SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT SIMULATION
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Mother Pelican
PelicanWeb's Journal of Sustainable Development
Vol. 6, No. 10, October 2010 Luis T. Gutierrez, Editor
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Will Working Mothers' Brains Explode? The Popular New Genre of Neurosexism
Cordelia Fine
Centre for Applied Philosophy & Public Ethics
School of Philosophy, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Originally published in Neuroethics 1:69–72, 7 February 2008 Reprinted with Permission
ABSTRACT
A number of recent popular books about gender differences have drawn on the neuroscientific literature to support the claim that certain psychological differences between the sexes are "hard-wired." This article highlights some of the ethical implications that arise from both factual and conceptual errors propagated by such books.
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Meet Sarah.
Sarah can “identify and anticipate what [her husband] is feeling—often before he is conscious of it himself.” ([ 4], p. 118). Like the magician who knows that you’ll pick the seven of diamonds before it’s even left the pack, Sarah can amaze
her husband at whim, thanks to her lucky knack of knowing what he’s feeling before he even feels it. ( Ta-DA! Is this your emotion?) Sarah is neither a fairground psychic nor the somewhat irresponsible owner of a futuristic brain wave interpreting machine.
She is simply a woman who enjoys the miraculous gift of mindreading that, apparently, is bestowed on all owners of a female
brain:
‘Maneuvering like an F-15, Sarah’s female brain is a high performance emotion machine—geared to tracking, moment by moment,
the non-verbal signals of the innermost feelings of others.’ ([4], p.119)
Sarah is just one of the many curious characters who populate lay science books about gender. She can be found in Louann Brizendine’s
book The Female Brain, one of several recent popular and influential books arguing for fundamental and ‘hard-wired’ differences in male and female
psychology.
Unfortunately, scientific accuracy and commonsense are often casualties in the ugly rush to cloak old-fashioned sexism in
the respectable and authoritative language of neuroscience [10, 19]. Mark Liberman, whose online Language Log offers wry and meticulous critiques of pseudoscientific claims about gender differences,
has described some popular authors’ use of the neuroscientific literature as “shockingly careless, tendentious and even dishonest.
Their over-interpretation and misinterpretation of scientific research is so extreme that it becomes a form of fabrication.”
[18].
Then, too, with the buzz-phrase ‘hard-wiring’ comes an extraordinary insistence on locating social pressures in the brain.
In The Female Brain, for example, the working mother learns that she is struggling against “the natural wiring of our female brains and biological
reality” (p. 161). According to Brizendine, combining motherhood with career gives rise to a neurological “tug-of-war because
of overloaded brain circuits” (p. 160). Career circuits and maternal circuits battle it out, leading to “increased stress,
increased anxiety, and reduced brainpower for the mother’s work and her children.” (p. 112). But Brizendine promises her female
readers that “understanding our innate biology empowers us to better plan our future.” (p. 159). It may startle some readers
to learn that family friendly workplace policies are not the solution to reduced maternal stress and anxiety, and that fathers
who do the kindergarten pick-ups, pack the lunch-boxes, stay home when the kids are sick, get up in the night when the baby
wakes up, and buy the birthday presents and ring the paediatrician in their lunch hour are not the obvious solution to enhanced
maternal ‘brainpower’. No, it is an appreciation of female brain wiring that will see the working mother through the hard
times. (Predictably, Brizendine never even hints that the over-wired working mother consider the simplest antidote to the
ill-effects of going against her ‘natural wiring’: namely, giving her partner a giant kick up the neurological backside.)
What accounts for the success and appeal of the new field of neurosexism? Most lay readers, of course, have neither the background
nor the resources to question the many inaccurate and misleading claims made about gender differences in the brain. There
is also recent evidence that neuroscientific explanations enjoy a special “seductive allure” [20]. People’s capacity to spot the unsatisfactory nature of circular psychological explanations is significantly reduced when
impressive-sounding neuroscientific terms are introduced.
Yet surely there is more to it than this? The back cover of The Female Brain offers to explain why “a man can’t seem to spot an emotion unless someone cries or threatens bodily harm”. Were we to pick
up a different sort of book that made an equally unusual sort of claim (a guide to pets, say, which promised to explain why
cats can’t climb trees), we would immediately put it down and go in search of a more reliable text. Yet The Female Brain is a New York Times bestseller, translated into twenty-one languages and featured in newspapers, magazines and TV shows around the world. What,
exactly, is the draw of gender stereotypes dressed up as neuroscience? For men, perpetuation of the idea that they lack women’s
hard-wired empathizing skills is a small price to pay for licence to lay claim to more valued and potentially profitable psychological
advantages. According to another popular book about gender difference, The Essential Difference [1], “[t]he female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding
and building systems.” (p.1). As Levy [16] notes, this translates to the idea that “on average, women’s intelligence is best employed in putting people at their ease,
while the men get on with understanding the world and building and repairing the things we need in it.” (pp. 319–320). Levy
adds, “[t]his is no basis for equality. It is not an accident that there is no Nobel Prize for making people feel included.”
(p. 323).
For women, a possible explanation of the appeal of neurosexism lies in the palliative system justification motive, “whereby
people justify and rationalise the way things are, so that existing social arrangements are perceived as fair and legitimate,
perhaps even natural and inevitable.” ([11], p. 119). Jost and colleagues have found that lower status groups have a remarkable capacity to rationalize what goes against
their self-interests, internalize limiting stereotypes, and find legitimacy in the very inequalities that hold them back (see,
for example [12]; [11]). If a frazzled mother can tell herself that her hard-wired powers of female empathy uniquely position her to intuit that
the red-faced, cross-patch baby wants to get down from the highchair, then there’s no need to feel cross that she’s the only
one who ever seems to notice. If she can take seriously Brizendine’s claim that it is only when the children leave home that
“the mommy brain circuits are finally free to be applied to new ambitions, new thoughts, new ideas” ([4], p. 143) she may feel less resentful that the autonomy to pursue a career unhindered, a freedom still taken for granted
by her partner, is now no longer extended to her.
Similarly, Davis [9] has recently suggested that gender role attitudes may fall in line with life, rather than vice versa. Davis’ recent longitudinal
study of gender ideology found that young adults shed their gender egalitarian beliefs once they had children, but only so
long as their procreation was normatively timed, indicating that it is not the experience of having children per se that causes gender ideology to change [9]. Rather, there may be something special about taking on a culturally loaded adult role. Davis asks whether it is, “because
there are few structures in place to support egalitarian marriages and child-rearing practices that individuals fall away
from egalitarian practices and, as a reflection of their new interests, alter their belief structure to reduce cognitive dissonance?”
([9]; p. 1037). And as Cameron [5] has noted in her popular critique The myth of Mars and Venus, the effect, and also perhaps the appeal, of the idea of “timeless, natural, and inevitable” differences between the sexes
is that it “stops us thinking about what social arrangements might work better than our present ones in a society that can
no longer be run on the old assumptions about what men and women do.” (p. 177). Popular neurosexism permits us to sit back
and relax, with its seemingly neat explanation of our social structure and personal lives. The answer, ‘Oh, it’s the brain,’ offers a tidy justification for accepting the status quo with clear conscience.
We can currently only speculate on the enervating effect of popular gender science books on male nappy-changing frequencies,
or female patterns of leaving the toilet to be cleaned by someone else. However, there is evidence that accounts of gender
that emphasise biological factors leave us more inclined to agree with gender stereotypes, to self-stereotype ourselves, and
for our performance to fall in line with those stereotypes (e.g., [ 2, 7, 8]). Moreover, other research from the social psychological literature has shown that presenting cognitive or emotional tasks
in ways that make them seem diagnostic of gender tends to set up a self-fulfilling prophecy (e.g., [ 3, 14, 15, 21– 24]). Research such as this underlines the point that,
‘the psyche is … not a discrete entity packed in the brain. Rather, it is a structure of psychological processes that are
shaped by and thus closely attuned to the culture that surrounds them … the mind cannot be understood without reference to
the sociocultural environment to which it is adapted and attuned.’ ([13], p. xiii).
This important observation is one usually ignored by popular accounts of gendered ‘hard-wiring’.
Mark Liberman has suggested that “misleading appeals to the authority of ‘brain research’ have become the modern equivalent
of out-of-context scriptural fragments.” [18]. Noting, along with Rivers and Barnett [19], that baseless neuroscientific ‘facts’ about gender differences are already having an impact on educational policies, for
example, he argues that journalists have a real responsibility to fact-check the accuracy of neuroscientific claims. The need
for journalists to take on this responsibility takes on an extra import when one considers our susceptibility to poor neuroscientific
explanations, together with the way that biological accounts of gender, and the stereotypes about male versus female abilities that they promote, can measurably alter our beliefs, self-identity and abilities.
Finally, of course, let’s not forget the sheer embarrassment factor. The successful nineteenth century book, Sex in Education (subtitled Or, A Fair Chance for Girls – somewhat ironically as it turned out) argued that education was selectively perilous to girls and young women. Its author,
Harvard Medical School professor Edward Clarke [6], proposed that intellectual labour sent energy rushing dangerously from ovaries to brain, threatening infertility as well
as other severe medical ills. From our modern vantage point we can laugh at the crudely obvious prejudice that gave rise to
this hypothesis (as biologist Richard Lewontin [17], p. 208 dryly remarked of this hypothesis, ‘Testicles, apparently, had their own sources of energy’).
Yet it seems we may have little cause for complacency. Who wants future generations to giggle in astonished outrage at our
crude attempts to locate social pressures in the brain? (Here it is, Michael! I finally found the elusive human ‘maternal circuit’. See how it crowds out these circuits for career,
ambition and original thought?). Nineteenth century medical opinion proposed that girls who overtax their brains might never reproduce. Twenty-first century
neurosexism warns that women who reproduce risk overtaxing their brains. It is, perhaps, a little less progress than many
working mothers would have hoped for.
References
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