I enjoyed this article, a book review by Ben A. Barres of Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society and Neurosexism Create Difference, so much that I decided to use the writer's post title for my own:
No one disputes that male and female brains are different or that males and females differ in their accomplishments. But are these two facts related? A few years ago Harvard President Larry Summers suggested that the answer is yes. He proposed that innate brain differences help to account for the dearth of successful women in science, provoking much heated debate. Reporters called it the story that would not die. Unlike most news stories that exhaust themselves after a few days, this story stayed in the news for months, and even years later continues to inspire debate. Apparently many of us think we already know the answer to this question—the subject of Cordelia Fine's highly readable and enjoyable new book Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference. At least half of us—not just the men—seem to think the answer is yes whereas the other half say not so.
You all know where I stand on this issue. Based on my experiences as a neurobiologist and as a transgendered person, I have previously argued that innate sex differences in the brain are not relevant to real-world accomplishments. [Emphasis mine-SW] Without question, male and female brains have different circuits that help to control their different reproductive behaviors. So it has long seemed an easy step to believe that such anatomic changes also underlie supposed gender differences in cognitive abilities. Rather, in a theme that Fine elegantly expands on, it is the idea itself that women are innately less capable that may be the primary cause of differences in accomplishment. This idea Fine appropriately dubs “neurosexism.” This idea was long ago powerfully encapsulated in the concept of “stereotype threat,” the phenomenon in which members of a sex or race perform substantially worse on a test—and perhaps in real-world environments—when they are led to believe before the test that they are innately less capable.
I don't want to be too snarky, though this review tends to elicit such a response. David Thompson has addressed the tendency of the transgressive progressive to pathologize what was once quaintly referred to as "normal":
If the prosaic can be made to sound oppressive or inauthentic, it makes those who announce themselves as nonconformist sound much braver and more interesting than they actually are (if only to themselves and those similarly disposed). For instance, the clownish Amanda Marcotte rails against any number of “normativities,” all of which she seeks to pathologise. It isn’t enough that she doesn’t feel an urge to become a parent. She has to claim that those who do wish to become parents don’t know their own minds and are dupes of some hegemonic power. In much the same way, the preference for an intact and functional body is depicted as both a parochial social construct and a moral failing. And likewise, the belief that “binary gender” is not “natural or fundamental to our biological existence as humans” is based on an occasional malfunction of the very biological processes that are imagined not to exist.
What I would like to emphasize for Ben A. Barres is that our biases, even when we admit them up front, tend to bias our selection of material and how we interpret the material. I am fully prepared to accept that most Psychological research and even most neuropsychological research has significant methodological defects. Further, a number of good arguments can be made that brain structure is quite plastic in response to experience and that people with different brain structures will still have an enormous overlap in their abilities. Scientists and even more so science reporters tend to oversimplify their results and over-interpret them.
Perhaps the best example of how one's conscious bias can unconsciously affect one's thinking shows up in Ben A. Barres's concluding paragraph:
Finally, Fine supplies some wonderful pointers to those who write books about gender: Do not suggest that parents or teachers treat boys and girls differently because of differences observed in their brains. Exercise extreme caution when making the perilous leap from brain structure to psychological function. Most importantly, please don't make stuff up! I think that Fine is at her best when she points out that neuroscientists have responsibility for how their findings are interpreted. They—and reviewers and editors—bear a heavier burden of caution because of the social implications of this work. She concludes that neurosexism promotes damaging, limiting, and potentially self-fulfilling stereotypes, powerfully reminding us that neuroscience can be dangerous when mishandled. [Emphasis mine-SW]
Apparently, Fine's conclusion is that differences in brain structure are not only not necessarily related to differences in behavior (a defensible position though it has already been eroding in the face of a growing body of neuropsychological research) but that such structural differences have nothing to do with behavioral outcomes. She then concludes that the actual cause of differences in behavior between men and women has to do with a brand new construct, neurosexism, (discernible perhaps in a penumbra emanating from psychosocial research) that is so subtle that it has been missed by generations of researchers and nonetheless leads people to behave differently!
If she were to suggest that brain structures and subtle environmental effects, so far unmeasurable, with such effects in need of research might include neurosexism, interact in complex ways, it might be possible for her to design an experiment to test for neurosexism and see if it effects structure and behavior. To insist that structure is meaningless and only the unmeasurable and so far hidden variable, neurosexism, is dispositive is evidence of rationalization, not rationality.
[I would add that the consistent differences in the size of the standard deviation on psychological testing between male and female, noted from the earliest days of testing, a point Larry Summers was trying to make, is not addressed in the Barres post. Perhaps in the book , Fine finds a way to show that such SD differences are proof of subtle neurosexism rather than differences in the robustness of brain structures.]
There is no question that we come into the world with a potential for all sorts of brain structures whose actuality is determined by an interplay between our experience/environment, our genetic loading, and other constitutional factors. We can all agree that to overweight Nature as the primary explanation is problematic; however, Cornelia Fine, et al make an even greater error by insisting that Nature has nothing to do with differences. This is merely sophisticated perversion of the data in the service of one's biases.
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