“Take a look around. The gender inequality that you see is in your mind. So are the cultural beliefs about gender.” Cordelia Fine
When Cordelia Fine’s book Delusions of Gender: The Real Science behind Sex Differences came out last fall, there was a lot of media flutter. And so there should have been. Fine’s is a necessary book.
Many books of popular science seem to be moneymaking tools or publicity stunts on the part of isolated academics longing for the sensational spotlight. But Fine writes as one who wants to make change happen in the world. She wants parents and teachers (perhaps especially teachers and those who make decisions about how we educate our next generation) to know that the neuroscience behind sex differences is new, debateable, and shaky.
Fine specifically aims to expose the scientific myth of that neuroscience can explain the gap between the sexes. As a parent as well as an academic psychologist, she is concerned with the concept that our brains are hardwired by our sex: males to systemise and females to empathise. You come across that term a lot these days: hardwired. I heard a mother at the park the other day claim that her daughter’s love of ponies was hardwired. Weird.
Fine, in her cheeky and convincing style, wants us to raise a fist in protest every time we hear the term hardwired. To effect this change, she leads us through reams of scientific studies, both gently and snarkily (when appropriate) pointing out the glaring flaws of method, reasoning and sheer sanity in what she calls neurosexism. (I might recommend the book for that term alone.) I found that, as the mother of a boy and a girl, I was fascinated to read about all the studies and fields of research that go into what makes girls girls and boys boys. I live with the ambiguities and also the conformities, and it’s interesting to hear how the scientists try to sort out that soup.
Fine points out that there are, of course, obvious and subtle ways in which male and female brains physically differ. She isn’t debunking neuroscience – it is a new science and is doing wonderful things - but she rails against the assumption that these observed internal differences account for lived differences. Because so much about gender is socialized. And that isn’t just about Sesame Street. As Evelyn Witmer wrote in her comment last week, there are so many unconscious influences on young children that aren’t taught or even spoken.
Fine writes: “a closer look at the social world into which children are born reveals an environment in which gender is emphasised above all social categories, from birth. How should children ignore gender, not be influenced by the assumptions and expectations it brings, when they continually watch it, hear it, see it; are clothed in it, sleep in it, eat off it? Little wonder that children become “gender detectives” eager for their behaviour to fall on the right side of the all important social divide.”
Interesting point, this – small children have few other identities to cling to. They aren’t yet artists or jocks, bookish types or business bigwigs. Small children aren’t even aware of what those divisions look like. They understand friendly vs scary, but those shift and change, thank heavens (thus preacheth this week’s impatient mum). But the most obvious identities children see are sex-based. So they run with that. They are boys or girls.
But I want my kids to think better than that. I want my son to empathise and my daughter to systemise. I want them both to wonder about how people feel and how they think. I want their understanding of the world to grow past their early childhood assumptions about blue and pink and into bigger ways of seeing.
So I’ll keep Fine’s book on my shelf for them, and hope that when they read it, they might wonder about how we celebrate sex differences and similarities as well as rebel against them.
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28
