Interestingly, a recent study conducted in the more socially egalitarian and gender-equal Sweden failed to find the “white male effect.” This national survey of nearly fifteen hundred households found that, all else being equal—and in stark contrast with the U.S. data—Swedish men and women had very similar perceptions of lifestyle, environmental, technological, health, and social risks.36 The survey found instead just a “white effect,” with people from foreign backgrounds, who are subject to social disenfranchisement and discrimination, perceiving risks as higher than did native Swedes.
In trying to understand how social place and identity can affect risk perception in such a marked way, it’s helpful to know that people often use their feelings as a guide to the risk-benefit trade-off. The more positively we feel about something—whether it’s unpasteurized French cheese, vaccinations, or abortion—the more we tend to minimize the risks and play up the benefits. Conversely, if we feel antipathy towards an activity or hazard, we “tend to judge the opposite—high risk and low benefit.”37 Political world-view is a potent source of strong emotions about risky hazards, and it may be that people perceive risk in ways that protect their social identities, roles, and status:
Perhaps white males see less risk in the world because they create, manage, control, and benefit from so much of it. Perhaps women and non-white men see the world as more dangerous because in many ways they are more vulnerable, because they benefit less from many of its technologies and institutions, and because they have less power and control.38
This point was neatly demonstrated by some statistical fun, inspired by Nelson’s insight that we tend to think risk, think male. Yale Law School academic Dan Kahan showed that, when asked about the risks to human health, safety, or prosperity arising from high tax rates for business, now it was the women’s and minority men’s turn to be sanguine. This, he notes, beautifully illustrates Nelson’s point:
It confirms that men are more risk tolerant than women only if some unexamined premise about what counts as a “risk” excludes from assessment the sorts of things that scare the pants off of white men (or at least hierarchical, individualistic ones).39
The white male effect in the United States, viewed alongside the similar risk perceptions of native Swedish men and women, suggests that it can at least sometimes be the different social place, identities, and experiences of men and women in the world, rather than some enduring dissimilarity of biology, that underlie sex differences in risk perception. This is a vital point since, as we’ve seen, it is these subjective perceptions that underlie sex differences in risk taking. The idea that women have evolved to be biologically predisposed to perceive greater risks to health is intuitively plausible, but appears to be simply wrong. As the researchers who first identified the white male effect point out: “Biological factors should apply to nonwhite men and women as well as to white people.”40
No less importantly, social identities come in a package that includes social norms. These norms, as Sunstein has emphasized, play a crucial role in our decision making. Indeed, psychologists Catherine Rawn and Kathleen Vohs have compiled a convincing case that people sometimes overcome strong preferences to avoid risky but socially expected behaviours (such as drinking, drugs, sex, or violence) in order to stay “in” with others.41 Gender, of course, is a rich source of norms that apply differently to males and females, with some behaviours more strongly expected of one sex, and others more strongly censured.42 For example, there is a stronger expectation of women to “be nice” than there is of men. When women violate this norm in a workplace setting (by behaving in domineering ways or negotiating for better remuneration and conditions, for instance) they encounter backlash from others, who become less willing to work with them, and like them less.43 This means that statements that men “are more likely to bargain aggressively for their starting salaries”44 need some unpacking. If so, is it really because women are intrinsically risk averse, or care less about money? Or is it because there is a violation of feminine norms involved in bargaining aggressively in one’s own self-interest, and so women quite accurately intuit a less favourable balance of benefits and risks from doing so?
On the first point, research has found that a sex difference in negotiating for bigger pay (in a lab task) can be eliminated simply by framing exactly the same behaviour in a way that’s more in keeping with feminine norms of politeness: “asking,” rather than negotiating. As the authors point out, “the term negotiation is not gender-neutral.”45 And regarding the second point, does violating those norms yield the same benefits? One study found that although top-flight female MBA students were just as likely as their male counterparts to negotiate their initial post-course salary, the financial pay-off for them was less.46 It’s not hard to imagine those women being less likely to negotiate in the future, but because of the anticipation of less reward rather than an evolved disinclination to take risks. Exeter University psychologist Michelle Ryan surveyed more than eight hundred managers at a major consultancy firm, and found that women on average were less willing than men to make sacrifices for their career, and to take career risks in order to get ahead. Closer examination revealed that this was because women tended to perceive less benefit in taking risks and making sacrifices. But this was not because they were simply less ambitious. Rather, they had lower expectations of success, fewer role models, less support, and less confidence that their organization was a meritocracy.47
In many domains, gender norms tend to favour male risk taking, which is a norm of masculinity 48 and seen as a more important trait for men than for women.49 This means that, in addition to material gains, taking risks may often bring greater reputational benefits or smaller costs: women in counter-stereotypical leadership roles are judged more harshly than men when risky decisions don’t work out.50 Underscoring the importance of Sunstein’s unruly amalgam, both men and women seem to be responsive to cultural information about how their risk-taking behaviour will be perceived by others. In one study, for instance, single men presented with a newspaper article claiming that women found risk taking unattractive in partners subsequently made less risky choices in a lab task administered by a female experimenter (compared with men who’d read a stereotype-consistent article).51 Or consider a recent study of young Chinese women and men, who played a risk-taking game either privately or while being were observed by an attractive person of the other sex. In China, the authors argue, the ideal of womanhood strongly precludes risk taking, valuing instead those who are “timid, reserved, shy, obedient, unassertive, humble, attentive, respectful, and, above all, chaste.”52 In contrast with this feminine ideal, Chinese women were every bit as risk taking as the men when unobserved. But in line with gender norms, men increased their risk taking when supposedly observed by an attractive other-sex observer, while women decreased it.
Some, of course, might argue that an asymmetry in gender norms for risk taking is nonetheless inescapable, thanks to the evolutionary advantages to males of risk taking, from which female partners then benefit. As we saw in the first part of the book, this argument requires overlooking the reproductive advantage to males of selecting a mate who can hold her own in the reproductive stakes. But there’s also a more directly devastating problem: women aren’t drawn to risk takers. Gambling, ethical risk taking, and health risks are all viewed as unattractive in potential mates, and even financial risk taking is touch and go.53 Social risk taking, by contrast, is alluring in a potential partner (things like being willing to defend an unpopular position at a social event). But as you’ll recall, women are just as likely as men to take social risks. And while physical risk taking is also viewed positively, especially in people being considered for a short-term relationship, this is only if the level of risk is perceived to be low. People desire “neither daredevils nor wimps”54 and, surprisingly, “the less risky an [activity] is perceived to be, the more attractive it is.”55 This is all a far cry from the assumption of female glorification of male risk taking. But mo
st importantly, this pattern of preferences is no less true of men than it is of women: heterosexual men are generally no less attracted to physical and social risk takers than are women.56
This is a problem for the Testosterone Rex view. Some research teams have acknowledged this minor devastation of a pet hypothesis with good grace, accepting that the proposal that men have evolved to display risky behaviour in order to attract females “does not account for the observed similarities between men and women” and “offers little explanation… for men’s preference for risk-takers.”57 Summarizing this “picture of overall similarity between the sexes,” Andreas Wilke of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and colleagues suggest instead
that men and women learn to value the same traits for non-adaptive reasons (e.g., a cultural norm) or that the same sort of risk taking might (at least in societies with male investment comparable to female levels) be a reliable cue to quality for both sexes.58
In other words, maybe there isn’t anything so special about male risk taking, after all.
Nor, it turns out, are females quite as disinclined to take the risk of going head-to-head with others in a competitive context as they are often assumed to be. The Testosterone Rex view of competition, inspired by those hypothetical one hundred babies in a year from a hundred different women, leads to a simple “men are more competitive” prediction:
Relative to females, male reproductive success is affected more by their ability to obtain mates. Males may compete directly for mates or they may compete for resources, territory or status, all or which serve to increase their mating opportunities.… Consequently, the preference to compete should be more pronounced in men compared to women.59
But one of the few psychological studies to look at the frequency of competitive behaviour in the real world—two diary studies of UK students by Elizabeth Cashdan—found nothing of the kind.60 Women and men reported similar rates of competing and the sexes were also remarkably similar in terms of how often they vied with others within particular domains. They were equally competitive with regard to their studies and work (arguably the best route to future economic resources for students), and status (which ranked rather low in both studies). The only arena in which men were more likely to compete than women was in sports, while women were more likely to compete over “looking good,” neither of which seem key to understanding occupational sex inequality.
Nor have economists’ more tightly controlled studies invariably found that males are more competitive. In this discipline, the standard approach is to give participants some kind of bloodless task (the somewhat masculine-flavoured staples include adding three-digit numbers or throwing balls into buckets). Then having tried their hand at the task, each participant is given the choice to either earn a modest “piece rate” for each success, or a much more generous sum per success, so long as they beat a randomly selected opponent. Whether or not you see sex differences turns out to depend on what you are asking people to compete at, and also which males and females you are asking. When researchers use more neutral or “feminine” competitive contexts—like dancing, verbal ability, fashion knowledge, or a stereotypically feminine job (like “administrative assistant” versus “sports news assistant”), they often find that females are equally, or sometimes even more, likely to compete.61 The cultural background of participants also has a significant impact on whether or not sex differences are seen; interestingly, coming from a home-land with lesser economic development seems to be associated with greater female competition.62 Thus, Colombian, Han Chinese, and Armenian girls and Beijing women are as competitive as their male counterparts, even in the kinds of tasks in which, in developed Western cultures, greater male competitiveness is the typical finding.63 Most striking of all, while men from the patriarchal Maasai society in Tanzania were more willing than women to compete against others to try to earn money by successfully throwing tennis balls into a bucket, exactly the opposite was seen in the matrilineal Khasi society in India.64 Moreover, among the children from these societies, only in the patriarchal Maasai did boys become more competitive than girls in the post-pubescence years.65
That biology clearly doesn’t determine that males should be more competitive than females makes it all the more concerning that, among Austrian children of three to four years of age, boys are already more willing to compete in a running competition than are girls (even though girls can run just as fast). At this age, girls are as eager to compete in a more “feminine” manual sorting task (at which they are slightly superior); but within a few years, even here, boys are more competitive.66 What messages are children receiving in developed Western countries that, compared with children in some other societies, separates girls’ and boys’ inclination to compete from such an early age?
WRITING IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES about our supposedly admiring attitudes towards those who take big financial risks, columnist John Kay draws direct links to our Stone Age past, contrasting “prudent hunters” who peered about anxiously for dangerous animals and “stayed at home when it was too dangerous,” with more courageous hunters who “chose not to buy or exercise these options” and therefore “took more risks and caught more prey.”67 Lest there be any doubt in readers’ minds as to which sex it was that won admiration with their daring, Kay then rhetorically asks, “Were the young women of the tribe more impressed when the cautious described their uneventful days, or when the bold recalled their heroic escape from danger?” For some reason, Kay omits asking readers to consider how the women would have appreciated the conversation of hunters whose throats had been ripped out by wild animals.
We are now a long way from the bundle of assumptions packed into this familiar vignette. Risk taking is not a stable personality trait, allowing us to assume that the person who would willingly take the physical risks of hunting (or white-water rafting or skydiving) would be a fearless CEO or trader. Nor is risk taking something that only men do, or that only women are drawn to in a potential partner. Meanwhile, the growing evidence that females do compete at equal rates to men when the nature of the task seems to authorize it, and that girls and women from populations further afield than the typical Western samples are no less eager than males to compete, undermines assumptions that this is an “essential” sex difference.
What does this mean for assumptions of “testosterone-fuelled” male risk taking? From the old understanding of risk taking as a masculine trait, sex differences in testosterone is an intuitive, obvious, and common explanation. But as the last chapter argued—and the next chapter further reinforces—the shape and pattern of sex differences defies explanations in terms of a single, powerful cause that splits the sexes.
As I was editing this chapter, a survey of more than thirty-five hundred Australian surgeons revealed a culture rife with bullying, discrimination, and sexual harassment, against women especially (although men weren’t untouched either). To give you a flavour of professional life as a woman in this field, female trainees and junior surgeons “reported feeling obliged to give their supervisors sexual favours to keep their jobs”; endured flagrantly illegal hostility towards the notion of combining career with motherhood; contended with “boys’ clubs”; and experienced entrenched sexism at all levels and “a culture of fear and reprisal, with known bullies in senior positions seen as untouchable.”68 I came back to this chapter on the very day that news broke in the state of Victoria, Australia, where I live, of a Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission report revealing that sexual discrimination and harassment is also shockingly prevalent in the Victorian Police, which unlawfully failed to provide an equal and safe working environment.69
I understand that attempts to identify the psychological factors that underlie sex inequalities in the workplace are well-meaning. And, of course, we shouldn’t shy away from naming (supposedly) politically unpalatable causes of those inequalities. But when you consider the women who enter and persist in highly competitive and risky occupations like surgery and p
olicing—despite the odds stacked against them by largely unfettered sex discrimination and harassment—casual scholarly suggestions that women are relatively few in number, particularly in the higher echelons, because they’re less geared to compete in the workplace, start to seem almost offensive.
Testosterone Rex implicitly blames women for their lower salary and status, distracting attention away from the “unruly amalgam” of gendered influences—the norms, beliefs, rewards, inequalities, experiences, and, let’s not forget, punishment by those who seek to protect their turf from lower-status outsiders—that unevenly tip the cost-benefit scales.
CHAPTER 6
THE HORMONAL ESSENCE OF THE T-REX?
Adult brains are like celestial objects or continents—more dynamic and plastic than most scientists used to imagine.
— ELIZABETH ADKINS-REGAN, Hormones and Animal Social Behavior1
SOMETIMES THESE DAYS I’M INTRODUCED TO PEOPLE AS AN academic who wrote a book about how the brains of women and men aren’t that different. Disappointingly, the wide range of reactions to this brief biography has yet to include You must be Cordelia Fine! Would you sign this copy of your book that I carry around with me? Instead, people often shoot me a startled look, and then ask whether I’d also deny that there are other basic physiological differences between the sexes. Whenever this happens, I’m always tempted to fix my interrogator in the grip of a steely gaze and pronounce briskly, “Certainly! Testes are merely a social construction,” then see how the conversation flows from there.
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