?’ op cit, p954; Lewin, ‘Math scores show no gap for girls,’ op cit
63 Susan Pinker, The Sexual Paradox, op cit, p124
64 Catherine Weinberger, ‘Is the science and engineering workforce drawn from the far upper tail of the math ability distribution?’ September 2005, retrieved 10 July 2008 from http://econ.ucsb.edu/~weinberg/uppertail.pdf
65 P M Frome and J S Eccles, ‘Parents’ influence on children’s achievement-related perceptions’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 2 (1998), 183–201; J S Hyde, E Fennema, M Ryan, L A Frost and C Hopp, ‘Gender comparisons of mathematics attitudes and affect: a meta-analysis’, Psychology of Women Quarterly, 14, 3 (September 1990), 299–324; J S Eccles and J E Jacobs, ‘Social forces shape math attitudes and performance’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 11, 2 (Winter 1986), 367–80. For a good discussion of these studies and others see Diane Quinn, S J Spencer, ‘The interference of stereotype threat with women’s generation of mathematical problem-solving strategies’, Journal of Social Issues, 57, 1 (2002), 55–71
66 Statistics compiled by the Association of Women in Science (US), from National Science Foundation statistics, retrieved 25 October 2008 from http://www.serve.com/awis/statistics/Rep_of_Women_in_S&E.pdf
67 Battle of the Sexes, part 1, 19 September 2002, retrieved 18 October 2008 from http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s686728.htm
68 Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference, op cit, p100
69 ‘Two studies of estrogen-exposed males found no consistent effects on sex-typed play. Although one study suggested possible enhancement of some male-typical activities following prenatal estrogen exposure, the effects were inconsistent.’ Melissa Hines, Brain Gender, op cit, p120
70 Patricia Kester, Richard Green, Stephen J Finch and Katherine Williams, ‘Prenatal female hormone administration and psychosexual development in human males’, Psychoneuroendocrinology, 5, 4 (1980), 269–85
71 Battle of the Sexes, part 1, 19 September 2002, retrieved 18 October 2008 from http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s686728.htm#contacts
72 John Gray, Why Mars and Venus Collide, op cit, p64
73 Anne Campbell, ‘Attachment, aggression and affiliation, the role of oxytocin in female social behaviour’, Biological Psychology, 77, 1 (January 2008), 1–10
74 S E Taylor, G Gonzaga, L C Klein, P Hu, G A Greendale and T E Seeman, ‘Relation of oxytocin to psychological stress responses and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis activity in older women’, Psychosomatic Medicine, 68 (2006), 238–45, p243
75 Another study of young women suggested that higher basal levels of oxytocin ‘were associated with greater interpersonal distress’. R A Turner, M Altemus, T Enos, B Cooper, T McGuinness, ‘Preliminary research on plasma oxytocin in normal cycling women: investigating emotion and interpersonal distress’, Psychiatry, 62, 2 (1999), 97–113, p99. See also K M Kendrick, ‘Oxytocin, motherhood and bonding’, Experimental Physiology, 85, 1 (2000), 111–24; which stated, ‘The role of brain oxytocin release in humans is still a matter for some speculation.’
76 Jonathan Leake, ‘Science finds the secret of a hot kiss’, Sunday Times, 8 February 2009; unpublished research presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference on 14 February 2009, confirmed through personal correspondence with Professor Wendy Hill
77 BBC, Secrets of the Sexes, broadcast, 17 July 2005
78 Janice Turner, ‘Planet Boy, where mum fades from the picture’, The Times, 21 April 2003
79 ‘Humour comes from testosterone’, BBC News, 21 December 2007
80 Satoshi Kanazawa, ‘Why productivity fades with age: the crime–genius connection’, Journal of Research in Personality, 37 (2003), 257–72
81 Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference, op cit, p104
82 Helena Cronin, ‘The vital statistics’, Guardian, 12 March 2005
83 Steven Pinker, The Blank State, op cit, p348
84 Susan Pinker, The Sexual Paradox, op cit, p217
85 Melissa Hines, Brain Gender, op cit, pp165–7, citing S M Perlman, ‘Cognitive abilities of children with hormone abnormalities’, Journal of Learning Disabilities, 6 (1973), 21–9; S W Baker and A A Ehrhardt ‘Prenatal androgen, intelligence and cognitive sex differences’, in R C Friedman et al, Sex Differences in Behaviour (New York: Wiley, 1974); L S McGuire et al, ‘Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia II: cognitive and behavioural studies’, Behaviour Genetics, 5 (1975), 175–88; A A Ehrhardt and S W Baker, ‘Males and females with congenital adrenal hyperplasia: A family study of intelligence and gender-related behaviour’, in P A Lee et al eds, Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (Baltimore MD: University Park Press, 1977); R Nass and S Baker, ‘Learning disabilities in children with congenital adrenal hyperplasia’, Journal of Child Neurology, 6 (1991) 306–12
86 Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference, op cit, p101
87 Melissa Hines, Susan Golombok, John Rust, Katie Johnston, Jean Golding and the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children Study Team, ‘Testosterone during pregnancy and gender role behaviour of preschool children: a longitudinal population study’, Child Development, 73, 6 (Nov/Dec 2002), 1678–87
88 See for instance Bonnie Auyeung et al, ‘Fetal testosterone predicts sexually differentiated childhood behaviour in girls and boys’, Psychological Science, 20, 2 (2009) 144–8
89 Jo-Anne Finegan, ‘Relations between prenatal testosterone levels and cognitive abilities at 4 years’, Developmental Psychology, 28, 6 (November 1992), 1075–89
90 Cornelieke van de Beek et al, ‘Prenatal sex hormones (maternal and amniotic fluid) and gender-related play behaviour in 13-month-old infants’, Archives of Sexual Behaviour, 38, 6 (2009), 6–15
91 Other studies that appear to disprove a clear link between exposure to testosterone in the womb and cognitive traits include a 2001 study that looked at the relationship between finger-digit ratio (associated with levels of prenatal testosterone) and various cognitive and personality tests. It found that ‘no significant associations were found for the cognitive tests’. Elizabeth Austin et al, ‘A preliminary investigation of the associations between personality, cognitive ability and digit ratio’, Personality and Individual Differences, 33 (2002), 1115–24, p1121. In another study, Mark Brosnan at the University of Bath studied finger-digit ratio among academics. He found that academics in the science faculty had digit ratios ‘consistent with the female norm’ and that academics in the social sciences had digit ratios ‘consistent with the male norm’, whatever sex they were. This implied that male scientists were exposed to less testosterone than were social scientists. As Mark Brosnan commented: ‘Those in faculties requiring higher systemising abilities … have an index of low prenatal exposure to testosterone. This contrasts with Baron-Cohen’s findings.’ Mark Brosnan, ‘Digit ratio and faculty membership: implications for the relationship between prenatal testosterone and academia’, British Journal of Psychology, 97, 4 (2006), 455–66. Another study that did not find the predicted relationship between foetal testosterone and later masculine behaviour was carried out by Simon Baron-Cohen’s team after the publication of The Essential Difference. In 2005 his team f
ound that variations in testosterone in the amniotic fluid did not contribute to individual differences in game participation as reported by the mother among fifty-three children aged four and five. R Knickmeyer et al, ‘Gender-typed play and amniotic testosterone’, Developmental Psychology, 41, 3 (May 2005), 517–28
92 Melissa Hines, Brain Gender, op cit, p136, citing R Tricker et al, ‘The effects of supraphysiological doses of testosterone on anger behaviour in healthy eugonadal men’, Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 81 (1996), 3754–8 and K Bjorkquist et al, ‘Testosterone intake and aggressiveness – real effect or anticipation’, Aggressive Behavior, 20 (1994) 17–26
93 J R Lightdale and D A Prentice, ‘Rethinking sex differences in aggression: aggressive behaviour in the absence of social roles’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 1 (February 1994), 34–44, p43
94 ‘Do men really listen with just half a brain? Research sheds some light’, 28 November 2000, CNN; retrieved 18 October 2008 from http://archives.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/11/28/brain.listening/index.html
95 James Chapman, ‘Why men find it harder to show their emotions’, Daily Mail, 23 July 2002
96 Janice Turner, ‘Planet Boy’, The Times, 21 April 2003
97 Ian Sample, ‘Gay men and heterosexual women have similarly shaped brains, research shows’, Guardian, 16 June 2008, describing findings from Ivanka Savic and Per Lindstrom, ‘PET and MRI show differences in cerebral asymmetry and functional connectivity between homo- and heterosexual subjects’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 16 June 2008, retrieved 18 June 2008 from http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/06/13/0801566105.abstract
98 Mark Liberman, ‘Annals of essentialism: sexual orientation and rhetorical asymmetry’, Language Log, 18 June 2008, retrieved 20 June 2008 from http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=256
99 Murat Yucel et al, ‘Hemispheric and gender-related differences in the gross morphology of the anterior cingulate/paracingulate cortex in normal volunteers: an MRI morphometric study’, Cerebral Cortex, 11, 1 (January 2001), 17–25, p17
100 C D Good et al, ‘Cerebral asymmetry and the effects of sex and handedness on brain structure: a voxel-based morphometric analysis of 465 normal adult human brains’, NeuroImage, 14, 3 (September 2001), 685–700, p692
101 Thomas Barrick et al, ‘Automatic analysis of cerebral asymmetry: an exploratory study of the relationship between brain torque and planum temporale asymmetry’, NeuroImage, 24, 3 (February 2005), 678–91, p692
102 Arthur Toga and Paul Thompson, ‘Mapping Brain Asymmetry’, Neuroscience, 4, 1 (January 2003), 37–48, p43
103 Christine de Lacoste-Utamsing and Ralph L Holloway, ‘Sexual dimorphism in the human corpus callosum’, Science, 216 (1982), 1431–2
104 Lorraine Dusky, ‘Just like a woman’, 2 March 2005, Salon.com, retrieved 30 October 2008 from http://dir.salon.com/story/opinion/feature/2005/03/02/gender_differences/index1.html
105 Susan Pinker, The Sexual Paradox, op cit, p116
106 Other writers have joined this debate: for instance, Steven Pinker says, ‘The brains of men differ visibly from the brains of women in several ways … Portions of the cerebral commissures, which link the left and right hemispheres, appear to be larger in women, and their brains may function in a less lopsided manner than men’s.’ Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, op cit, p347; Simon Baron-Cohen says, ‘Women’s brains, interestingly, have a thicker corpus callosum (the connective tissue between the two hemispheres, which allows for better communication between them)’, Simon Baron-Cohen, ‘Scientists have sex on the brain’, Guardian Weekly, 4 February 2005
107 John Gray, Why Mars and Venus Collide, op cit, p38
108 Other commentators have popularised the same idea, for instance, the talk show host Phil Donahue commented that this original study showed that females had a corpus callosum ‘as much as 40 per cent larger’, and that this was the basis for ‘women’s intuition’. Quoted in Katherine M Bishop and Douglas Wahlsten, ‘Sex differences in the human corpus callosum: myth or reality?’, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 21, 5 (1997), 581–601
109 Katherine M Bishop and Douglas Wahlsten, ibid, p590
110 As Susan Pinker puts it in The Sexual Paradox: ‘MRI studies show that males have most language functions localised in the left hemisphere. Meanwhile, most females use both hemispheres for language.’ Susan Pinker, op cit, p45
111 Micheal D Phillips et al, ‘Temporal lobe activation demonstrates sex-based differences during passive listening’, Radiology, 220 (July 2001), 202–7
112 ‘Why men don’t listen’, BBC, 28 November 2000, retrieved 10 July 2008 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1044805.stm
113 ‘Why men don’t listen’, Daily Mail, 29 December 2000
114 Iris E C Sommer, André Aleman, Anke Bouma and René S Kahn, ‘Do women really have more bilateral language representation than men? A meta-analysis of functional imaging studies’, Brain, 127, 8 (August 2004), 1845–52. It’s interesting that this meta-analysis was carried out by scientists who did agree with the idea that there are significant sex differences in cognitive abilities, but they couldn’t see any evidence for them in the physical brain, concluding: ‘It is therefore not likely that differences in language lateralization underlie the general sex differences in cognitive performance, and the neuronal basis for these cognitive sex differences remains elusive.’ p1845
115 For discussion of the ‘file-drawer’ problem see for instance: John T E Richardson, Gender Differences in Human Cognition (Oxford University Press, 1997), p9; Caplan and Caplan, ‘The perseverative search for sex differences in mathematics ability’ in Gallagher and Kaufman eds, Gender Differences in Mathematics (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 25–47; Mark Liberman, ‘Innate sex differences: science and public opinion’, Language Log, 20 June 2008, retrieved 22 June 2008 from http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=261 Erin McClure, ‘A meta-analytic review of sex differences in facial expression processing and their development in infants, children, and adolescents’, Psychological Bulletin, 126 (May 2000), 424–53
116 For instance, if you look at studies on rodents’ brains, which can be experimented on in ways that we cannot with humans’, changes to their environment have been shown to increase the size or density of particular brain regions. Melissa Hines, Brain Gender, op cit, p196
117 Eleanor A Maguire, David G Gadian, Ingrid S Johnsrude, Catriona D Good, John Ashburner, Richard S J Frackowiak and Christopher D Firth, ‘Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 97, 8 (11 April 2000), 4398–403
118 Similarly, when subjects in a test were given a three-month period of juggling practice, that led to an increase in grey-matter density in the area of the temporal cortex that was assumed to process that sort of task. After the practice stopped, the brain area changed back. Draganski, Gaser, Busch, Schuierer, Bogdahn and May, ‘Changes in grey matter induced by training’, Nature, 427 (22 January 2004), 311–12
119 Melissa Hines, Brain Gender, op cit, p196
120 Sherwood Washburn and Chet Lancaster, ‘The Evolution of Hunting,’ in Richard B Lee ed, Man the Hunter (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1968), p296
121 Allan and Barbara Pease, Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps (London: Orion, 1999), p13
122 Kristen Hawkes, ‘Grandmothers and the evolution of human longevity’, American Journal of Human Biology, 15 (2003), 380–400
123 Description of life among the Agta people of the Sierra Madre, Melvin Konner, ‘Hunter-gatherer infancy and childhood, the !Kung and others’, in Hewlett and Lamb eds, Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods (London: Transaction, 2005), 19–64, p55. See also Rayna Reiter ed, Toward an Anthropology of Women (London: Monthly Review Press, 1975); Frances Dahlberg ed, Woman the Gatherer (Yale University Press, 1981)
124 Barry Hewlett, quoted in Joanna Moorhead, ‘Are the men of the African Aka tribe t
he best fathers in the world?’, Guardian, 15 June 2005
125 Craig B Stanford, ‘The ape’s gift: meat-eating, meat-sharing and human evolution’, in Frans B M De Waal, Tree of Origin (Harvard University Press, 2001), 97–117, p115
126 Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography (London: Virago,1999), p347
9: Stereotypes
1 Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference, op cit, p11
2 Steven Pinker, ‘The science of sex difference’, The New Republic, 14 February 2005
3 Ashley Herzog, ‘Will feminists again attempt to censor science?’, Town Hall, 13 March 2008, retrieved 31 October 2008 from http://townhall.com/columnists/AshleyHerzog/2008/03/13/ will_feminists_again_attempt_to_censor_science
4 Mark Liberman, ‘More functional neuroanatomy of science journalism’, Language Log, 18 March 2008, retrieved 30 October 2008 from http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005472.html
5 Martin Newland, ‘Why women prefer talking to sex’, Daily Mail, 13 September 2006
6 Tracey Shors, ‘The mismeasure of woman’, Economist, 3 August 2006
7 Dr Matthews Duncan, quoted by William Withers Moore, president, at the fifty-fourth annual meeting of the British Medical Association, Brighton 1886, as reported in Lancet, 2 (1886), 315, cited in Joan N Burstyn, ‘Education and sex: the medical case against higher education for women in England’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 117, 2 (April 1973), 79–89, p84
8 Henry Maudsley, ‘Sex in mind and education’, Fortnightly Review, 15 (1874), 466–83, cited in Joan N Burstyn, op cit
Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism Page 27
