by Lisa Jervis
The organizers of the AAAS conference had unwittingly underscored Roughgarden’s point: The seminar was held at 8:30 a.m. Monday, the last day of the convention. Few of the attendees of America’s biggest and most venerable science conference had managed to drag themselves to the seminar—most were already on planes home, and those who remained had the difficult choice of sleeping off last night’s cocktails or getting up at the crack of dawn on the promise of having some weak coffee and hearing the voices of dissent.
Sexism in science takes many guises, some more subtle than others. My favorite example of blatant “scientification” of sexism comes courtesy of some Greek scientists who purported to solve the age-old question, Can you spot a superlong schlong by scoping a guy’s shoe size? Thanks to those gumptious Greeks, we now know that shoe size has nothing to do with the ol’ pajama python—but in case anyone really cares, the index finger is a more reliable measure of the man.
I find these studies humorous for their poignantly desperate attempts to validate male power and female subordination. But at a certain point, they take a sinister turn. When pseudoscientific studies claim to reveal the “natural basis” of double standards, they justify abhorrent sexist ideas and behavior by calling them biological destiny. It’s one thing to put your pecker under the microscope and tell everyone you’ve seen the world’s biggest prick—it’s another to co-opt the tools of science to justify barbaric behavior, claiming culture and consciousness can’t hold their own against the genetic writ of male dominance.
Biology is particularly amenable to sexist narratives. Gendered explanations and expectations of animal behavior are so prevalent that challenging them seems to be a Sisyphean undertaking. Perhaps they’re so ingrained because they so satisfyingly reflect prevailing social mores: Females are passive and males are aggressive; mothers raise the offspring and fathers’ contributions end at ejaculation; sex is for reproduction, so, by definition, anything else is unnatural. Gowaty calls these “just-so stories” that “buttress status quo notions about sex roles that … confine women to their ‘natural’ roles as mothers and subordinates to men.”
In evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology’s human cousin, these just-so stories are applied to men and women, especially to their sexual dynamics. Each new study seems to bristle with controversy and bad intentions. They often come out in obscure journals, are filtered through the popular press, and enter public consciousness with such headlines as “Semen Makes Women Happy” and “Male Sweat Brightens Women’s Moods.” According to these studies, anything secreted from men’s pores or penises can make the world a better place.
Whenever a new study comes out claiming to demonstrate the evolutionary justification for the latest topic in the battle between the sexes, everyone from CNN to Maxim jumps at the chance to promulgate the same old sexist schlock: Women want love, not sex. Men only want sex. Girl babies break up marriages. Men can’t help cheating; it’s in their genes. Men can’t help raping; it’s in their genes. Dr. David Schmitt, an evolutionary psychologist from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, recently trumpeted “the most comprehensive test yet conducted on whether the sexes differ in their desire for sexual variety.” The media reported that a survey of sixteen thousand people had proved that male promiscuity is hardwired, based on the results of questionnaires Schmitt had college students fill out describing their sexual practices and attitudes.
To be fair, it’s not a crime to attempt a broad study of human sexuality. Attempting to illuminate cultural similarities and differences in sexuality and gender roles is certainly an interesting undertaking. But claiming to demonstrate that “hardwired” gender disparities evolved over millions of years on the basis of the questionnaire responses of teenagers in 2003 is stretching the limits of credibility and science. The scientists behind these studies may not intend to promote the macho ideal, but their preconceived notions—combined with a media eager for the buzz of such stories—make for an embrace of the sexist status quo.
Dr. Terri Fisher, a psychologist at Ohio State University, challenges the validity of research like Schmitt’s, even while she defends him as a colleague. Although research that relies on self-reporting dominates the field, Fisher believes that asking people to answer intimate questions about their sex lives in a classroom setting is inherently unreliable. She wonders whether, if the subjects are answering questions in a public setting, they are expressing their actual feelings and experiences or responding to a perceived social pressure to abide by certain gender-specific behaviors.
Fisher and her colleague Michele Alexander have designed their own studies to guard against this sort of self-reporting bias. In one recent study, Fisher controlled the level and type of social pressure her subjects felt as they responded to the questions. Some of her subjects were assured that their answers were anonymous, others thought that they had to hand their questionnaires to another student, and still others had to answer while hooked up to what they believed was a lie-detector machine. By manipulating the pressure students felt to either perform under the scrutiny of their peers or “pass” the fake lie-detector test, Fisher got markedly different results. Like Schmitt’s students, when Fisher’s respondents answered the questions in the company of their peers, their answers fit social stereotypes. But when students thought they were hooked up to a lie detector, the story changed. The men admitted to having fewer partners, and the women copped to more—a lot more. And both men and women, at the end of the day, had roughly the same amount of sex—which is the only thing that really makes sense, considering that all those straight males had to be finding their multiple female partners somewhere.
In light of Fisher’s study, Schmitt’s appears to be measuring not the genetic mandate for profligate men and coy women but the amount of social pressure each gender feels to adhere to cultural ideals. Fisher’s research is a powerful rebuttal to scientists whose work fails to dig below the surface and instead uncritically reflects and reinforces social stereotypes. Perhaps predictably, Fisher’s study also received press attention, but the media managed to twist her findings to fit yet another gendered stereotype: “Fake Lie-Detector Reveals Women’s Sex Lies,” squawked NewScientist.com. The article opened with what read like a warning to guileless men: “Women are more likely than men to lie about their sex lives, reveals a new study.”
It’s no surprise that the media tends to overreport and underanalyze results like Schmitt’s while ignoring or distorting studies like Fisher’s, but—sensationalistic reporting aside—the problem of sexism in biological research still remains a scientific, not a media, issue.
Advances in feminist research can go only so far when the very structure of academia works against the full inclusion of alternative ideas. Despite the scientific conceit of “objectivity,” the scientific community is made up of people, and each and every scientist has his or her own belief system, ingrained cultural biases, and blind spots. The scientific method may be the best way we have of achieving an objective view of the world, but it can be only as objective as the questions asked. If one group is doing most of the asking, unseen biases—or, as Gowaty calls them, “assumptions so deep they tend to be invisible”—can creep in without anyone noticing.
Three decades after second-wave feminists began making inroads into academia, and pioneers like primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy began using feminist critiques to improve scientific theories, there is still palpable resistance to feminist perspectives in science. But contemporary biologists who cut their teeth on the scientific critiques of second-wave feminists are putting forth testable theories that are proving to be more accurate and powerful in their ability to explain the intricacies of animal (and human) behavior than much of the gender-based Darwinian dogma that preceded them.
Gowaty’s fruit flies are the perfect example. The females have huge eggs and the males have tiny sperm—which, according to parental investment theory, should mean that the females should be extremely choosy, and the males should mat
e indiscriminately whenever possible. But it turns out that her fruit flies, regardless of sex, employed flexible mating strategies dependent on environment—not gender. In her first trial, Gowaty found that males seemed to be slightly pickier than females when it came to approaching sex partners. In the second test, they were about the same. It might not sound so radical to a feminist, but to Darwin and his descendants, Gowaty’s conclusion would be downright shocking: In the end, “There was nothing so like a male as a female, and nothing so like a female as a male.” After more than a century of biological theory grounded strictly in gender determinism, it’s a statement that could cause a revolution—if it could be heard.
But Gowaty’s research has not been cited as often as it could have been. She believes her feminist politics, not the quality of her work, have marginalized her in the scientific community. “My willingness to speak out against things that don’t make sense has cost me,” she says. A book she published in 1997, Feminism and Evolutionary Biology, is already out of print, and she now believes that labeling any scientific work as feminist “is the kiss of death.”
“If you don’t name something feminist,” she says, “it stands a much greater chance of being accepted.” She spends a good deal of time and energy defending her work against the arguments of colleagues who dismiss it out of hand because of her politics. There’s a twisted logic at play here: Science is supposed to be objective and therefore beyond politics—so any scientist who is openly political and challenges the idea of hegemonic objectivity is, by definition, unscientific.
Regardless of the political and professional price she has paid for it, however, Gowaty believes her feminism has made her a better scientist—and that her research and others’ feminist studies will contribute new and better theories to biology as a discipline. It was, in fact, Gowaty’s feminism that led her to review the scientific literature, to check what scientific “proof” lay behind the doctrine of rigid sex roles, and to look for alternative theories to explain observed behavior. What she found was a whole lot of nothing.
“The ‘facts’ of choosy females and profligate males have organized studies of social behavior evolution, but few ever asked if the ‘facts’ were correct,” she says. In the rare cases where someone did, the papers that proposed alternative theories were all but ignored by the rest of the scientific community.
It is also her feminist bias, Gowaty says, that allows her to see what others have not. Her research subtly turns age-old biological questions on their heads. For instance, in designing her experiments investigating mate choice, Gowaty created a gender-blind trial that makes no assumptions about how males and females are supposed to act—instead of assuming that males are profligate and females are coy. Rather than pairing females with a set of males and asking which males the females prefer, she randomly pairs males and females and watches who approaches whom.
The paradigm shift is simple, subtle, and scientifically unassailable. Gowaty explains, “Being self-conscious about my politics has helped to make my experiments better than they might otherwise be, because I institute a variety of controls that others might also use … if they were more aware of their own biases.”
One of her favorite tactics is to collaborate with colleagues who do not share her political views, which brings to light assumptions on both sides that might otherwise go unnoticed. And then, she says, she likes to “exploit the goodwill and energy of undergraduates” who do not know her hypotheses or predictions and can therefore make unbiased observations because they don’t know what they’re looking for. It was with those careful controls that she conducted her fruit-fly experiment. Gowaty’s approach to exposing and correcting bias in her science has made her a leader in what might not be a feminist revolution in science so much as a feminist evolution.
Roughgarden agrees that biological research may yet be salvaged from the mire of ingrained sexism on the merit of strong, careful studies. Her book Evolution’s Rainbow began as a celebration of the diversity of the invisible, forgotten, or ignored multitudes of genders and sexual expressions in the natural world—things that she says are too often overlooked by mainstream biologists. But as she wrote and researched the book, she recognized that while it was a celebration, it was also a rebuke, “an indictment of academia for suppressing and denying diversity in their own teachings.”
Roughgarden had a twenty-five-year career in ecology as a man before she transitioned to being a woman, giving her unique insight into the world of sexism in academia. She sees the prevailing theories in biology as a way to “naturalize male prowess” and believes that in a field dominated by straight white men, research has become a self-reinforcing cycle of sexism. “The purpose of their theories is often to buy them prestige, and prestige is found in agreement from other straight white men,” she says. “All the other straight white men are in on the racket. [For women] there’s no entree, there’s no avenue to make the truth count.”
Roughgarden has focused on devising alternative theories designed to encompass the diversity found in the natural world, where, despite popular belief, there are more than two genders, certain organisms (like fish) can change gender throughout their lives, and homosexuality is rampant. Roughgarden wants to send the whole discipline of biology back to school to study the facts of the world through a lens that doesn’t filter out inconvenient data that doesn’t match social mores.
She has offered her own hypotheses about the evolutionary forces that have shaped gender and behavior—theories that allow diversity in both gender and sexuality while maintaining the power to explain behavior. Instead of sexual selection—Darwin’s staid theory that relies on a strict gender binary and consigns females and males across all organisms to specific roles—Roughgarden proffers a replacement theory she calls social selection, which describes behavior in terms of not only its reproductive value but its social value as well. For example, she recasts the famous peacock’s tail in light of its ability to communicate social status to other peafowl, both male and female, not just its desirability to peahens. The change is slight, but it allows for a more holistic examination of all behaviors in light of their value in a variety of situations.
Roughgarden’s theories, even beyond social selection, are solid and testable, and they bear the hallmarks of careful thinking. They are designed to be tried by field biologists, to be poked and prodded by researchers, and to be revised, refined, or rejected if they prove inadequate. They are designed to invite more questions, provoke more thought, and spur more research into the very areas that have been cordoned off from critical thought for so long.
To Roughgarden, freeing science from the shackles of sexism is as much a political and social task as it is a scientific one. For feminist research to have an impact on the mainstream biology taught in classrooms, it will take confronting those in power—the deans, the awards committees, the granting agencies, “if we have to picket them and attack them and embarrass them at cocktail parties,” she says—and demanding that women, gays and lesbians, and people of color be included in the highly political processes that play such an important role in determining what questions are asked in science, and therefore what ultimately becomes public knowledge. Diversifying the practitioners of science is a matter not just of principle but also of scientific integrity.
“Knowledge is only as diverse as the members of the intellectual elite,” says Vasey, whose lesbian monkeys are also left out in the cold by biology. “When I look out into the audience [at scientific conferences], I don’t see much diversity. It just makes me wonder how much knowledge is being left out.”
There are small signs of improvement. There are now more women in science than ever before, though the number remains a pittance. And with much public fanfare, the National Academies of Science inducted seventeen women into its 2003 class, 24 percent of the total. Women now comprise 7.7 percent of the National Academies’ members—up from 6.2 percent a year ago. At this rate, we can expect parity in another thirty years or so�
��around the time Jenna Bush will be running for president.
In the meantime, Vasey’s monkeys and Gowaty’s fruit flies will continue to do their thing, mindless of the political and academic battles being waged over their unconventional couplings. There is precedent for the hope of feminist scientists prevailing, however. Darwin himself faced considerable opposition from both the religious and scientific communities of his time. But eventually the rigorous science of his ideas proved to be more durable than the rigid politics of his era. Thirty years ago, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium— whereby evolution occurs in abrupt shifts after periods of relative stasis, instead of gradually, over long periods of time. The theory appears to describe the evolution of science itself, and maybe, just maybe, Gowaty, Roughgarden, and Vasey are poised to punctuate the long-standing equilibrium of evolutionary biology.
On Language
Choice
Summer Wood / SPRING 2004
“YOU CAN BAKE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT, TOO!” DECLARES Julia Roberts, playing bohemian Wellesley art-history professor Katherine Watson in the period chick flick Mona Lisa Smile. She eagerly proffers an armful of law-school applications, standing on the doorstep of the imposingly tony house where Joan (played by Julia Stiles), one of her best students, resides. But it’s too late, Joan replies. She has eloped, and now that she has her MRS, she won’t be getting that law degree after all. “This is my choice,” she says earnestly, but her character, like most of the others in the film, is written so flatly that it’s impossible to tell whether we’re supposed to believe her. The filmmakers clearly meant for women in the audience to breathe a sigh as we watched Roberts’s signature grin crumble on hearing the news—a sigh of pity for those poor, repressed Wellesley girls, and a sigh of relief that women today are free of such antiquated dilemmas as having to choose between work and family.
