Sexism? it's all in the mind!
October 19th 2010 17:41
Signature Tune
Sex discrimination is supposed to be a thing of the past. But recently there’s been a rash of popular books and even scientific articles defending gender inequalities by citing differences between the male and female brain.
You can’t have missed all those reports which claim that little girls are automatically drawn to pink and that men really are better at map-reading. The reason, we’re told, is not sexual stereotyping, but neurological hard-wiring. Boys and girls, it is fashionable to say, are different after all.
This, says Dr Cordelia Fine, is nothing but “neurosexism” In this clever and often very funny book, she takes apart all those apparently conclusive studies that aim to prove the male brain is ambitious, unsociable and good at maths while the female brain is caring, group-oriented and a whizz at foreign languages.
By looking again at the conditions under which the studies were carried out, she manages to show that, in most cases, unconscious bias has crept in.
Put simply, if you expect to find that girls play with a doll for longer than a toy fire engine, then they probably will. If you tell boys they are tougher than girls then, hey presto!, they will oblige you with an impromptu display of wrestling.
But to jump from here to the conclusion that women are automatically drawn to nursing and that men make better soldiers is, says Fine in her witty way, “premature speculation”.
What about all those pictures we’ve seen of MRI images where the brain lights up in different places according to whether emotional or number-crunching tasks are being performed? Don’t they show men and women’s neurochemistry is different? No, says Fine. Those splashes of red, orange and green aren’t actually colour videos of the human brain in action.
Rather, they are measuring haemoglobin as a way of tracking differences in blood oxygen being consumed in different parts of the brain. Suggestive certainly, but not the same thing as proof. Fine calls this kind of visual mapping ”lobology” the “science” of creating images and then interpreting them as if they directly cause human behaviour. Fine isn’t against neuroscience, but she is against using it to make bald statements about the differences between men and women.
Instead, says Fine, it’s environment that determines pretty much everything we do, and how well we do it. She cites fascinating studies that show gender differences, far from originating in the brain, are actually in the mind, so to speak.
For instance, if women who are about to sit a maths test are shown adverts involving other women cooking and cleaning, they will score less highly than if they had gone into the exam “cold”. A mental picture has been lodged in their minds about what tasks women are perceived to be good at. And, as if to prove the point, they then proceed to fluff their long division.
Fine is not unrealistic she acknowledges that genetics and biology can limit our ability to perform certain tasks. What infuriates her, though, is the tendency in recent years to bow down to brain science as if it were the only authority on the difference between the sexes. Not only is this inaccurate, but it also perpetuates a vicious circle.
She tells the story of how, three years ago, she found her son’s kindergarten teacher reading a book which explained that boys were poor at processing languages. Fine was outraged, but not with the teacher who was only trying to keep herself informed. What worried Fine was the knowledge that the teacher would take what she had read back into the classroom and, without being aware of it, act towards her male pupils as if they found language difficult. It is in these social situations, she says, that our life chances are determined. - Daily Mail
| 137 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
subscribe to this blog
