Brain Sex!

There’s a study in all the papers today claiming to show fundamental differences between male and female brains, and that these differences prove that gender stereotypes are hard-wired.

It’s funny how the putative differences between male and female brains are always used in defence of the status quo. Early studies suggested that male brains had more connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and this was used as proof of men’s intellectual superiority. When later studies suggested that female brains were the most connected, this was not used as proof of female intellectual superiority.

Male single-mindedness is never used to prove that men are better suited to dull, repetitive work, such as cleaning; and women’s ability to multitask, empathise and communicate is never used as proof that women are suited to exciting challenging work like running the country.

Instead ‘brain sex’ is always used to prove that women are hard-wired for domestic drudgery, and don’t want careers, or reproductive rights, or the vote; while men are hard-wired for dominance, control and violence, and rape is inevitable, and pornography and prostitution are necessary – or else.

The simple fact is that we know very little about how the brain works, and even less about how the brain relates to the mind or the self. This study used a technique called “diffusion tensor imaging” to create a ‘road map’ of male and female brains. The problem with this is that a ‘road map’ is only part of the story, it tells us nothing about the density or flow of the ‘traffic’.

We know that brains are plastic, we know this because people with brain injuries are still able to do things that a lack of brain plasticity would preclude them from being able to do; eg a person with an injury to the part of the brain thought to be associated with language, may still be able to speak, because the brain is plastic and re-routes itself (to put it over-simply).

What I would like to look at though, is something in the news reports that seems so far to have been completely over-looked in the mainstream press: There is no brain sex before 14:

Male and female brains showed few differences in connectivity up to the age of 13, but became more differentiated in 14- to 17-year-olds.

Let me repeat that: there is no brain sex before 14. By the standards accepted by the proponents of ‘brain sex’ theory, there is no brain sex before 14.

This is actually rather important, if there are no significant differences between male and female brains before 14, how then do we explain gendered behaviour in under-14 year olds?

Under-14s are not amorphous, genderless [EDIT: I should say gendered-behaviour-less], personality-less blobs until they hit puberty. Lots of adults continue with interests that they developed as children, there is no flip-of-the-switch changeover between childhood and adulthood.

Children, in fact, are largely the most gender conforming – some people even believe that babies are born with gender roles hard-wired into their brains, and that newborn babies display gendered behaviour.

Cordelia Fine, author of Delusions of Gender, explains that small children’s adherence to gender roles is due to the fact that children are trying to understand the world around them, and that they can only understand it in simple, black and white terms, therefore they become ‘believers’ in, and reinforcers of, gender roles. But of course, they don’t get the original ideas of gender roles out of thin air, they get them from the adults around them.

(at this point I wanted to add a video I watched fairly recently, that related to experiments done in the 1970s(?) that showed that adults treated the same baby very very differently when it was dressed in blue and when it was dressed in pink, but ugh, I can’t find it again.)

EDIT 05/Dec/13: I still can’t find the video I’ve seen, but I did find this abstract from a very similar set of experiments:

The present study investigated adult behavior while interacting with a three-month-old infant under conditions in which the child was introduced as a boy, as a girl, or with no gender information given. Gender labels did not elicit simple effects, but rather interacted significantly with the sex of the subject on both toy usage and physical contact measures. There was a stronger tendency for both male and female adults to utilize sex-stereotyped toys when the child was introduced as a girl. Most of the findings, however, reflected a differential response of men and women to the absence of gender information. In this condition, male subjects employed a neutral toy most frequently and handled the child least; in contrast, females used more stereotyped toys and handled the child more. All subjects attempted to guess the gender of the child (with “boy” guesses more frequent, although the child was actually female) and all justified their guess on the basis of stereotyped behavioral or physical cues like strength or softness.

If gender rolls occur before ‘brain sex’ appears, then we have to entertain the idea that gender roles have nothing to do with brain structure, but are then, in fact, culturally dictated. How can we say they are ‘hard-wired’, when the ‘hard-wiring’ isn’t there yet?

Whatever these brain differences mean, if they actually mean anything at all, they do not mean that gender roles are hard-wired.

As an afterthought, I also want to examine this rather bizarre comment from one of the researchers:

I was surprised that it matched a lot of the stereotypes that we think we have in our heads. If I wanted to go to a chef or a hairstylist, they are mainly men.

Since when were cooking and cutting hair considered ‘masculine’ activities? The vast majority of the people in the world preparing food are female, but once it becomes well paid and prestigious, once a cook becomes a chef, it becomes a male activity. The same with ‘hair stylist’, the vast majority of people going to beauty school are female, and hairdressing is low-paid work, the hand-full of people at the top, with their own shampoo brands or whatever are all men.

This reflects something else Fine covers, how what are considered ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ characteristics can change with the circumstances, so that whatever is considered a ‘good’ quality in a particular situation, becomes a ‘masculine’ quality; when cooking, or cutting hair become important, they become ‘masculine’ activities.