Since the conditions under which contemporary brains develop are very different from the conditions under which human brains developed in the Stone Age, there is no reason to suppose that the outcome of that development was even approximately the same then as now.
This, he takes pains to point out, is not to say “that brains are blank slates developing with infinite plasticity in response to environmental variation.” It simply takes seriously the role of the developmental system in development and evolution: the “brain [is] constructed by a variety of more or less stable and reliable resources including resources that are reliably reproduced by human cultures.”44
So can even universal, adaptive traits be obliterated with a simple manipulation to the environment? Consider an experiment in which scientists selectively bred two lines of mice, one high in aggression, the other low. They achieved this by putting the young mice in social isolation after weaning, which increases aggressive tendencies in some. Then, mice for which this was the case—that were particularly combative in a staged encounter with another mouse four weeks later—were selectively bred together. Likewise for mice that were the least aggressive. After just seven generations of this selective breeding programme, the researchers successfully created two lines of mice that behaved in very different ways. When reared in isolation, mice bred to be thuggish were about six times more aggressive than the other group. After thirty-nine generations, the two lines had diverged even further. Aggression had therefore become a consistent, “adaptive” trait in the antagonistic line of mice (with the scientists acting as the hand of natural selection, increasing the reproductive success of the most aggressive mice). But here’s the remarkable part. Despite a heritage of thirty-eight ancestors bred for aggression behind them, thuggish mice that were reared in a different way from their ancestors—with other mice, instead of in isolation—turned out no more aggressive than mice bred for generations to be gentle.45 A simple but critical change to the developmental system eliminated a typical, “adaptive” trait.
Here’s another example that some overworked mothers might find inspiring. We saw in Chapter 2 that being the one who produces the sperm doesn’t dictate, by universal principle, that parenting is out of the portfolio. However, in the case of the rat (as with most mammals), the balance of trade-offs make it more adaptive for males to leave parenting to the mothers. This might tempt us to take it for granted that males, by virtue of their sex, therefore lack the capacity to care for pups. We might well assume that, through sexual selection, they lost or never acquired the biological capacity to parent: that it isn’t “in” their genes, hormones, or neural circuits. That it isn’t in their male nature. But bear in mind that one reliable feature of a male rat’s developmental system is a female rat that does the child care. So what happens when a scientist, under controlled laboratory conditions, simulates a first-wave feminist rodent movement by placing males in cages with pups but no females? Before too long you will see the male “mothering” the infant, in much the same way that females do.46
However surprising these two examples may seem, they are perfectly compatible with modern evolutionary thinking—just not with how most of us are used to thinking about adaptations. When we say, for instance, that sex differences in children’s toy preferences are “innate,” we usually fold three different assumptions into that word, as Griffiths explains. First, we mean that boys’ and girls’ preferences reflect an evolutionary adaptation: girls like dolls because they are adapted to care for babies; boys like toy trucks because, well, trucks move, and so do spears and animals when you hunt. The second assumption we usually make when we say something is innate is that it’s fixed. In the case of toys, we mean that neither feminist parenting nor gender-neutral marketing can eliminate those innate interests. And the third thing we often imply is that a preference for stereotypical toys is, if not universal, then at least typical of boyhood and girlhood. All this is what we mean, too, when we say that boys will be boys. Essentialist thinking leads us to bundle together these three biological properties: adaptiveness, fixity, and typicality, argues Griffiths. We tend to assume that if a behaviour or trait is an adaptation, then it must also be fixed and typical. Conversely, if it seems that a characteristic is typical (or universal), then it must also be fixed, and also probably an adaptation. This is why so much seems to hinge, politically and socially, on scientific questions like “Is it universal across societies for men to be higher in status?” and “Are men more promiscuous than women cross-culturally?”
Sometimes, certainly, these three biological properties do come together as a package: like the female and male human reproductive systems. The female human reproductive system is an essential trait of femaleness: it is adaptive; it develops in more or less the same way across a wide range of environmental, physical, social, and cultural conditions; and is highly typical (although not universal) in genetic females. But a well-accepted principle in developmental science is that adaptiveness, fixity, and typicality don’t necessarily come together. That a trait checks off one of the three boxes doesn’t mean it also checks both, or either, of the other two. Since, for instance, the development of adaptive traits relies on the entire developmental system, not just the genes, a relevant change in the external developmental system can change an adaptive behaviour: like the male rats that became parental when physically put in what would normally be the mother’s place. That is, adaptive traits don’t necessarily develop regardless of conditions. Nor are adaptations necessarily typical. Evolution can produce different forms of an adaptive trait: like the male dung beetles that can be either armoured and belligerent, or come in the hornless form that considers discretion to be the better part of valour. And behaviours can also be typical without being either an adaptation, or fixed. Even in a world in which all women wore dresses, we wouldn’t want to say that dress-wearing was a developmentally fixed sex-specific adaptation.
This disentangling means that the answer to questions like “Were male promiscuity, risk taking, and competitiveness sexually selected adaptations for reproductive success?” simply don’t have the implications for now and the future that we usually assume they do: that if the answer is “yes,” then boys will be boys. But when we think in essentialist ways about social groups, the differences between them seem “large, unbridgeable, inevitable, unchangeable, and ordained by nature,” as University of Melbourne psychologist Nick Haslam summarizes it.47 Those who think in gender-essentialist ways are more likely to endorse the gender stereotypes that are the foundation of intended and unintended discrimination in the workplace.48 They are more likely to feel negatively towards power-seeking women, relative to men.49 They are more likely to allocate child care in a traditional way.50 They are more likely to prefer that the husband earns more in a heterosexual marriage, and to expect to make traditional work-care trade-offs.51 Women encouraged to take an essentialist view of gender become more vulnerable to “stereotype threat”—the reduction in performance and interest in traditionally masculine domains triggered by negative stereotypes about women.52 Gender essentialist thinking makes men evaluate sex crimes more leniently,53 and makes people less supportive of progressive gender policies and feel more comfortable with the status quo.54
That’s why the evidence that sex hasn’t “fixed” any behaviours as “essential” traits is so important. Instead, the genetic and hormonal components of sex collaborate with other parts of the developmental system, including our gender constructions. There have been massive shake-ups in that developmental system since the Pleistocene—laws, social welfare, taxation, medical advances, industrialization, and so on. And while the male and female reproductive systems have stayed the same across human history, as the developmental system has changed—whether through the introduction of contraception, equal opportunity legislation, paternity leave, or gender quotas—brains, hormones, behaviour, and roles have changed.
We already know that when this happens in a biggish way, the changes to gendered behav
iour can be remarkable. In our postindustrial societies, reliable contraception and technology have made the physical differences between the sexes less important, and this has led to a rapid merging of sex roles, as Wendy Wood and Alice Eagly point out.55 Women have stampeded into traditionally masculine roles like law, medicine, accounting, and management. Although there hasn’t been a reciprocal rush by men towards traditionally feminine roles, like early education and nursing, this might be expected purely on the grounds of the unappealingly low status and pay of “women’s work.”56 Or to take another example, as Jordan-Young documents in Brain Storm, only thirty or forty years ago scientists categorized so many sexual behaviours as distinctly masculine—the initiation of sex, intense physical desire, masturbation, erotic dreams, arousal to narratives—that it was “scarcely an overstatement to suggest that sexuality itself was seen as a masculine trait.”57 Female sexual imagination was restricted to “wedding fantasies” (presumably not of an “Ooh, Reverend!” variety). As for the contemporary $1 billion U.S. market for vibrators,58 to the psychobiologists of the time, this would presumably have indicated an epidemic of abnormal female sexuality on a catastrophic scale. “From this side of the sexual revolutions of the 20th century, it is easy to lose track of just how much has changed, and how rapidly,”59 Jordan-Young observes.
What does this mean for the aspiration to see a more balanced society, from more boys playing with dolls and more dads caring for kids, to more women in science and senior leadership roles? As Dalhousie University philosopher Letitia Meynell puts it:
Biologically speaking, our actions and dispositions are developed and could have been otherwise, given the right mix of developmental inputs at various points in our lives. If one wants to change the distribution of a given trait in a population, the task is not to overcome nature but to rearrange the developmental system.60
While this is a rightly optimistic message, rearranging the developmental system is no trivial task. Ironically, the rich, stable cultural inheritance that enables us to be so adaptably diverse as a species is also a heavy counterweight to change. If you want a male rat to take care of a baby rat, you can just pop him in a cage with one. Rearranging gender in the human developmental system involves the reconstruction of the social structures, values, norms, expectations, schemas, and beliefs that penetrate our minds, interactions, and institutions, and that influence, interact, and become entangled with our biology. There’s a reason they’re called “social constructions” rather than, say, “social Legos.” Social constructions are robustly built: you can pull out bricks here and there, but the others continue to hold everything in place. They’re not easily torn apart and reconstructed in new ways.
Take domestic violence. What makes a person, usually a man, more likely to assault a partner or former partner? Experts point the finger at a dauntingly long list of influences, including rigid gender stereotypes that tightly circumscribe appropriate female roles and responsibilities, hypermasculine norms, societal excuse making for violence towards female partners, lack of perpetrator accountability, many women’s economic dependence on their male partners, a society that places females lower in status than males, and government’s low financial and political investment in the problem.61 That’s a lot of collective rearranging to be done if we’re to reduce the number of men harming women. How much simpler a problem it would be if violent men simply had too much testosterone.
So how should we think about those gender-coded toy aisles now—those pink and blue plastic safety knives being sold at the school market?
A year on, in the lead-up to the next Christmas, Australian senator Waters drew links a second time between the rigid gender stereotypes promoted by sex-segregated toy marketing, and seemingly far-removed social issues, like the gender pay gap and domestic violence.62 More scorn was poured. But now think about gendered toy marketing not as boy versus girl nature made manifest, but part of the developmental system. At the very time children are laying down cultural meanings and norms in their minds, gendered marketing emphasizes sex as a critically important social divide.63 That booth seller at the local school market overlooked everything her two small customers had in common—their family background, their close age, their ethnicity, the shared fortune of a parent who doesn’t see sliced fingers as an inevitable and important childhood learning experience—and instead emphasized one thing that was different, their genitals. And while the colour coding of any toy or product sends this message, when those gender cues are also linked to stereotypical kinds of toys and products, it also serves the no less important purpose of reinforcing stereotypes of males as “bad but bold” masters of the world and females as “wonderful but weaker” carers.64 These gender stereotypes operate throughout life both as expectations about the characteristics men and women have, and as gender norms dictating double standards for how women and men should behave, influencing people’s interests, self-concept, performance, and beliefs about capabilities in gendered domains. These gender stereotypes and norms are also the foundation of both conscious and unconscious forms of sex discrimination, like biased evaluations of performance and potential, and social and economic backlash against people whose behaviour isn’t in line with them.65 Gender stereotypes and norms can certainly harm and constrain boys and men too. But gender is a hierarchy. The higher prestige of males and masculinity is, some have speculated, why significant numbers of girls in middle childhood start to shun the “girl” toys and activities they have supposedly evolved to prefer, in order to become “one of the boys,” while there is a conspicuous absence of boys hoping to become “one of the girls.”66 And since traditionally masculine occupations and roles are generally associated with more prestige and better pay than equivalently skilled feminine roles, gender stereotypes and norms are particularly harmful to women financially and professionally. Ironically, unconscious gender bias is now considered such an obstacle to the fair promotion and retention of women that organizations routinely invest considerable time and money in training to reduce it—yet we vigorously sow the seeds of it in our children from the moment they are born.
So what do we want? Do we want a society that genuinely values equal opportunity for development, employment, economic security, safety, and respect, regardless of sex? If so, there’s a glaring contradiction with the messages some marketers are sending to children. As psychologists Sheila Cunningham and Neil Macrae point out, the colour coding of toys “seems at odds with the egalitarian goals that feature so prominently in contemporary society.”67
Toy marketing is obviously just one strand of many that weave gender through the developmental system. No single factor is overwhelmingly important in creating sex inequalities. Every influence is modest, made up of countless small instances of its kind. That’s why everything—a doll packaged in pink, a sexist joke, a male-only expert panel—can seem trivial, of intangible effect. But that’s exactly why calling out even seemingly minor points of sexism matters. It all adds up, and if no one sweats the small stuff, the big stuff will never change. Senior leaders obviously enjoy the most power to create change—whether through implementing targets and quotas, pay gap audits, more generous paternity leave, rooting out sexual harassment, or rethinking media portrayals—but everyone else, and there are a lot of us, can play a part: complaining about doll and kitchen toy aisles labelled “for girls” and science kits labelled “for boys”; petitioning for women’s achievements to also be honoured on paper money; even asking for a plastic knife in the “wrong” colour. How efforts and money are best recruited to achieve a social goal, and how much regulation should be invoked, are certainly legitimate questions for debate. But if we, as a society, say that we are for equality between the sexes, then when someone has the courage to speak up and ask for change, for something better, fairer, less sexist, or more respectful, they don’t deserve to be shot down with charges of insanity, overreaction, or political correctness gone mad.
So, again, what do we want?
PE
OPLE HAVE DIFFERENT REASONS for wanting greater equality between the sexes. Some people want fewer women assaulted or killed by their partners. Some want to close the yawning gap in retirement savings that puts disproportionate numbers of women in poverty in their senior years. Some want greater sex equality in their organizations because of research suggesting beneficial effects for productivity and profit. Some people want mothers and fathers to share more equally in caring for children so that the next generation reaps the benefits of involved, caring fathers and happier parents. Some people want an easier journey for loved ones with identities, bodies, or both, that fall in-between the too-neat male versus female binary. Some want it to become easier for people to pursue and fulfil counter-stereotypical ambitions. Others want to stem the leak of talented, highly educated, and expensively trained women lost in professional pipelines. Some want to see households headed by single mothers lifted out of hardship or poverty. Some want more equal political representation, so that girls’ and women’s interests are more equally served in government policy. Some people are also for sex equality because of a suite of benefits for men: from lessening of pressure to live up to demanding and sometimes dangerous hypermasculine norms, to an easing of the burden and stresses of being the primary breadwinner. Some hope it will bring a liberating expansion of the definition of male success into the parts of human existence beyond work, wealth, and sexual conquest. Some go even further, and hope that thinking of qualities, roles, and responsibilities as human, rather than as feminine or masculine, will transform the world of work, to the benefit of everyone. Others think that greater sex equality is probably a mixed bag for men, but that we should try for it anyhow because it’s just fairer and nicer when power, wealth, and status are more equally shared.
Testosterone Rex Page 19
